Hello all context for me I am from a small village and so I don't have much experience talking to people 10 fold for things I enjoy (games: Valorant, Rust, DBD and Anime: favorites right now Toradora, QQT, Cowboy Bebop, Hajime No Ippo) but I am honestly open to anything so I am available mostly weekdays and early on weekends Discord: zuzamai steam code: 873283398 and have a good day :).
Hello all who sees this I will add some context first. I go to a very small school and I am finishing up my senior year but I have never had to do a long form paper a few short things here and there nothing more then a few paragraphs so to my surprise my teacher decided I needed to do a 5-7 page research paper on any interest I have. So i would greatly appreciate any general advice as well because i am going to college soon and this has been one of my main worries. Once again thank you very much for your time. Free will is something that will be debated till the ends of time, and I am not here to settle it but to examine the strongest arguments on each side. Free will in its broadest sense is the capacity to choose between different possible courses of action in a way that makes you genuinely responsible for those choices. Even in the smallest decisions, such as what color socks you wear, if you wear those socks today, or what flavor of ice cream you want to eat, or to even eat that ice cream at all. These are all decisions that you make, and that gives you the idea of free will. The issue with this is that it leads to a lot of questions, mainly if we are able to make our own decisions. The difference between the scientific look on free will, also known as the deterministic view, is based on deterministic mechanisms of the brain and the idea that everything is predetermined. Then there is the libertarian look on life in the logical, ethical, and metaphysical implications of agency, accountability, and what it means to be one’s "self” and the idea that you carve your own path on top of the countless ideals in between. While the question of free will, will never truly be answered or be accepted by most people, if we take a step back and peer into its true ideals, maybe we can find a less fuzzy answer.
To better understand the debate, it helps to examine each position on its own terms. The first is the deterministic view, which is the idea that all events, including human decisions, are the inevitable result of prior causes such as but not limited to genetics, environment or physics. This view is the metaphysical view that all events within the universe or multiverse can occur only in one possible way. It is based on the idea that the world is a cause and effect-based system. If your brain is made of matter and obeys physical laws, and your choices are caused by your brain, your choices are just a chain of causality. If so in a situation in which a person makes a certain decision or performs a certain action, it is impossible that he or she could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did. "We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed... for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes." - Pierre-Simon Laplace This idea, known as Laplace's Demon, is essentially asking If you had an inexplicably powerful computer at the start of the universe. Imported every particle with their exact position, location, density and every small insignificant detail and ran a simulation of the universe. What would that outcome look like. Would it lead to you reading these words right here right now? If not how and where would it end up how far would it be off. For the sake of this argument, we will say it does work, and you put it in today’s date and time. It will show you reading this paper right here right now. That would show that everything you have done to this point and beyond was not by choice, it was already decided. This shows that because of the causes and the effects that everything abides by; everything leads to a single outcome, Arthur Schopenhauer explains this very clearly "a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants" In other words, you may feel free in the moment of choosing, but the desire behind that choice was never yours to control.
Now that we understand one side of the coin, let's look at the opposite side. The libertarian view is the belief that determinism is false, and we have genuine, undetermined choices. This in an extremely simplified form is back to the “what color socks will I wear today.” Someone with a libertarian view will know that they have a choice in what color their socks are. Libertarians argue that under identical circumstances a person could genuinely choose differently, meaning human decisions are not completely fixed by prior causes. Because in any given moment they will make a choice based on that given moment that will change how that day will go. If this person decided, they wanted to they could change the whole direction of their life by making one decision that they could do at any given moment. With that said our conscious experience of deliberation suggests we are not just robots, this meaning we can anticipate consequences before taking action. So when you are talking with someone before you say something that could be harmful you can take an educated guess on how they will react before saying said harmful thing. Some libertarians such as Robert Kane argue for "effort of will" in moments of conflict. Effort of will is the tiredness you feel after having making a lot of discissions especially difficult ones, or in moments of genuine inner conflict say, choosing between the harder right thing and the easier wrong thing the outcome is not predetermined, and whichever way it goes, it was genuinely you making that call. This sense of struggle and weight after difficult choices suggests that decisions are not merely mechanical outputs they carry meaning because they are genuinely ours. " Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."- William James links well with “effort of will” because it essentially breaks down to you can make the choice to alter your life. If you can choose to believe your life is worth shaping, then you are already exercising the kind of undetermined will libertarians defend. However, libertarian free will faces a serious problem. If your choices are truly undetermined by prior causes, what determines them? A choice with no cause looks less like freedom and more like randomness and randomness is not the same thing as being in control.
We have now seen how both extreme views of life and how they think it works now lets look at an in between view the Compatibilism view. Compatibilism is the ideal that both determinism and libertarian views can coexist. But how is that possible? One means choices are already made and the other means you make all the choices when they happen. Compatibilism is like a GPS it has a set path from the start but you can make different choices then it provides you with different paths as you change as a person. Compatibilism argues that freedom is not freedom from causation, but freedom from coercion. If you want to do something and are not forced by someone else, your action is free, even if your desire was determined. "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." - Arthur Schopenhauer is the best representation of compatibilism because an agent may often be free to act according to a motive, the nature of that motive is determined. This definition of free will does not rely on the truth or falsity of causal determinism. This view also makes free will close to autonomy, the ability to live according to one's own rules, as opposed to being submitted to external domination. One of the more famous pieces from the compatibilism is Daniel Dennett’s "Elbow Room" which argues that we are free because we can anticipate consequences and adapt. Dennett argues that instead of chasing impossible magical concepts (like uncaused choices), we should focus on the actual abilities that give us control. These include avoiding harm, learning from mistakes, and pursuing our desires. He systematically redefines what it means to say we "could have done otherwise." Even in a deterministic universe, you still possess the capacity to make different choices based on new information. Dennett dismantles philosophical boogeymen (e.g., the "Nefarious Neurosurgeon" or the "Peremptory Puppeteer") that inaccurately portray determinism as a robotic trap. Through evolution, humans have developed incredibly sophisticated brains. We can anticipate the future, model multiple scenarios, and choose the best path to further our interests. We are active, self-correcting systems. We can evaluate our own desires, learn from errors, and change our own minds over time.
Then finally in the broadest sense we have the root of all views whether that's determinism, libertarian, compatibilism or anything and everything between moral responsibility and consequences. If you think free will is real or not you and i both still have the social responsibility to hold each other to. If that is the law or rules in a game of tag we all have guides to follow that keep us human. That could be holding the door for someone checking on someone that tripped or saving someone's life its all of our responsibility to carry out our civil duties as humans to care for one another and help when others have fallen. Some argue for a "pragmatic" approach: we should treat people as if they have free will because it encourages better behavior and self-control.