So, in a post a few days ago that I made I talked about how everything is pre-determined. I think I made a rather compelling argument, and it is one that I have been consistently looking for flaws in since I have thought of it. None of my responses have been very good, at least I think. However, I think with the massive scale of the "script" described in pre-determinism, if we can provide even a 1% falsehood in the idea that everything is pre-determined (IE prove that at least 1% of things aren't pre-determined) it will create a significant break down of the theory.
So here are my two ideas right now:
1) Decision calculus's are inconsistent - If I were to tell you to write two e-mails (one right after the other, with no time elapse) to your aunt congratulating her on her birthday and also an update on your life, you would likely not send the same e-mail twice. Which means on some level you would evaluate things that are important to bring up again differently, or you would make different semantic evaluations somewhere. Consequently, to some extent our ability to make decisions is random, and inconsistent. Now, you may argue time has elapsed, but I think that many of us have experienced the situation where we have sent two texts in a row saying basically the same thing with slight variation. Perhaps, you get lazier, or something, but if I were to ask you to send the exact same message twice I don't think that it would be a consistent. Especially if a week elapsed between sending the messages instead of only a few minutes. Of course, you could argue that that your decision calculus could change over the week, which is possible, although I doubt there would be a noticeable change in your writing style over that time period, or at least enough to account for the variation in your second letter.
2) True Accidents Can Happen - now, by this, I mean accidents that happen outside consideration by one's decision calculus (decision calculus used broadly to include emotions, biology, etc.) I think this is a difficult claim to prove. Firstly, let's say I trip when I reach the bottom of the stairs of some building, because every Tuesday at that time the janitors clean the floor and it is wet and when you come down those particular stairs you can't see the sign that they put up ("caution - floor is wet.") The next week, I do the same thing. However, the difference between the first and the second time is that the second time I had the experience of the first. So the question here is whether or not "forgetfulness" exists outside of one's decision calculus. Now, the argument for pre-determinism here would be that if I had developed the decision calculus to remember events like that and mentally log them, then I would have remembered and not tripped. Or, you could make the argument that I was born with the biology of being a forgetful person. Or was raised in a forgetful environment. Whatever. However, the question here becomes, can something that never enters your decision calculus still be considered a part of decision calculus. Can something that exists outside your framework of analysis, or never enters your framework of analysis, be still considered part of your framework of analysis, purely because your framework of analysis wasn't developed enough to consider it? If I just trip. Plain and simple. No memory involved. Does this still count as an "inevitability" because it was never considered within my framework? Possibly. I think to assume that everyone should be constantly walking around thinking about the chance they will trip, otherwise it is inevitable that they will trip, and consequently pre-determined, feels like a stretch.
So, while I think there are some flaws with these arguments, I think that they do cast some doubt on the idea that EVERYTHING is pre-determined. And, I think they also have really interesting implications.
Neither of them positively affirm that "free will" exists. They both just prove that things are not pre-determined. In fact, it seems that the only way that things aren't pre-determined is for there to be some degree of chaos and irrationality that we have no control over. We have to mess up our decision calculus. Or we have to be given choices that are a result of irrationality (or accidents). We still have very little control over our ability to make decisions but, it seems, this is fine. If we were perfectly functioning machines, then it would make it impossible for life to be varied, instead we would be stuck in a script of pre-determinism.
It's interesting, then, where will comes into the situation. Let's say that you are given a decision ( the decisions you are given being something totally random - a result of accidents, irrationality, or perhaps, even perfectly refined decision calculus.) You assert your will as a result of a decision you make, one that will often vary randomly and be irrational, and the more powerfully you can assert your will into your actions, the more control, or determined your actions can become. So, counter intuitively, the most control you have over your decision comes not in the options of the decision, or the ability to make the decision, but the ability to act on your - likely to some degree irrational - decision. And the more rational of an actor everyone becomes, the more we try and order the world and reduce the amount of chaos in it, the more we get stuck into this pre-deterministic script.
As a result, we see why the myth of the perfectly rational actor is necessary for belief systems like 100% free market capitalism. Because that is the only way we could predict what will happen, and as a result, the actions of the market would be inevitable. However, this sort of irrationality seems to exist in every decision, and lead to varied, impossible to expect results, that keep the world interesting, and, I think, actually act as the vehicle for free-will to happen.
The reason for this is free will can only exist in the context of "true decisions." These mean decisions that are not pre-determined - or not a result of pre-determined circumstances, like assumed rationality or perfect consistency of every actor. Interestingly, then, the ability for us to make our supposedly rational decisions exist in a context of irrationality, or chaos. It means that there is always going to be a certain balance between chaos and order in order for us to have something that we consider free will. As a result, the events in the world that seem sometimes random, and scary, actually allow for free-will exist. Perhaps it is the events that happen outside our immediate control, and outside our decision calculus, that keeps life interesting, whether those events are good or bad.
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