2021.07.11 所感

Do I think free will exists?
    

      As far as I understand, there are two types of definition.
    

      The first is what people normally think free will is.  I can make my own decision when I would like to. I can choose to speak, raise my hand, walk, go shopping, literally anything. And that is ‘I’ who is making these decisions. This sense of self and freedom of choice makes people believe in free will. This logic is fairly reasonable, and straightforward enough to spend my daily life.

     The second definition is that I have free will if my action is independent of any external factors – and this free will is highly unlikely (could be impossible, but my scientist side doesn’t let me use the word). The underlined concept is causality – that everything has a cause. My motivation has a cause, my reason has a cause, my action has a cause, and my will has a cause. If I chose to drink water now, which may seem like coming from my own free will, there could be various reasons behind it. I might have been thirsty since the morning. There might have been a bottle of tasty-looking water in front of me. My friend might have asked me to hydrate myself before going out. I might have known I should drink water from my experience of dehydration. See, everything has a cause. And nothing, literally nothing, can happen without any reason (for this part, I stand corrected). In this sense, free will doesn’t exist. I am controlled by my experience and surrounding environment.

     How do these two definitions coexist? I suppose it's the idea of 'self'. Self is formed by accumulation of experiences. Humans are born without any built-in mental contents. People learn what it's like to live as humans. All these external environmental conditions that I have absorbed become a part of myself. When I avoid a dog because I was bitten by one at the age of 10, that is my then-environment still forming my judgement. In this sense, the 'self' we all believe in - nothing about it is truly 'me'. I feel that many things in my life are mere illusions. Self, free will, morality... I will have a better life believing in them. If I really think about this, it comes to the point where I question what it is that's talking in my head, what I am, and if 'I' as an entity even exists. Rip free will, rip myself. 

     Also, the second way of thinking brings a lot of troubles in the picture. If free will doesn’t exist, does it mean the determinism was true? What about the judicial systems? Am I a puppet of the destiny?

     Let us start with determinism. Is my life pre-determined by the law of nature? Well, not necessary. I am not a determinist. I do not believe in free will, plus causality and indeterminism can coexist. This is the fallacy critics sometimes fall into. They say if free will doesn’t exist, everything that happens in our life is pre-determined. Nobody has said that. They think nature is predictable. They are not! Humans, of course, cannot predict what happens in nature. If we could, nobody dies in the earthquake. It's because we can only estimate the possibility of an earthquake happening by a Poisson distribution that we live fearing of a sudden death. And we know Laplace’s demon cannot exist due to the uncertainty principle.

     You may think the judicial system will cease to exist if free will does not exist. That is not welcomed. Indeed. We want dangerous ones off the streets. Well, I believe that criminals should be punished, not because they are responsible for their crimes but because that will prevent the next crime. We now know that there is a gene accountable for aggressive behavior (MAOA – it’s an enzyme that determines the aggressiveness of a person, and its activeness is pre-determined by genes). Then it really is a question of responsibility. Do you accuse a person of a bad gene? No. However, as I mentioned above, the surrounding environment determines people’s actions. This is a balance game. If the benefit of a crime is bigger than the cost, there is no reason to refrain from it. We shouldn’t lower the cost of a crime.

     All these are talking about something people would laugh off. They are counter-intuitive. But one thing we have to remember is that truth is oftentimes counter-intuitive. And science mustn’t be stopped because it seems inappropriate. 400 years ago, everybody believed in Geocentrism. It’s all about feasibility. This is a reminder to myself, to not let my intuition and emotion cloud my judgment.

Do I believe in dualism?
What is consciousness? Consciousness is the first thing we need to define, and it is almost impossible to get a consensus on its definition. For now, let’s say consciousness is the collective perception, process, and response. I perceive the outer world through my perception, process the information in the brain, and respond to it in any form. So the question is – is consciousness a separate entity from the brain? I wouldn’t say that because consciousness does not function without the brain. The reality is a little different from Cartesian dualism. There is no little self in my brain watching the screen. I would go with the Global Workspace Theory where there is a screen but the audience is the unconsciousness. I do think consciousness is like a TV screen – each pixel processes the information and responds to it. From the outside, it looks like showing a cohesive image, but actually, they are thousands of pixels doing their things. And it would be foolish of us if we say the image on screen and TV are two separate entities.

Dualism fails.