Does Free Will Exist?

Ask almost anyone whether they believe in free will and they will say “yes”.  Did the man who murdered a policeman during a bank raid have a choice?  Of course he did. He chose to raid the bank, didn´t he?  Or the drunk, who knocked someone over in the street, leaving them with permanent crippling injuries  -  did he have a choice.  Certainly – he didn´t have to drink too much, or, having done so, drive his car.

When you come to think about it, though, you realize that at least part of the answer has to do with what you mean by “choice”.  In a simplistic way, I don´t know what you´re going to decide if you are faced with a dilemma. Should you do this – or that?  If I know you, I might well be able to guess, but I certainly would not know.  But did you really have a choice?  If so, what part of you thought about the issues involved and decided to do this….or that?  Which part of you is “you” – the conscious you, that thinks and makes decisions?  I think the answer to that must be your brain, the organ inside your head. That is “you”.  

Do you have any control over your brain?  And where did your brain come from?  Given that you are, effectively, your brain, there is no other part of you that could control it.  There is no other “you” – you are entirely in the control of your brain. ( If you believe that human beings have souls and that it is their souls that control them and their actions, then we are simply pushing the same question back a stage.)  Where did your brain, the thing that controls you, come from?  Are you in any way responsible for the way it is and the decisions it makes? You were born with a brain and, certainly, you had no control over how your brain was at birth – it was just a matter of luck, your parents´genes and whether the pregnancy that eventually produced you went well.  At a certain point, after being born or – probably even before – the first thing happened that would have a lasting effect on your mind.  It might have been  being given food you didn´t like or the lights being turned off in the bedroom or you parents quarrelling or maybe you fell out of bed.  Your mind has already taken in its first experiences of life and been, ever so slightly, modified by the process and it has stored the first things in your memory. 

To what extent were you able to control the effect that these first stimuli or events had on your brain – your mind?  Surely, the answer to that must be none.  The effect that the first things to impinge on you had on your brain were determined by the brain you were “allocated”.  Nothing you could do about that!  And so the process continued. More and more experiences and events and traumas and elations arrived minute by minute and day by day as you´ve been through life – each and every one adding to your memory and altering you in some way. Until, one day, you reached today.  Your brain – your mind – is as it is because of the brain you were born with has  been modified millions of times since and the effect of those modifications all depend on the mind you were born with. 

Say,  I am faced with a choice of actions – “a” or “b”, say – and I choose “a”. My friend, however, in similar circumstances and with pretty much the same considerations to take into account, chooses “b”.  Why have we chosen differently?   Which part of us has done the choosing?  Could that part of us have chosen differently?  Each of our brains – our minds – thought about which to choose and took into account the same circumstances – and came to different decisions!  If it is our brains that decide, then it must be that in absolutely identical circumstances they will always make the same choice. The only alternative would be that the decision is random – but that would not be free will either.  It is difficult to understand what exactly free will means in these circumstances. Someone else wondering whether I would choose “a” or “b” does not know the answer – so far as they are concerned, I had free will in the matter.  But, it seems to me, that there are only two possibilities. Either my mind in those exact circumstances would always make the same choice – so, that choice was effectively predetermined and cannot be said to correspond to free will – or sometimes it might choose one thing and sometimes another, in a haphazard random way and that is hardly free will either.