Apologizing Free Will and Determinism
When I say Free Will, I'm taking a purely secular stance on the idea. I'm not taking into consideration any God(s) or Goddess(es), I'm looking at it entirely from a non-religious stance.
In a previous post I briefly covered how the determinism works, but I feel that there's more to say on the subject. I used to take the stance that everything is simply action-reaction (or stimulus-response, for you behaviourists), but I've come to realize that it doesn't really change anything. There is always a factor of chance in the world and, supposing things have some uniformity to them, we could see exactly what is going to happen at any given point. This is a very strenuous burden to pose as a possibility because we will likely never be able to figure out exactly how everything works. As Richard Dawkins puts it:
"What I do know is that what it feels like to me, and I think to all of us, we don't feel determined. We feel like blaming people for what they do or giving people the credit for what they do. We feel like admiring people for what they do. None of us ever actually as a matter of fact says, 'Oh well he couldn't help doing it, he was determined by his molecules."
Though he's right that people rarely, if ever, take that stance, it could be strongly argued in favour of that. But as he said, we need to believe that events are within our control or else we'll develop cases of learned helplessness, and have an entirely external locus of control. I've recently had a radical change in my approach to things, gaining a feeling that whatever comes my way is manageable and within my control to handle. It's a very empowering feeling to be sure, but from a deterministic stance, this was meant to happen because of how things were put together; I was determined to gain this new perspective from the beginning of time. Be that as it may, it doesn't take away any of the perceived freedom I've derived from my environment. I would like to close by calling upon Sartre, yet again, with one of my new favourite quotes:
"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you"
For more information on Determinism, here is an interesting video.
Very nice post. I like the final quote... it follows the same thinking found in buddhist darma which emphesizes our peaceful relationship to the present moment. It also resembles what Jewish Rabi Harold S. Kushner talks about in his book 'when bad things happen to good people'.