PhiloPsycho Freedom

Humans are pretty crazy things, aren't they? They can take random events and patterns and force order and meaning onto it. We not only want order; we need it. This is no better illustrated than in a study I referenced in another post (last paragraph of it). Participants needed to take back some of that control and meaning in their environment, so much so that they saw a pattern in a randomly changing arrangement of black and white pixels.

We also feel a need to attribute performance to people's abilities when it may be entirely independent of such factors. This has been illustrated by looking at Hollywood production companies, stock brokers, coaches, and basketball players. Statistically analyzing the data collected from each of these groups has shown that a person's performance was more controlled by random factors than by the people themselves: The producer didn't influence the success of the studio; the stock broker who has chosen the correct stock enough times in a row is lucky, more than anything; coaches had little influence on the ability of the team; basketball players on "hot streaks" didn't perform significantly better than average.

There's a basic stats principle called "regression", or "regression to the mean", which says that people will vary around their average performance, but won't stray too far from it. In the above cases (not including the stock broker), each group was performing around their mean. The producer who got fired for lack-lustre choices in projects may get fired, but it simply could've gone from one extreme (the high side of the mean) to the other (the low side of the mean), making it appear like he's a terrible chooser. When the next hot shot comes along and performance does better, it's a simple regression to the mean, meaning that it went from the low side back to the average. Same for the coach, and basketball player.

The stock broker is slightly different though. Say there are 10 stock brokers and they all pick random stocks to invest in. Let's give them a running chance and say that they all have a 50-50 chance of gaining or losing money. From the first pick, 5 will appear to be good brokers. Replay this again, 2.5 appear to be better choosers. Run again, and now it's 1.25. It may seem ridiculous to be looking at 1.25 stock brokers,  but if we take a much larger number, it becomes more clear. Of all the hundreds of thousands of stock brokers, a few are going to be consistently successful in their stock ventures. People will look at them in amazement saying "they must have talent! They've been successful for years and never picked a bad stock!", but that isn't the case. These people aren't psychic.

Of course, people are going to argue with me saying that players really do go on hot streaks, or that producers play a huge part in the companies, but in reality we're just creatures who are terrible at intuitively analyzing statistical principles and need to impose meaning and order on "patterns" we see. The performance of these companies or groups is more a sign of the overall workings of the company and less about the leader, deal with it.

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.