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25. marraskuuta 2009 |
                      
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Lasse Heikkilä - OUKA
2. Personally, I don’t believe in predestination in the sense that god or fate determines what happens next. However, I find it hard to deny the argument presented by Thomas Nagel. Everything that happens in this reality we are able to perceive happens because something happened before it. That means everything we do is based on the events that happened before. This might sound like it completely removes the idea of free will. It seems like B is caused by A, and B is followed by C, and nothing can change that. Actually, our consciousness is built this way. Any other sequence of events would be insane. The intervention of some totally random factor to the A -> B -> C sequence would require something that is out of this world, and like somebody said, the problem of proving that something is out of this world is that you first need to prove that it is not in this world. And as far as I know, nothing in this world has yet been affected by something that is not in this world. Over time, of course, someone might prove me wrong. Anyways, I believe that everything is caused by something. But I do not believe that this would mean free will doesn’t exist. Nagel’s argument doesn’t directly say that it wouldn’t exist, but it suggests that we are not totally free to choose what happens or what we do next which pretty much means the same thing. I understand that humans are extraordinary in our ability to predict the future. We know what happened in our past, and we see the present moment, but the future is up to guesses. And after years of experience about what thing caused which thing, we are able to make better and better guesses which reach ever further. And this gives us the ability to control the future. We know that B happens or might happen if we do the thing A. This means that B was created because we wanted so, and that B causes C, which we might have already known when we caused the A. So we caused this chain reaction ourselves, and the further we were able to predict it, the more control over future we had. And we were given the right to decide whether we cause this chain reaction or not. And we were free to choose according to our will. Of course, it might be that free will is just an illusion, that we are biological machines and after we became more and more complex in our struggle to survive we developed consciousness as a kind of a byproduct and that we really don’t have any control over what happens, because the things happen no matter what and they are caused by an enormous and incredibly complex chain reaction that began at some point. And I still have no idea how to deny this claim even if I wanted to. Mainly because it would be up to me to prove this claim wrong and currently I have no ability to do so. It’s the same reason I can’t deny God, because I cannot prove it doesn’t exist. Personally, I agree with the claim presented by Thomas Nagel, even though I don’t know whether he believes in it. In my reality, one thing is caused by another, and the only question is what was the first thing to ever happen in this chain reaction. Perhaps that thing came from somewhere out of this world, from a reality where A -> B -> C sequence doesn’t apply. But when it comes to free will, I can’t prove that this ability to make decisions independently is not just an illusion. But at least I have it, whether it is an illusion or not, the feeling that I have the freedom to make decisions. And I will use it to keep on causing chain reactions which will make my world look the way I want it to look like, and I have the freedom to do so until someone proves that I don’t have.
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Tätä sivustoa on viimeksi päivitetty 25. marraskuuta 2009
