There are 2 important questions.
1. What makes us make the choices that we make? Or How do we make our choices?
2. What determines the consequences of our decisions?
how did I make these choices?
consequences of choices
although the debate on free will is still undecided. this one is clearly closed. We don't determine the consequences of our choices. No one does. Things happen randomly and our plans are put to tatters again by forces we don't understand.
If the forces are controlling the consequences which teach us that we are not in control of our lives, they would logically be controlling our thoughts and desires as well. Else, we can't conclude anything.
Below is some of the finest available matter on the subject available online:
Everything that has, will, or can exist is already determined -
So get happy and enjoy the ride!
everything is destined from the beginning of time- Heisenberg and his apprentice
"You fool! Don't you realize that the lumberjack is himself formed by the same elements as the tree? The tree grows and sprouts green, the lumberjack lumberjacks, but both do it by the same cause-and-effect domino fall. If he cuts down the tree then he was always destined to cut it down! If he changes his mind then he was always destined to change his mind!" - Heisenberg
"But sir!" Squealed Hans from the floor as the leather strap lashed across his shoulders with a sound like a gunshot. "My brain is made of atoms and atoms only react to other atoms and energies present in the world! They cannot be changed! It was destined from the beginning of time that I should talk back to you just now!"
"So be it!" Screeched Heisenberg. "And so it was also destined from the beginning of time that I should thrash you for it!"
The Illusion of control http://zenhabits.net/control/
Patience is understanding the settled reality that we are not in control.
War and peace by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's major work, War and Peace, appeared between the years 1865 and 1869. The epic tale depicted the story of five families against the background of Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Its vast canvas includes 580 characters, many historical, others fictional. War and Peace reflected Tolstoy's view that all is predestined, but we cannot live unless we imagine that we have free will.
If the will of every man were free, that is, if each man could act as he pleased, all history would be a series of disconnected incidents.- Tolstoy
If in a thousand years even one man in a million could act freely, that is, as he chose, it is evident that one single free act of that man's in violation of the laws governing human action would destroy the possibility of the existence of any laws for the whole of humanity. If there be a single law governing the actions of men, free will cannot exist, for then man's will is subject to that law.
"In historical events great men - so-called - are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity." (from War and Peace)
Free will-The Indispensable Illusion (I thought I was the first one to coin it!!!)
Laplace
Our actions should be based on the ever-present awareness that human beings in their thinking, feeling, and acting are not free but are just as causally bound as the stars in their motion."
"Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper." - Albert Einstein
'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants,'
Schopenhauer
Proponents of free will say that if I decide to go an have dinner is my free will. Malayesh decided to have dinner (free will to have an enjoyable evening?) Not true. That dinner led to his death. If he had known by any way that this could remotely happen, he would be alive today. (So that decision of his was guided by the divine will that he was to die that night) for many others like him.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00z5y9z/In_Our_Time_Free_Will/
An essay by John Byl:
Given our best scientific theories, factors beyond our control ultimately produce all of our actions . . . we are therefore not morally responsible for them.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwVariousPereboom.htm
Derk Pereboom
Clarence Darrow's closing argument saving 2 teenagers who pleaded guilty of murder
Why did they kill little Bobby Franks? Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood. Mr. Savage, with the immaturity of youth and inexperience, says that if we hang them there will be no more killing. This world has been one long slaughterhouse from the beginning until today, and killing goes on and on and on, and will forever. Why not read something, why not study something, why not think instead of blindly shouting for death?
Nature is strong and she is pitiless. She works in her own mysterious way, and we are her victims. We have not much to do with it ourselves. Nature takes this job in hand, and we play our parts.
Your Honor, I am almost ashamed to talk about it. I can hardly imagine that we are in the twentieth century. And yet there are men who seriously say that for what Nature has done, for what life has done, for what training has done, you should hang these boys.
There is a large element of chance in life. I know I will die. I don't know when; I don't know how; I don't know where; and I don't want to know. I know it will come. I know that it depends on infinite chances. Did I make myself? And control my fate? I cannot fix my death unless I commit suicide, and I cannot do that because the will to live is too strong; I know it depends on infinite chances.
These boys, neither one of them, could possibly have committed this act excepting by coming together. It was not the act for one; it was the act of two. It was the act of their planning, their conniving, their believing in each other; their thinking themselves supermen. Without it they could not have done it. It would not have happened. Their parents happened to meet, these boys happened to meet; some sort of chemical alchemy operated so that they cared for each other, and poor Bobby Franks's dead body was found in the culvert as a result. Neither of them could have done it alone.
Take the rabbit running through the woods; a fox meets him at a certain fence. If the rabbit had not started when it did, it would not have met the fox and would have lived longer. If the fox had started later or earlier it would not have met the rabbit and its fate would have been different.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We are merely puppets in the hands of the Master Puppeteer-anonymous
http://www.the-highway.com/freewill_Byl.html
Either determinism is true or it's not. If determinism is true, then my choices are ultimately caused by events and conditions outside my control, so I am not their first cause and therefore...I am neither free nor responsible. If determinism is false, then something that happens inside me (something that I call “my choice” or “my decision”) might be the first event in a causal chain leading to a sequence of body movements that I call “my action”. But since this event is not causally determined, whether or not it happens is a matter of chance or luck. Whether or not it happens has nothing to do with me; it is not under my control any more than an involuntary knee jerk is under my control. Therefore, if determinism is false, I am not the first cause or ultimate source of my choices and...I am neither free nor responsible.
Some of the greatest human beings who ever existed on earth believed in predetermined lives.
SPINOZA JOHN LOCKE VOLTAIRE DAVID HUME THOMAS JEFFERSON ABRAHAM LINCOLN MARK TWAIN
CLARENCE DARROW JOHN STUART MILL BERTRAND RUSSELL ALBERT EINSTEIN
"There is no half-way house between random and correlated behavior. Either the behavior is wholly a matter of chance, in which case the precise behavior within the Heisenberg limits of uncertainty depends on chance and not volition. Or it is not wholly a matter of chance, in which case the Heisenberg limits...are irrelevant."
(The Philosophy of Physical Science,, MacMillan, 1939, p.182)
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/standard_argument.html
Whatever is destined not to happen will not happen try as you may. Whatever is destined to happen will happen do what you may to prevent it. everything is predetermined. The past was predetermined. The future is predetermined.
Ramana Maharshi
"Our freedom, then, consists in knowing that everything that is, must necessarily be and everything that happens must necessarily happen."- Spinoza
He did not make the choice, it was made FOR him by forces which he could not control. Free Will has always existed in WORDS, but it stops there, I think--stops short of FACT
Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance.
Democritus
Live Surprisingly, living in the moment, accepting whatever unfolds, whatever it is. It is the universal will that causes things to happen including thoughts and actions.
“The human mind,” Lincoln wrote, “is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.” Our choices thus are predetermined though we may appear to be making them consciously. Ironically, Lincoln cited the specific example of Brutus and Caesar, and said Brutus’s decision to murder Caesar was simply the mechanical result of laws and conditions over which Brutus had no control. Disbelieving as he did in free will, Lincoln consciously swore never to act out of revenge, deciding he would literally have “malice toward none.”
Even Mary Todd Lincoln acknowledged that her husband had been guided by the conviction that "what is to be will be, and no cares of ours can arrest nor reverse the decree."1 What this meant in practical terms, as Herndon discovered, was that Lincoln believed that "there was no freedom of the will," that "men had no free choice." Lincoln, according to Herndon, was inclined by his fatalism to soften or excuse what appeared to be the most obvious examples of human guilt or responsibility. He "quoted the case of Brutus and Caesar, arguing that the former was forced by laws and conditions over which he had no control to kill the latter, and vice versa, that the latter was specially created to be disposed of by the former."26
In the face of great tragedy and sorrow, national or private, it is always good to recall in our grief the phrase of Lincoln:
The Almighty Has His Own Purposes.
Abraham Lincoln
As Spinoza and Lincoln tried to teach us, when we discard free will, we are discarding hatred, anger, envy, malice, guilt, and anxiety. So the next, and very practical question is this: Can you run a society without hatred, anger, envy, malice, guilt, and anxiety? Lincoln did.
Each of us is free to do what we want. But we are not free to want whatever we want. The divine will causes things to be the way they are.
"Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper." - Albert Einstein
"The enormous value of the concept of free will in relieving parental shame and guilt is the only and overriding reason, in our opinion, that the lie of free will is well nigh universally taught to all children. If and when we can convince parents of total determinism, so they are freed from their own shame and guilt, they will no longer need to teach the vicious lie of free will to the world's children. A new world will be born." -- Peter Gill
1. What makes us make the choices that we make? Or How do we make our choices?
2. What determines the consequences of our decisions?
how did I make these choices?
consequences of choices
although the debate on free will is still undecided. this one is clearly closed. We don't determine the consequences of our choices. No one does. Things happen randomly and our plans are put to tatters again by forces we don't understand.
If the forces are controlling the consequences which teach us that we are not in control of our lives, they would logically be controlling our thoughts and desires as well. Else, we can't conclude anything.
Below is some of the finest available matter on the subject available online:
So get happy and enjoy the ride!
everything is destined from the beginning of time- Heisenberg and his apprentice
"You fool! Don't you realize that the lumberjack is himself formed by the same elements as the tree? The tree grows and sprouts green, the lumberjack lumberjacks, but both do it by the same cause-and-effect domino fall. If he cuts down the tree then he was always destined to cut it down! If he changes his mind then he was always destined to change his mind!" - Heisenberg
"But sir!" Squealed Hans from the floor as the leather strap lashed across his shoulders with a sound like a gunshot. "My brain is made of atoms and atoms only react to other atoms and energies present in the world! They cannot be changed! It was destined from the beginning of time that I should talk back to you just now!"
"So be it!" Screeched Heisenberg. "And so it was also destined from the beginning of time that I should thrash you for it!"
The Illusion of control http://zenhabits.net/control/
Patience is understanding the settled reality that we are not in control.
War and peace by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's major work, War and Peace, appeared between the years 1865 and 1869. The epic tale depicted the story of five families against the background of Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Its vast canvas includes 580 characters, many historical, others fictional. War and Peace reflected Tolstoy's view that all is predestined, but we cannot live unless we imagine that we have free will.
If the will of every man were free, that is, if each man could act as he pleased, all history would be a series of disconnected incidents.- Tolstoy
If in a thousand years even one man in a million could act freely, that is, as he chose, it is evident that one single free act of that man's in violation of the laws governing human action would destroy the possibility of the existence of any laws for the whole of humanity. If there be a single law governing the actions of men, free will cannot exist, for then man's will is subject to that law.
"In historical events great men - so-called - are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity." (from War and Peace)
Free will-The Indispensable Illusion (I thought I was the first one to coin it!!!)
Laplace
Our actions should be based on the ever-present awareness that human beings in their thinking, feeling, and acting are not free but are just as causally bound as the stars in their motion."
"Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper." - Albert Einstein
'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants,'
Schopenhauer
Proponents of free will say that if I decide to go an have dinner is my free will. Malayesh decided to have dinner (free will to have an enjoyable evening?) Not true. That dinner led to his death. If he had known by any way that this could remotely happen, he would be alive today. (So that decision of his was guided by the divine will that he was to die that night) for many others like him.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00z5y9z/In_Our_Time_Free_Will/
An essay by John Byl:
Given our best scientific theories, factors beyond our control ultimately produce all of our actions . . . we are therefore not morally responsible for them.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwVariousPereboom.htm
Derk Pereboom
Clarence Darrow's closing argument saving 2 teenagers who pleaded guilty of murder
Why did they kill little Bobby Franks? Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood. Mr. Savage, with the immaturity of youth and inexperience, says that if we hang them there will be no more killing. This world has been one long slaughterhouse from the beginning until today, and killing goes on and on and on, and will forever. Why not read something, why not study something, why not think instead of blindly shouting for death?
Nature is strong and she is pitiless. She works in her own mysterious way, and we are her victims. We have not much to do with it ourselves. Nature takes this job in hand, and we play our parts.
Your Honor, I am almost ashamed to talk about it. I can hardly imagine that we are in the twentieth century. And yet there are men who seriously say that for what Nature has done, for what life has done, for what training has done, you should hang these boys.
There is a large element of chance in life. I know I will die. I don't know when; I don't know how; I don't know where; and I don't want to know. I know it will come. I know that it depends on infinite chances. Did I make myself? And control my fate? I cannot fix my death unless I commit suicide, and I cannot do that because the will to live is too strong; I know it depends on infinite chances.
These boys, neither one of them, could possibly have committed this act excepting by coming together. It was not the act for one; it was the act of two. It was the act of their planning, their conniving, their believing in each other; their thinking themselves supermen. Without it they could not have done it. It would not have happened. Their parents happened to meet, these boys happened to meet; some sort of chemical alchemy operated so that they cared for each other, and poor Bobby Franks's dead body was found in the culvert as a result. Neither of them could have done it alone.
Take the rabbit running through the woods; a fox meets him at a certain fence. If the rabbit had not started when it did, it would not have met the fox and would have lived longer. If the fox had started later or earlier it would not have met the rabbit and its fate would have been different.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We are merely puppets in the hands of the Master Puppeteer-anonymous
http://www.the-highway.com/freewill_Byl.html
Either determinism is true or it's not. If determinism is true, then my choices are ultimately caused by events and conditions outside my control, so I am not their first cause and therefore...I am neither free nor responsible. If determinism is false, then something that happens inside me (something that I call “my choice” or “my decision”) might be the first event in a causal chain leading to a sequence of body movements that I call “my action”. But since this event is not causally determined, whether or not it happens is a matter of chance or luck. Whether or not it happens has nothing to do with me; it is not under my control any more than an involuntary knee jerk is under my control. Therefore, if determinism is false, I am not the first cause or ultimate source of my choices and...I am neither free nor responsible.
Some of the greatest human beings who ever existed on earth believed in predetermined lives.
SPINOZA JOHN LOCKE VOLTAIRE DAVID HUME THOMAS JEFFERSON ABRAHAM LINCOLN MARK TWAIN
CLARENCE DARROW JOHN STUART MILL BERTRAND RUSSELL ALBERT EINSTEIN
"There is no half-way house between random and correlated behavior. Either the behavior is wholly a matter of chance, in which case the precise behavior within the Heisenberg limits of uncertainty depends on chance and not volition. Or it is not wholly a matter of chance, in which case the Heisenberg limits...are irrelevant."
(The Philosophy of Physical Science,, MacMillan, 1939, p.182)
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/standard_argument.html
Whatever happened till here was predetermined. Whatever will happen from here is also predetermined. Everything is predetermined.
Whatever is destined not to happen will not happen try as you may. Whatever is destined to happen will happen do what you may to prevent it. everything is predetermined. The past was predetermined. The future is predetermined.
Ramana Maharshi
"Our freedom, then, consists in knowing that everything that is, must necessarily be and everything that happens must necessarily happen."- Spinoza
From Mark Twain's what's a man...
Y.M. PERSONAL merits? How do you mean?
O.M. It would be personally entitled to the credit of its
own performance?
own performance?
Y.M. The engine? Certainly not.
O.M. Why not?
Y.M. Because its performance is not personal. It is the
result of the law of construction. It is not a MERIT that it
does the things which it is set to do--it can't HELP doing them.
result of the law of construction. It is not a MERIT that it
does the things which it is set to do--it can't HELP doing them.
O.M. And it is not a personal demerit in the stone machine
that it does so little?
that it does so little?
Y.M. Certainly not. It does no more and no less than the
law of its make permits and compels it to do. There is nothing
PERSONAL about it; it cannot choose. In this process of "working
up to the matter" is it your idea to work up to the proposition
that man and a machine are about the same thing, and that there
is no personal merit in the performance of either?
law of its make permits and compels it to do. There is nothing
PERSONAL about it; it cannot choose. In this process of "working
up to the matter" is it your idea to work up to the proposition
that man and a machine are about the same thing, and that there
is no personal merit in the performance of either?
O.M. Yes--but do not be offended; I am meaning no offense.
What makes the grand difference between the stone engine and the
steel one? Shall we call it training, education? Shall we call
the stone engine a savage and the steel one a civilized man? The
original rock contained the stuff of which the steel one was
built--but along with a lot of sulphur and stone and other
obstructing inborn heredities, brought down from the old geologic
ages--prejudices, let us call them. Prejudices which nothing
within the rock itself had either POWER to remove or any DESIRE
to remove. Will you take note of that phrase?
What makes the grand difference between the stone engine and the
steel one? Shall we call it training, education? Shall we call
the stone engine a savage and the steel one a civilized man? The
original rock contained the stuff of which the steel one was
built--but along with a lot of sulphur and stone and other
obstructing inborn heredities, brought down from the old geologic
ages--prejudices, let us call them. Prejudices which nothing
within the rock itself had either POWER to remove or any DESIRE
to remove. Will you take note of that phrase?
Y.M. Yes. I have written it down; "Prejudices which
nothing within the rock itself had either power to remove or any
desire to remove." Go on.
nothing within the rock itself had either power to remove or any
desire to remove." Go on.
O.M. Prejudices must be removed by OUTSIDE INFLUENCES or
not at all. Put that down.
not at all. Put that down.
Y.M. Very well; "Must be removed by outside influences or
not at all." Go on.
not at all." Go on.
O.M. The iron's prejudice against ridding itself of the
cumbering rock. To make it more exact, the iron's absolute
INDIFFERENCE as to whether the rock be removed or not. Then
comes the OUTSIDE INFLUENCE and grinds the rock to powder and
sets the ore free. The IRON in the ore is still captive. An
OUTSIDE INFLUENCE smelts it free of the clogging ore. The iron
is emancipated iron, now, but indifferent to further progress.
An OUTSIDE INFLUENCE beguiles it into the Bessemer furnace and
refines it into steel of the first quality. It is educated, now
--its training is complete. And it has reached its limit. By no
possible process can it be educated into GOLD. Will you set that
down?
cumbering rock. To make it more exact, the iron's absolute
INDIFFERENCE as to whether the rock be removed or not. Then
comes the OUTSIDE INFLUENCE and grinds the rock to powder and
sets the ore free. The IRON in the ore is still captive. An
OUTSIDE INFLUENCE smelts it free of the clogging ore. The iron
is emancipated iron, now, but indifferent to further progress.
An OUTSIDE INFLUENCE beguiles it into the Bessemer furnace and
refines it into steel of the first quality. It is educated, now
--its training is complete. And it has reached its limit. By no
possible process can it be educated into GOLD. Will you set that
down?
Y.M. Yes. "Everything has its limit--iron ore cannot be
educated into gold."
educated into gold."
O.M. There are gold men, and tin men, and copper men, and
leaden mean, and steel men, and so on--and each has the
limitations of his nature, his heredities, his training, and his
environment. You can build engines out of each of these metals,
and they will all perform, but you must not require the weak ones
to do equal work with the strong ones. In each case, to get the
best results, you must free the metal from its obstructing
prejudicial ones by education--smelting, refining, and so forth.
leaden mean, and steel men, and so on--and each has the
limitations of his nature, his heredities, his training, and his
environment. You can build engines out of each of these metals,
and they will all perform, but you must not require the weak ones
to do equal work with the strong ones. In each case, to get the
best results, you must free the metal from its obstructing
prejudicial ones by education--smelting, refining, and so forth.
Y.M. You have arrived at man, now?
O.M. Yes. Man the machine--man the impersonal engine.
Whatsoever a man is, is due to his MAKE, and to the INFLUENCES
brought to bear upon it by his heredities, his habitat, his
associations. He is moved, directed, COMMANDED, by EXTERIOR
influences--SOLELY. He ORIGINATES nothing, not even a thought.
Whatsoever a man is, is due to his MAKE, and to the INFLUENCES
brought to bear upon it by his heredities, his habitat, his
associations. He is moved, directed, COMMANDED, by EXTERIOR
influences--SOLELY. He ORIGINATES nothing, not even a thought.
Democritus
Live Surprisingly, living in the moment, accepting whatever unfolds, whatever it is. It is the universal will that causes things to happen including thoughts and actions.
“The human mind,” Lincoln wrote, “is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.” Our choices thus are predetermined though we may appear to be making them consciously. Ironically, Lincoln cited the specific example of Brutus and Caesar, and said Brutus’s decision to murder Caesar was simply the mechanical result of laws and conditions over which Brutus had no control. Disbelieving as he did in free will, Lincoln consciously swore never to act out of revenge, deciding he would literally have “malice toward none.”
Even Mary Todd Lincoln acknowledged that her husband had been guided by the conviction that "what is to be will be, and no cares of ours can arrest nor reverse the decree."1 What this meant in practical terms, as Herndon discovered, was that Lincoln believed that "there was no freedom of the will," that "men had no free choice." Lincoln, according to Herndon, was inclined by his fatalism to soften or excuse what appeared to be the most obvious examples of human guilt or responsibility. He "quoted the case of Brutus and Caesar, arguing that the former was forced by laws and conditions over which he had no control to kill the latter, and vice versa, that the latter was specially created to be disposed of by the former."26
In the face of great tragedy and sorrow, national or private, it is always good to recall in our grief the phrase of Lincoln:
The Almighty Has His Own Purposes.
Abraham Lincoln
As Spinoza and Lincoln tried to teach us, when we discard free will, we are discarding hatred, anger, envy, malice, guilt, and anxiety. So the next, and very practical question is this: Can you run a society without hatred, anger, envy, malice, guilt, and anxiety? Lincoln did.
Each of us is free to do what we want. But we are not free to want whatever we want. The divine will causes things to be the way they are.
"Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper." - Albert Einstein
"The enormous value of the concept of free will in relieving parental shame and guilt is the only and overriding reason, in our opinion, that the lie of free will is well nigh universally taught to all children. If and when we can convince parents of total determinism, so they are freed from their own shame and guilt, they will no longer need to teach the vicious lie of free will to the world's children. A new world will be born." -- Peter Gill
- The initial configuration of the universe may have been chosen by God, or it may itself have been determined by the laws of science. In either case, it would seem that everything in the universe would then be determined by evolution according to the laws of science, so it is difficult to see how we can be masters of our fate." -- Stephen Hawking
- "You will say that I feel free. This is an illusion, which may be compared to that of the fly in the fable, who, upon the pole of a heavy carriage, applauded himself for directing its course. Man, who thinks himself free, is a fly who imagines he has power to move the universe, while he is himself unknowingly carried along by it." -- Baron d'Hobach
- "Whether or not we have personality disturbances, whether or not we have the ability to overcome deficiencies of early environment, is like the answer to the question whether or not we shall be struck down by a dread disease: "it's all a matter of luck." It is important to keep this in mind, for people almost always forget it, with consequences in human intolerance and unnecessary suffering that are incalculable." -- John Hospers
- "Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws. A purely random set of accidents." -- Marvin Minsky
- "The first dogma which I came to disbelieve was that of free will. It seemed to me that all notions of matter were determined by the laws of dynamics and could not therefore be influenced by human wills." -- Bertrand Russell
- "A man can surely do what he wills to do, but cannot determine what he wills." - Schopenhauer
- "A self is a repertoire of behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies." -- B. F. Skinner
- "In the mind there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to wish this or that by a cause, which has also been determined by another cause, and this last by another cause, and so on to infinity." - Baruch Spinoza
- "Punishment as punishment is not admissible unless the offender has had the free will to select his course." - Clarence Darrow
- "Everything happens through immutable laws, ...everything is necessary... There are, some persons say, some events which are necessary and others which are not. It would be very comic that one part of the world was arranged, and the other were not; that one part of what happens had to happen and that another part of what happens did not have to happen. If one looks closely at it, one sees that the doctrine contrary to that of destiny is absurd; but there are many people destined to reason badly; others not to reason at all others to persecute those who reason." - Voltaire
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- More:
Clarence Darrow: "Every one knows that the heavenly bodies move in certain paths in relation to each other with seeming consistency and regularity which we call [physical] law. ... No one attributes freewill or motive to the material world. Is the conduct of man or the other animals any more subject to whim or choice than the action of the planets? ... We know that man's every act is induced by motives that led or urged him here or there; that the sequence of cause and effect runs through the whole universe, and is nowhere more compelling than with man." Quoted in Lecture Notes on Free Will and Determinism by Norman Swartz.
Charles Darwin: “…one doubts existence of free will [because] every action determined by heredity, constitution, example of others or teaching of others.” “This view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no credit for anything…nor ought one to blame others.” From Darwin’s notebooks, quoted in Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, pp. 349-50.
Baron D’Holbach: “The inward persuasion that we are free to do, or not to do a thing, is but a mere illusion. If we trace the true principle of our actions, we shall find, that they are always necessary consequences of our volitions and desires, which are never in our power. You think yourself free, because you do what you will; but are you free to will, or not to will; to desire, or not to desire? Are not your volitions and desires necessarily excited by objects or qualities totally independent of you?” From Good Sense Without God.
Albert Einstein: "If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord on the strength of a resolution taken once and for all. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will." From a piece written as a homage to the Indian mystical poet Rabindranath Tagore, quoted here.
Our actions should be based on the ever-present awareness that human beings in their thinking, feeling, and acting are not free but are just as causally bound as the stars in their motion."
Our actions should be based on the ever-present awareness that human beings in their thinking, feeling, and acting are not free but are just as causally bound as the stars in their motion."
And: “I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants,' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper.” From "My Credo" .
And: "I agree with your remark about loving your enemy as far as actions are concerned. But for me the cognitive basis is the trust in an unrestricted causality. 'I cannot hate him, because he must do what he does.' That means for me more Spinoza than the prophets." From a letter to Michele Besso quoted here.
"I do not at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense…. Schopenhauer’s saying, ‘A man can do what he wants, but not will what he wants,’ has been a very real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life’s hardships, my own and others’, and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance. This realization mercifully mitigates the easily paralyzing sense of responsibility and prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it is conducive to a view of life which, in part, gives humor its due."
"I do not at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense…. Schopenhauer’s saying, ‘A man can do what he wants, but not will what he wants,’ has been a very real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life’s hardships, my own and others’, and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance. This realization mercifully mitigates the easily paralyzing sense of responsibility and prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it is conducive to a view of life which, in part, gives humor its due."
And: "Human beings, in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free agents but are as causally bound as the stars in their motion." From his address to the Spinoza Society in 1932.
Thomas Jefferson: "I should . . . prefer swallowing one incomprehensibility rather than two. It requires one effort only to admit the single incomprehensibility of matter endowed with thought, and two to believe, first that of an existence called spirit, of which we have neither evidence nor idea, and then secondly how that spirit, which has neither extension nor solidity, can put material organs into motion." From a letter to John Adams on 3/14/1820.
Thomas Jefferson: "I should . . . prefer swallowing one incomprehensibility rather than two. It requires one effort only to admit the single incomprehensibility of matter endowed with thought, and two to believe, first that of an existence called spirit, of which we have neither evidence nor idea, and then secondly how that spirit, which has neither extension nor solidity, can put material organs into motion." From a letter to John Adams on 3/14/1820.
Samuel Johnson: “All theory is against free will; all experience is for it.”
Abraham Lincoln: “The human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.” from Handbill Replying to Charges of Infidelity.[1] “We often argued the question, I taking the opposite view.... I once contended that man was free and could act without a motive. [Lincoln] smiled at my philosophy, and answered that it was impossible, because the motive was born before the man.... He defied me to act without motive and unselfishly; and when I did the act and told him of it, he analyzed and sifted it to the last grain. After he had concluded, I could not avoid the admission that he had demonstrated the absolute selfishness of the entire act.” From Herndon, "Analysis of the Character of Abraham Lincoln," Abraham Lincoln Quarterly 1 (Dec. 1941): 411; Herndon and Weik, Abraham Lincoln, 2:148, 306, quoted in Abraham Lincoln and the Doctrine of Necessity by Allen C. Guezlo (a most interesting, well-referenced paper).
Friedrich Nietzsche: "The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far; it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for ‘freedom of the will’ in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Münchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness." Quoted in “The Buck Stops – Where?”, an interview with philosopher Galen Strawson.
Bertrand Russell: “When a man acts in ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse to face the fact that his annoying behavior is the result of antecedent causes which, if you follow them long enough, will take you beyond the moment of his birth, and therefore to events for which he cannot be held responsible by any stretch of imagination… When a motorcar fails to start, we do not attribute its annoying behavior to sin, we do not say, you are a wicked motorcar, and you shall not have any more gasoline until you go.” (Richard Dawkins takes exactly this line at Edge.Org in his case against retribution.)
Arthur Schopenhauer: “You are free to do what you want, but you are not free to want what you want.”
Baruch Spinoza: “The mind is determined to this or that choice by a cause which is also determined by another cause, and this again by another, and so on adinfinitum. This doctrine teaches us to hate no one, to despise no one, to mock no one, to be angry with no one, and to envy no one.”
Mark Twain: “Where are there are two desires in a man's heart he has no
choice between the two but must obey the strongest, there being no such thing as free will in the composition of any human being that ever lived." - in Eruption. See also and especially “What Is Man?” for Twain's completely naturalistic view on human nature.
choice between the two but must obey the strongest, there being no such thing as free will in the composition of any human being that ever lived." - in Eruption. See also and especially “What Is Man?” for Twain's completely naturalistic view on human nature.
Voltaire: “Now, you receive all your ideas; therefore you receive your wish, you wish therefore necessarily. The word "liberty" does not therefore belong in any way to your will….The will, therefore, is not a faculty that one can call free. A free will is an expression absolutely void of sense, and what the scholastics have called will of indifference, that is to say willing without cause, is a chimera unworthy of being combated.” From The Philosophical Dictionary.
http://www.naturalism.org/celebrities.htm
Darwin in The Descent of Man doesn’t directly address the consequences of his account for free will and personal responsibility. He was more open in his in unpublished notebooks. There he wrote that “the general delusion about free will [is] obvious,” and that one ought to punish criminals “solely to deter others”—not because they did something blameworthy.4 “This view should teach one profound humility,” wrote Darwin, “one deserves no credit for anything… nor ought one to blame others.” Darwin denied that such a fatalistic view would harm society because he thought that ordinary people would never be “fully convinced of its truth,” and the enlightened few who did embrace it could be trusted.
http://www.discovery.org/a/9581
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now that everything is predetermined, how should I live from here?
Work as if everything depends on you.
Accept whatever unfolds calmly knowing that nothing does and that everything is predetermined.
Live on the assumption of free will while believing 100% that every thing that happens is preordained/predetermined.
The assumption is free will. The world cannot act otherwise. The truth is determinism.
http://www.naturalism.org/celebrities.htm
Darwin in The Descent of Man doesn’t directly address the consequences of his account for free will and personal responsibility. He was more open in his in unpublished notebooks. There he wrote that “the general delusion about free will [is] obvious,” and that one ought to punish criminals “solely to deter others”—not because they did something blameworthy.4 “This view should teach one profound humility,” wrote Darwin, “one deserves no credit for anything… nor ought one to blame others.” Darwin denied that such a fatalistic view would harm society because he thought that ordinary people would never be “fully convinced of its truth,” and the enlightened few who did embrace it could be trusted.
http://www.discovery.org/a/9581
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
now that everything is predetermined, how should I live from here?
Work as if everything depends on you.
Accept whatever unfolds calmly knowing that nothing does and that everything is predetermined.
Live on the assumption of free will while believing 100% that every thing that happens is preordained/predetermined.
The assumption is free will. The world cannot act otherwise. The truth is determinism.
