DB 7 What is Free?

Be sure to first read Professor Dennett’s “Free Will and a Wasp” anecdote at the beginning of our slide show “The Problem of Free Will” in this weekly unit’s Module before posting. 

Do human beings have free will? Keep in mind that free will is not necessarily “doing what you want” since your “wants” could themselves be determined by nature or nurture.

• If you claim we are free, then explain how it is that everything seems to subscribe to physical laws which necessitate certain actions (e.g., planets move according to gravitational pull) but that somehow we are able to ‘bypass” such laws. (i.e., How can scientific predictions be reconciled with human freedom?)
• If you claim we are not free, then explain how it is that we feel we can act in a free manner and how we came to even think about this free will problem in the first place.

In your answer please also consider the freedom of at least one of the following examples: a “criminally insane” individual, Agent Smith in the Matrix, one or more animals, or a child. Is your answer here consistent with your general view about human freedom?

DB 7 What is Free? Answer

The problem of free will has posed three critical points: 1) human beings have the freedom to do what human beings want to do; 2) whether our wants are predetermined, and 3) whether we could have done otherwise than what we already did.

In its most simplistic sense, yes, humans have free will. However, this is always relative to our actions, so the free will that we are talking about here is limited to our choices. Moreover, we always have two choices: to do or not do; to cry or not cry; to walk or not walk; to kill or not kill; and so on.