Free Will

A buddy of mine forwarded me a link to an article about free will yesterday. Scientists and philosophers have hypothesized that free will does not exist, but that our decisions are rather a result of a combination of DNA and nueral patterns. In other words, we are "programmed" by genetics and past experience. It's an interesting idea, and one can see their point.

This article went on to discuss an experiment that was performed. Basically they informed their subjects what I just noted, that there was no free will. They questioned the subjects whether they believed in free will or not. They then went through a quick mathematics test and informed them that there was a glitch in the software, and if they hit the space bar they would see the answer. They asked them not to cheat, but they were on the honor system. Results showed that those that didn't believe in free will cheated a lot more. Conclusions were made that moral responsiblity is a result of the belief in free will, and that when a person believes he or she is "programmed", they feel little responsibilty for their actions, or remorse from them.

We probably could have guessed those results, but this author noted something interesting... that these scientists that disbelieve in free will actually typically feel just as morally obligated as most others. From this author's observation, I must conclude that either they don't truly disbelieve in free will, or that they don't actually act on it. This is interesting because if they're right, and we are programmed by what we learn, then they should have been programmed to feel little remorse or moral responsibilty. This doesn't appear to be the case.

It can be argued that free will was a concept that was invented by man for a couple of reasons, one being a way to maintain order, and another to improve quality of life.

But here's the thing... The idea of "I am who I am" just doesn't work. Why? Because we can change ourselves. We experience things and choose which of them we like, and as a result we learn what we choose to learn. In other words, we can program ourselves. We choose what we like, believe what we want believe, and learn what we decide is true. Affected by others? Sure. But ultimately we choose what becomes our nature and we can change our nature with effort.