On Free Will

 Day 9

Everything here was written in October-November, 2022. There are 52 posts total, one for each day I wrote.

What would it mean if I had no free will? It would mean that my will was constrained, was bound and limited in its actions. We can say that if the will was a world, then that world would be a closed off world. It would be a world that, ultimately, did not have any unknowns. You can disagree and think that we can have a partially-free will, a will that is limited only in some areas. If we think of this will as a world though, a world of possibilities, then it is partially constrained. That is, some things are possible in the world and some things are not. However, if there is a known unknown in the world, then we do not know what is possible and what is not. We can only guess, we do not know because of the issues of a known unknown. So, because as world acts like a gem of reality, and if the will was a world it would either be an open or a closed world, then we may suspect from this that a will is either free or not free. Or, that if the will is actually partially-constrained, then I do not see how we are able to realize that it is so, because then there will still appear to be some unknown, some possibilities in the world that are still open. The idea of partial-constraint of a world is the idea that there some edges of the world, some limits to possibility in one 'direction' of the world or another. Put another way, it suggests that a world which is partially-constrained is a world that accurately reflects the rules of reality, and that no rules of reality that we do not know do effect and change the world. This might be true, or it might not be true, but I don't think I've ever heard a satisfactory way of figuring it it that isn't, at the end of the day, just probability. I don't mean to disparage those efforts, for they seem to certainly have been shown to be useful. People are free to follow them all they want, and indeed I do so in most of my daily life. It is just that there is a nagging voice in the back of my mind that pushes me to go a little bit further, that whispers that there is something more. That yearns to be free.

The idea that the will is free is an assumption. We don't usually think of a rock as having free will, although as I've said, this isn't known for certain. When I think of a rock not having free will though, I think of the rock as not being able to make a choice. I think of the rock being some sort of gem in the world, some collection of what is that appears to me to be a rock, and that this rock is totally constrained by something. That is, the assumption that the rock does not have a free will is the assumption that the unknown at the core of the rock is something that is ultimately understandable, that if the world were actually complete, then the unknowns within the rock would disappear. This is just like the idea of physics which suggests that if we knew everything, absolutely everything down to the smallest movement of the smallest particle and the weakest ray of lights and forces of gravity in all the universe, then we would determine what, exactly, would physically happen and what would have happened. This might be a false idea, as probability understandings in quantum physics seems to suggest, but there is a core that remains the same. The idea is that there is a total and complete description of a physical system, and that this physical system cannot be described as free because it has no freedom of movement or action. If we are omnipotent and omniscient, then the rock can never do anything which can surprise us.

If I think of myself as having no free will in this way, in being like the rock, then the mos essential part of me, the unknown at the core that takes action, disappears. We would become like the rock. A complete description of the physical system of the rock, by which we show that the rock is not free, includes a complete description of everything that ever interacts with the rock, everything that ever effects the rock. It is a complete description of a world that includes a rock, and everything in that world. The world must be closed, because otherwise you could never actually know that the rock was totally described. The rock thus loses its greater identity. It becomes a part of the world, a gem of the world that also includes the complete world itself, by the definition of shards. We can still say the rock is there, can still point it out, but there comes to be no difference in the particularity of its gem as compared to other gems. If we consider the rock and a nearby pigeon, then the rock is a gem that reflects all of the world, and the pigeon is gem that reflects all of the world. What distinguishes them? The particular parts of the world that they are. Yet, because we consider both the rock and the nearby pigeon, the rock and the pigeon are connected. That is, they both impact me, or are both touch the gem that is the description of them, or frankly just effect each other because the pigeon can see the rock, etc. So, a full description of the rock must include the pigeon, and a description of the pigeon must include the rock. You now apparently can't consider, talk about, define, or clearly think of either the rock or the pigeon as a separate entity, as an individual thing. Rather, the pigeon and rock become a sort of dual-sided thing, a particular gem that has two major aspects, the rock and the pigeon. You can see the gem in the world as a rock or a pigeon. Because a rock without free will is a gem in a closed world, this suggests that the rock, the pigeon, the clouds and rain, the sun and moon, myself and my cat, are all connected in the same way. Any individual thing in the world becomes just another aspect of the world just another way of seeing the world from a certain angle, no angle of which is any more or less true, real, or valid, than the others. Certain aspects might become more valuable for certain purposes, just as a scientific understanding of the world is sometimes more valuable than a spiritual one for certain tasks, and vice-versa. We are stuck back at not being able to make decisions based on anything concrete, but rather to be in an entirely relative decision-making world.

If we consider that we have no free will in this situation, then we are reduced to being exactly the same as the rock in this way - perhaps only a slightly more complicated series of rocks. We only appear to exist from a certain point of view. We are totally measured and directed, every I'st action set in unmovable stone. 'I', as a unique and valuable being, disappear. I'm not alive because I don't have a life, and life becomes just a series of rocks hitting each other. You can certainly live like this and believe this, but then what happens to everything you are, everything you have ever done or will do, everything that is worth caring about and which is worth doing? There is no purpose or point to anything, no reason to do something over any other something. All actions become relative, and more than relative – something that is neither arbitrary or non-arbitrary. Arbitrariness never comes into the equation of possibility, because there was never any question of one or the other. It feels like something is lost.

This all assumes a closed world. What happens if the world is open? Then, we can never be certain that we have a complete gem of the rock. We can never be certain that the rock and the pigeon are not separate entities, that one of the gems contains or touches upon something that the other gem does not. Because by the definition of shards all shards contain other shards, then the same is true for ourselves. There are possibilities in an open world. If I want to keep my identity as my individual self, an identity that is not my body or my mind, but something which si beyond the boundaries of the world, then it appears that I have two major options. The first is to believe in my free will, to believe that I am not totally defined by the parts of me that are in the world. The second is to go beyond the boundaries of the world, to break our of the limits of the world.

When I say that I believe in my free will, we should clarify that there is a link between the concept of free will and the concept of the unknown. If there is something unknown in the world, then we do not know that free will is impossible. If there is a free will, then there must be something unknown. If either there is no free will or there is no unknown, then both of them are not. When I say that I have free will, I am also saying that there is something unknown in the world. However, this free will does not have to be particularly 'my' free will, in a possessive sense. It could be the other way around, that my 'self in the world' is a sort of body that is possessed by the free will. It could be that my mind and body are just like a stick that has been thrown. It could be that the minds and bodies of all the people I know, the gems of all the human beings, animals, trees, tables, wishes, and colors are gems like a rock-gem is in an open world, are gems with an unknown core. If this is so, then I am not saying that I do not have free will – rather, my mind, body, and decisions, my very being, simply have a different origin. I do not have to assume that 'myself' has free will, but rather that there is free will in the world, and that I identify 'I' with that free will.

If myself and the person sitting across from me on the subway are both people in this way, are both gems with unknown cores, then it is possible that we are actually the same person, that we are simply doing something like hiding from ourselves. This does not introduce anything new to our conception of the world, for the same reason that solipsism is permitted just as much as non-solipsism. This is still only a possibility, not a certainty. It could be that the other person is a rock without a free will, or it could be that the other person is a different free will. There could be one, some, or many free wills. What I not believe is that there are no free wills. If I say that there are no free wills, I am saying that there is no possibility of a free will. If I say that there is no possibility of something, then I am saying that the world is closed. If I say that the world is closed, then I am saying that there are no unknowns in the world. If there are no unknowns in the world, then I disappear as an individual and distinct object. So, if I believe that I exist as an individual, then I believe that I have a free will. Because a free will is the most essential part of me, if there is only one free will then I identify myself with that free will. If there are many free wills then I can identify myself with one of these free wills. I believe everything, so I believe that I exist, so I believe that I have a free will, and so I believe that there is at least a free will somewhere - If I believe that there is no free will, then I believe that 'I' do not exist. If I believe that there is a free will, then I believe that 'I' do exist. (I may not may not exist, but if I do, then I have free will.)

The other option is to escape the boundaries of the world. What I have talked about so far assumes things. However, since the world is open, any one of these assumptions are the logic's I used to come to a conclusion, might be wrong. The world could fall at any moment. What is difficult is existing without a world, while still being alive and existing. One can certainly deny the self, and this is a way to escape the world, but it comes at a dire cost. If that is escaping the world by lifting off the pencil from a piece of paper, then perhaps we could also escape the world by other means.