Does Free Will Exist?

By Anushree Gupta

For decades philosophers with white beards and politicians with big hair (or no hair) have tried to champion the idea of free will in society, either backed by religion, or by political agenda. The problem with free will is that, if we believe it exists, we often forget to look at the motivations behind our actions and how, even discounting predestination, they are not always our own.

There are different ways free will could be misplaced to a human, may it be in society or from the unreachable skies of god. Before you think I’m crazy, yes, I do realise that someone can do the Macarena on top of their neighbours car, and, apart from a few concerned faces (as well as angry gestures from an agitated looking neighbour) they will face no other penalty. Yet hidden in society lay these hidden social constructs which create an invisible barrier of fear, inhibiting a human’s life and their actions. This does not physically influence them, but by creating the mental impression that what they are doing is not right (because of the reaction of others), manipulates them to do the opposite to fit the ‘norm’.

Yet have you seen anyone do just that, have you seen anyone commit a reckless move without the intention of getting some sort of recognition…Insta famous, front cover of The Sun? It’s because society has an outdated perception of what’s normal and what’s not. This idea of a ‘civilised person’ and the fear of public reaction stops people from doing these so-called crazy things  as they know they will be derided. This notion that we are so acutely aware that we will be ridiculed that it stops us carrying out the action is not a physical barrier, but deters us from committing the action all the same, thus hindering our free will. And I understand that the person themselves might not care, but consider what would happen if something of that sort occurred in your school car park…

This is quite a controversial reason for the restraint of a person’s free will (I’m ready for the torrent of counter arguments as to why no one would judge someone doing the Macarena on top of a North London Range Rover), but it’s the principle that matters.

Another idea about free will and its existence is the influence from sources that are incorporeal. Yeah, it’s God. (For the purposes of this article, God is referred to as ‘He’). God is quite a universal concept, yet no one has had any credible, reliable, scientific proof of his existence, and it’s this irrational commitment to God that makes Him such a powerful influence. The idea that He could act outside of creation and time allows us to believe that humans could possibly have been created with free will. Yet this opens the other possibility that God isn’t giving us free will. Did He want Hitler’s regime to kill six million Jews? Did want poverty and suffering to occur? If God is behind all of this, then that doesn’t make him as good as we conjure him up to be, and yet, with no universal evidence of him implementing this, nothing obstructs us from worshipping Him and giving Him our time to respond to our prayers and forgive our sins.

Yet another way to approach this issue is by thinking that if you have free will, you chose a specific decision from a lot of options (and if you only had one option then it would be a determined action). Yet if you have a reason for your decision, caused by another factor, then it does not necessarily mean you decided to do it. Free will can be the feeling of having the possibility to do whatever you want, which can be quite appealing to many, but if you look at it more closely, then you might find that not all your intentions originated freely from your own thoughts at that point. If you had a choice and you decided to do something freely and chose an option, then there must be factors that determined why you chose that option. It may be invisible factors in your mind since these causes link to the chain of causes and action. And accordingly your cause would be influenced by external physical influences - the things that already exist in the world - all which follow a determinist action and cause chain. Another way to think about it is that unless our minds are a separate entity to our bodies, our minds must be connected to our brains, which are connected to our body, which is a physical result of an action. So, it is hard to determine whether this thought of free will was spontaneous as there are so many contributing factors which can to a large extent make it not so much your decision at all.

To conclude, find me Macarena man, I’ll wait.