Free Will

Ah, the great debate. Do we have it? Or is it an illusion? This excellent teaching company course asks that question and leaves you to fill in your own answer. Well, opinion. And maybe even that's too strong a word. For the record though, here's mine.

I think the very idea of free will hangs on the 'preceding' idea of an 'I' which has the will to be free (or not) in the first place. In other words, it is a property (or not) of the 'I': Do 'I' have 'free will'. Here's what I think it's like: we can ask whether a car has a manual or automatic gearbox. But there isn't a car. In what sense can we talk about its gearbox?

I think (therefore...?) and have often said here, that this 'I' is illusory. Therefore free will must be illusory too. Extending a better metaphor by Douglas Hofstadter (he tells of the time he tried to take out a wedge of old envelopes from a box in his drawer, and could swear he felt a marble nestled among them. It turned out that the uncanny appearance of a marble was produced by the extra layers around the envelopes' V. Ultimately, he proposes, our self is an emergent appearance of this sort. In fact, it is the most real emergent object in our inner world) - it would be like asking what colour our marble was.

All that being said, I have something else to say. If our 'I's' and their properties are illusory, what do real 'I's' look like*? What does real free will look like? What I am trying to get at is, how can something be called an illusion if there is no real thing that it is deceiving us about? Can you imagine being more of an 'I'? Neither can...I. Neither can I imagine feeling more free than this (I raise my arm. Just because I wanted to). I don't think that's a failing of my imagination. Really, what would it mean to have more of these things, or to have them, if this isn't that? How would they differ, objectively and subjectively?

Can someone show me, or prove to me that there is, a further, real reality where real people really decide to eat real apples? Failing that, I think you may as well say 'This is all we know. It's all real. We really decide to eat real apples'. OK? Imagine being Mario in a Nintendo game. Is a 1up real? Yes! It is as real as you are! And what else do you know? What can you compare your universe with? Of course, poor Mario is not really real, not really free, but who would be in the privileged position to show us this? Until such a time as that standpoint is shown to exist, I think that we can, or may as well, define a self-contained universe and the contents of that universe, all of which obey the laws of that universe, as being real in the eyes of its beholders, as real as they feel themselves to be, as real as they feel themselves free to feel. The rabbit hole stops here. Which is to say, there isn't one. And if there was, or if one is required in your imagination for these things to really exist, then how long could this rabbit hole turn out to be? The Matrix is another Matrix? Ad infinitum.

So what have I said, yes it's an illusion, but it being an illusion is probably an illusion? Hell yeah.

*What is Hofstadter's 'real' marble when the doppleganger is the 'I'?