Free Will: Kick it out

Tonight is Yalda Night, the longest night of the Persian year. I’m far from my parents; they are in Karaj. I am alone at home. My wife and daughter have gone to her mother’s house. So now that I’m alone, I thought I’d write a bit about my philosophical thoughts. Doing this excites me and turns the bitterness of this night into the sweetness of knowledge and awareness.

What is Free Will?

Well, tonight’s topic is free will. Do humans have free will? Should we consider humans to have free will? I’ve talked about this silly idea (free will) before. When we look at a person’s life, how many of their decisions are truly conscious? Every morning when I go to work, I decide to wear a warm shirt because it’s winter. I tell myself, “Ali, put on enough clothes so you don’t freeze, because my company still doesn’t have a heater. Amazing, right?” But anyway, when I make a conscious decision, thousands of unconscious decisions are happening simultaneously. How I step with each foo?, what I say to the taxi driver, and which words I choose—respectful, harsh, or neutral—are all decisions I make without conscious thought. So, is talking about free will enough?!

We don’t have free will. Free will is a mental capacity that helps us gain control over unconscious drives. This means things are essentially unconscious. Now, let’s talk a little about the impact of free will on life. If we accept free will and believe in it, our expectations from ourselves and others will increase. However, if we believe in determinism, we attribute bad behavior of others to social and cultural structures, not to the individual. So, when we believe in free will, we can hold individuals accountable, expect them to have control over their life and decisions. But when we believe in determinism, we cannot judge the individual and instead place the blame on the social and cultural structures. If we are foolishly religious, we talk about destiny and the power of God. Fine?! It’s clear now what free will is, right? Free will is a belief. Like faith. It can influence our lives. Free will is a modernist hypothesis. Without free will, why should a person vote? Yes! They vote and choose their preferred government because (we assume) they have free will. So, free will was one of the main hypotheses of modern philosophy. Fine, but this idea doesn’t align with the investigations we’ve done earlier.

This means that if I’m a researcher, I can’t believe in free will. Or at least I must believe in it just in my daily life area to have the motivation to participate in voting and forming my prefer government. But what about scientific studies? Should I believe in free will there too? My friends, I tell you that the assumption of free will, or rather the presumption of free will, has harmed science in recent centuries. I’m talking about the humanities. Because it has caused researchers to always study humans outside the cause-and-effect chain. In this situation, humans are not discovered, their behavior is unpredictable because there is always an unquantifiable variable assumed to be free will. So what should we do? I think we should draw a border between them. In the field of humanities, free will should be discarded. But in daily life, free will should be taught as a life style, so people continue to adhere to democracy. Otherwise, people will once again fall into the hands of bloodthirsty, authoritarian regimes.

What Should we do next?

So, if you want to conduct a scientific research, assume that humans do not have free will. That means, any behavior from them, go and find the cause-and-effect relationship. I’ll explain later how to discover this cause-and-effect relationship, but for now, I’ll say that you should always look at what’s behind human behavior. Thoughts and actions always stem from something prior.

By the way, before I forget to mention, all of us have the unconscious presumption of free will, but we must confront it. When we get angry with someone and curse them, it’s because we assume they have free will. We believe they have created their own behavior and thoughts. Until the next writing, goodbye.