Free Will

Let’s say you’re in the mood for an ice cream tonight. You get dressed, get in your car, and head out to the local spot on the corner near your house. This ice cream shop just happens to have only two choices; chocolate and vanilla. Before this day, you came to this same ice cream shop on 4 different occasions. The first time you came you got chocolate ice cream. The second time you came you decided you wanted to try their vanilla, so you did and although it was one of the best vanilla ice creams you have ever had, you just didn’t like it as much as the chocolate. So the third and fourth time you chose chocolate both times and loved every single bite of it. Now the question does not even cross your mind of which flavor to pick as you drive over to the shop. Obviously you will pick chocolate! In fact, you have been thinking about the taste of the chocolate ice cream for the past few hours and can’t wait until it’s in your hands. So you get to the shop and as you walk in you catch a glimpse of the big sign across the front door announcing the brand new flavor, mint chocolate chip! Now confronted with this monumental choice, you freeze for a second weighing the options in front of you. On one hand, you have been waiting all afternoon for the flavor of this particular shop's chocolate ice cream. On the other hand, mint chocolate chip is your all time favorite flavor and you know it must be good because of this shop's track record. As you get to the front of the line you decide to go with your gut. You pick mint chocolate. The excitement of the new flavor outweighed your excitement for chocolate and you decided to be a bit adventurous tonight. Maybe you got lucky or maybe this ice cream shop is simply the best but looking back at your choice after the fact, you are extremely happy with your decision. The excitement soon fades however, as with most choices we make we soon forget about the entire process and chock it up in our memories as a successful ice cream outing and nothing more. So you move on.

Of course the question we’re all thinking throughout this story is did you have any real choice in picking out your ice cream flavor? Or was every decision you made nothing but neurons firing In your brain in reaction to stimuli and processed through a combination of your genetics, brain chemistry, and memories. To put it simply, did you have any free will in your choice that day?

The principles of determinism are quite easy to follow in examples such as this. Within the setup of the story, we find that you have tried vanilla before and realized you didn’t like it as much as chocolate. Not just this, you also loved the chocolate ice cream so much as this shop that you were actively excited to eat it the day of. Call it a sweet tooth or whatever it may be, but something in your genetics or brain chemistry tells you chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla. Others may feel different. There exists a world where you tried the vanilla first and loved it as much as you loved the chocolate. Then when you tried the chocolate you enjoyed it but it just wasn’t the same. For you though, the very existence of chocolate ice cream forms a preference within your brain for that choice. This preference persists through each time you decide to go to that shop and even the thought of getting ice cream begins to trigger the preference for chocolate somewhat subconsciously. As the story states, you did not even think of the decision between vanilla and chocolate on your way over to the shop, you simply expected to be enjoying chocolate ice cream when you made your purchase. So at the moment the server asks what flavor you want, could you have chosen otherwise? determinism in this case would suggest no. Everything that led you to that point in a sense made the decision for you. Philosophers argue that every decision you make falls into one of two camps. You’re either forced to make the decision, or you want to make the decision. If you're forced to make the decision, then obviously you have no control and have no free will in the matter. If you want to make the decision, well that’s where determinism plays in. As we already laid out, the preference for chocolate ice cream was both a genetic predisposition you seemed to have before even trying the flavor, and also a tested conclusion you came to after trying both chocolate and vanilla. Therefore it wasn’t really a choice to get chocolate on those days you got chocolate. What about that first day you tried it for the first time? Well that was a random decision you happened to pick your favorite flavor but you had no idea you were doing so. However the same logic can apply here. No doubt there were some factors which acted on that decision, whether genetic or memories from your past which led you to pick chocolate on that first day. Even if you blindly chose, you could have had good luck in the past with making random decisions. In effect, there is always an answer to the choices you make in either your past or your brain chemistry and genetics.

So obviously free will must be a delusion right? If we have no authority over our decisions and everything is just based on the past then how could there be any autonomy? Well, we must make an important distinction here. Determinism makes the claim that all our actions and decisions we make today are directly caused by previous factors, which were caused by the factors before those, and so on until the beginning of the universe. There absolutely exists a continuity about our actions. Each action we take directly follows from previous actions, but there is a very big difference between a continuity of actions and those actions directly caused by previous actions. 

At the same time though, a large difference exists between the actions and events that lead up to a decision, and the act of making the decision itself. Under determinism, the act of making the decision is reduced to a bunch of inputs which much like a machine will simply spit out an output based on those inputs. However, the act of choosing is not so simple. When confronted with a choice, say the first time you made your way to the new ice cream shop, a few things happen in your decision making process. First, you process what it is you have the ability to choose from. In many cases this may represent an abstraction of more complex options, but in this case you can choose either vanilla or chocolate. Once the options are identified, your brain searches through its memories and experiences for all relevant information to help make the decision. This act is purely subconscious and your brain does not explicitly run through memories in their entirety. For the most part, memories from the past are extracted into emotion and feelings regarding the particular stimuli. For example, maybe you had a great date in the past which ended with chocolate ice cream, this positive memory may trigger positive emotions to correlate themselves with that flavor and thus serve as a trigger. When it comes to a food such as ice cream, genetics and preferences also come into play. Memories serve to enhance these by giving us concrete examples of when we tried an option and either liked it or didn’t like it. Similarly with other foods, we constantly sort food in categories based on our memories of eating them. We all have our favorite foods, foods we enjoy but don’t love, foods we hate. Our genetic preferences matter here, but when sorting through the preferences we have already established, the memories of eating these foods often serves as the primary reference. We can remember tasting the food and not liking the flavor, or we can remember eating chocolate ice cream on a hot summer day and feeling refreshed. The experience of eating and enjoying these different foods cements the preferences into our brains and allows us to recall those preferences at a later date. Now at the point of picking between vanilla and chocolate ice cream, all of these preferences and memories play through your brain as you attempt to make the decision. Very similar to a machine, those memories and preferences serve as an input to a function. With determinism, these inputs act as the entire process in making a decision, once the inputs are considered an output is provided based on those inputs alone. 

However humans are not machines. We do not act in a robotic manner in our decision making process. Instead, another phase exists after your brain finds all of the relevant inputs. It is this stage where you have the ability to weigh the importance of the different options ahead of you. In your case, you have been excited for the chocolate ice cream for a while now, but seeing the new option for mint chocolate chip available excites new inputs in your brain you had not considered before. You begin to remember how much you love mint chocolate chip and think of all of the great memories you had with it. No matter the actual decision you choose here, the most important factor is the consideration of both options. Which choice outweighs the other? In this case you abandoned your excitement for chocolate to try out the new flavor, but maybe in another world you decided to try it another time because you were just that excited for chocolate. think of the preferences and memories which serve as the inputs for the decision as evidence in a court case. You are the judge and each choice sits in front of you sharing the evidence for choosing them. After receiving all of the evidence, you have the ability to consider and make your ruling based on that evidence. Very often the decisions are very easy and do not require consideration at all to make a ruling. For example, should I continue driving to work or change direction and go on a cross country road trip? Obviously this question does not even cross your mind most of the time. Maybe one day you were extremely stressed and thought of just disappearing, but you thought better of it quickly and continued on your way. These decisions are very quickly considered and a ruling is very quickly made. However, there absolutely exist cases just like this where someone out there actually decided to go across the country and never returned to their job. They weighed their options and saw the evidence for continuing on and going to work, or abandoning it all and disappearing. After considering the evidence they ruled the best decision would be the latter. However, could they have chosen to forget about these thoughts of disappearing and continued on with their life that day? Determinism would suggest they don’t have any real choice in this. Everything until this point in their life led them to making this decision and there’s nothing they could have done to change that. However, this way of thought completely disregards the actual process of making a decision. It is true that based on the evidence they saw from the inputs they processed, they chose their option. 

The real question here is could they, and could you in decisions in your life, choose the other option? The answer; they absolutely could have, and you absolutely could have, but they never would, and you never would. Unless of course you consciously think about the decision process and actively attempt to pick the worst option according to the evidence, you will always pick the best option. Your brain does not force you to act in this way, but your brain is evolutionarily wired in this way to make the best decision possible. This way of thinking seems to align with determinist ideas, however determinism fails to account for the actual act of choosing. Your past does not determine your future, but it does affect it. Your genetic makeup does not determine who you are, but it does affect it. If your brain is damaged and pushes you towards different interests or values, you may have little control over the changes from the damage, but your choices are not determined from the damage. The important thing to always remember no matter the circumstance is you still do have a choice. You are not a machine which takes in an input and spits out an output. You are a conscious and thinking human being, and no matter how much of your choices are influenced by your past, genetics, or preferences, you can always adapt and choose to change those for the better.