Free Will and Determinism

Do human beings have freewill?

There seems to be an incompatibility between our belief in human autonomy and the principle of causality.

We believe human beings are autonomous at least some of the time.

'We' are all 'scientists' in the sense that the culture we belong to is structured by science - i.e. is a 'scientific' culture.

As 'scientists' in this sense, we automatically focus on the causes of things that happen, rather than eg regarding them as having meaning and being interested in that.

Another possibility our culture does not encourage us to pursue is to regard things that happen in the physical universe as rewards or punishments.

A strong way of putting this focus on causes is to say we seem committed to the idea that nothing happens without a cause (the 'Principle of Causality').

"An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis: to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes."

Laplace (1749-1827)

I take this quotation from Nagel,The Structure of Science, London, Routledge, 1961, p.281, footnote.

This implies that everything that human beings do is fixed beforehand - because the things that we do are of course 'happenings' and so must have causes - which in turn must have causes, and so on ad infinitum.

The next few sessions are devoted to investigating this apparent clash between belief in human autonomy and belief in the principle of causality.