This is me chipping in to what's known as the Free Will Debate, which is kind of a big deal in philosophy circles and for people generally when it is brought to their attention. Though the subject is usually avoided. In part because it is a weighty subject that many people have spoken and written on, from various perspectives and backgrounds, throughout human history and probably long before written history. But mostly because people in general either believe or like to believe that they have free will and academics in general ascribe to positions such as compatibilism or determinism that claim otherwise. It can become awkward and people tend to get emotional when the conflict becomes apparent.

    Academics are heavily invested in existing knowledge and in having new ideas or work that either adds to existing knowledge or adequately disproves existing knowledge in such a way that in turn adds to existing knowledge. In many cases this can be good, but it also leads to what I will call trapped scholasticism for the sake of convenience. Trapped scholasticism (as I am calling it) is the problem that some academics come to accept that the vast tower of knowledge that they are surrounded with for most of their lives is more real than reality itself. So only new contributions that adhere to accepted norms are considered and only arguments which account for all other arguments are heard and so on. But the foundational norms of an argument or debate that are disjointed from reality (either from inception or having become so over time) may irretrievably taint that debate and remove any possibility of arriving at a true position.

    Thus it is with the free will debate. Which started out as an argument between determinism and free will, with determinists saying that the material world is all cause and effect and so are people, so free will is an illusion. Free will proponents tend to rely heavily on intuition and received (religious) wisdom with the claim that human will precedes the material and thus is not bound by material determinism. And so on—there are many different positions and many wrinkles. For this post I will mostly be concerned with advancing what I think of as a fresh position and so am only giving the briefest acknowledgment of the different positions in the ongoing debate.

    The third position, and the one that is generally accepted by academics in one form or another, being compatibilism. Which has many variations but the basic claim is that determinism and free will are both true and thus are compatible because they do not preclude one another. This may be arrived at by defining free will in purely materialistic (watered down) terms or by splitting distinctions between metaphysical causation and moral culpability or by various other complex academic maneuvers. As far as I can tell, compatibilism does not actually solve the problem so much as it arrives at the conclusion that there was no problem in the first place. Which permits people to move on to other matters with the feeling that the debate has been resolved. As the compatibilists get to their conclusions by bringing in and integrating various other bits of accepted knowledge, it seems to me that compatibilism is a very trapped scholastic conclusion. And also technically a form of determinism.

    And one that I consider to be fundamentally wrong, because it is patently obvious to the individual consciousness that some freedom of will, of choice, exists. I choose to move my arm, and it moves. I make choices in my life and I suffer consequences or reap rewards. And yet much of human behavior may be seen as determined by causal factors. Even fundamentally in the brain itself, which is composed of material elements. I do have a possible solution to propose to this conundrum, but it is not that the two sides are compatible. Not that free will is an illusion or that it exists only in watered down form. Rather, that the two sides of the debate depict opposing forces that are in conflict within the individual and that either force may manifest (win) in a given moment.

    So, human beings (at least) are capable of free will through effort and by utilizing intrinsic faculties, but they do not always choose to attempt such or may fail to succeed in exercising that freedom (that ability). Call it a sort of structure possible within an individual by which truly free choices may be attained, but in many cases people fail to develop parts of the structure adequately or for some reason part of the structure is damaged or destroyed. Or a person may simply fail to utilize their innate capability at a given time or even throughout their life. These failures are pointed to by determinists as proof that free will is an illusion and does not actually exist, but this is not the case. It is simply the triumph of causal forces over free will capacities (so to speak).

     Determinism rests on an outdated logic derived from the position that everything is material and so everything is bound by cause and effect. However, matter is but stable energy. I think that it is more useful and also arrives at a better logic to take the position that everything is fields and field interaction (loosely translated from physics terms). All logics are limited and thus flawed, but traditional logic is derived from (or directly inspired) Newtonian physics. And is considered to be clearly superior over classical logics that were derived from the scientific understanding of the classical era. But Newtonian physics has been superseded by further advances in scientific understanding (it remains useful but we know it is not true). Yet traditional logics have not been superseded by any logics derived from those advances.

    I will not attempt a full logic derived from field theory (in this blog), but think that it is useful to call upon some aspects of that science in considering the free will debate. Specifically that material interactions are in fact field interactions, and that biological entities produce living fields of energy that interact in a feedback manner with the physical cells of the body. The human brain in particular produces an extremely complex interacting series of fields which together form into a driving force of the total body field, and the total body, of a human. It seems to me that the mind, and the consciousness, takes place not in the cells of the brain but rather in this conjoined field.

    Which enables a potential break from the causal factors of material interaction. So forces which we can say are reliably deterministic in such matters as dropping apples from trees, throwing a baseball, or driving a car and that can be reliably solved by Newtonian logic, are not necessarily determining factors in matters of the human will. Those forces still exist, as such, but there also exists at least the potential for countervailing forces. The body might produce the field (the mind) at least initially and feed into it in order to keep it extant, but the field itself is enduring and constant. More constant than the components of the body, as individual cells are replaced over time. The field of the living mind endures in constant dynamic life (barring total disruption) throughout the life of a person (I do not consider that it ends during sleep or unconsciousness). It has as much or more influence upon the physical body as the physical body has upon it.

    So, through utilizing such faculties as the imagination and the force of combined energetic field influence (often simply called the will), the living mind may exert countervailing force upon material factors. This effect is subtle, and I am not suggesting here such things as telekinesis, but the causal forces that impinge on the living brain are also very subtle and it seems likely to be the case that such force is sufficient to alter them in subtle ways and thus alter causal chains.

    This blog is meant as a mere foundational proposal for a different way of thinking about the free will debate, so I will not attempt to further develop the argument, but there is one very important point still worth noting.

    All such capacities reside in the mind and consciousness themselves (whatever distinctions there may be between those two concepts) and thus any factor that changes the mind also affects the capacity of the mind to exert the will. Such as belief. So for example, if someone believes that they do not have actual free will and that it is an illusion that is necessary to enable good moral decisions, they will be much less likely to attempt to exert their will upon themselves and so to alter outcomes. Such a belief does tend to lead to good moral choices simply because it reduces any effect of willfulness and most people have been trained to do the right thing—which is convenient for the rest of us—but that belief structure erodes the will and the very capacity for free choices.
    So too with many other beliefs. If a person does not believe that they are capable of true creativity, through use of their imaginative faculty and as empowered by a living independent will, they are much less likely to even be able to strike out on their own instead of simply picking from some offered set of alternatives. The mind, and thus its capabilities, is shaped by accepted beliefs. This and other purely mental factors (in a healthy human individual) represent much more significant impedances to the capacity for free choice than do purely mechanistic causal factors.

    -Joseph Jones, 27 May 2021
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