Getting Back Into Table Tennis

Two of my friends (Carl and David) and I have been having a long email
debate about free will. They believe in it. I don’t.

It’s been going on for multiple years now so I won’t attempt to summarize
here. But recently there has been a sub-debate spawned from a recent post of
mine:
Concepts vs. Convention.

In that post I talk about people being asleep, and I express my wish that
they wake up and become more than animal automatons going through the
motions of life as defined by their ancestors thousands of years ago.

Carl and David are exasperated by this. They see this as a complete
contradiction with my belief that humans lack free will. The particular
portion that drives them crazy is:

Wake up. Don’t sleep. Be human. Be better than the animal you are. And don’t
fall prey to the narrative that it’s endearing for others to conduct their
lives as if they were living 50,000 years ago.

My explanation for this has been simple: you don’t need free will to be
positively (or negatively) affected by inputs from the environment. It’s a
matter of giving a new perspective that can be used in a variable cocktail
for future decision making–just like a chess computer.

Example: if you show someone from a low-income family who doesn’t value
college at all how important college is by hitting them with salary
differences in adult life, lists of successful people who went to college,
taking them to college campuses to show them the girls and the dorms,
etc.–you have changed the inputs into an equation that will take place in
that person’s mind.

Notice that when a poor boy from a broken home in a poor neighborhood gets
involved with the wrong people and makes bad choices–this boy is considered
to some degree divorced from his actions because that’s the environment he
grew up in. “He got involved with the wrong people.” “He never saw how good
life could be outside his neighborhood.” Etc.

Those are valid statements because inputs matter.

And it’s the same for a motivational speech or seminar, or a blog post
challenging one to question their motives in life. Either way, they are
inputs into decision processes, and having good inputs can yield positive
results. People who are never encouraged to challenge why they make the
decisions they do are not likely to do so.

So, I happen to believe that we lack free will. I think that when we go to
make a decision we experience the sensation of making a choice, but that in
fact all the variables that will make up the outcome are outside of our
control, and thus we don’t truly have control over the decision.

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But this has nothing whatsoever to do with whether it’s good for a child to
hear that college is positive. Or that one should question why they behave
in certain ways. Or whether people should be encouraged to be nice to
others. Those are injections into the collective variable stream which are
positive, and it matters not whether the decision mechanism is with or
without freedom. Either way it is likely to improve outcomes.

Let me state it as I did in our email debate:

1. We are, ultimately, on rails. It could be that the rail is being put
   down randomly in front of us, but we’re not the ones putting it down.
   Hence, we are not in control.

2. From the inside of our experience, i.e. as humans experiencing life, we
   are able to respond to stimuli. If we hear a motivational speech we can
   decide to lose weight or pick up painting. We can also read blog posts
   about not being asleep, and decide to question why we do the things we
   do. The fact that our responses to that stimuli are outside of our
   control DOES NOTHING to diminish the fact that we’re able to perceive
   and respond to these inputs.

So yes, you absolutely can both “make choices” as a human responding to
stimuli (that’s what we experience) while simultaneously having no control
over what you will “choose”. There is no contradiction here.

I’m curious as to where any interested readers fall in this debate, but it
may be that I’ve argued too much for my position and not given my opponents
enough stage time. Here again is the crux of their argument: They claim it’s
a contradiction that I say people shouldn’t be blamed for their actions
because we don’t have free will, yet in that blog post I seem to admonish
people for being cogs in a wheel when they have no option to be anything
different.

My response is simple, and very consistent with both the concept of
improvement and a lack of free will: I’m using the post as an input stream
for improvement. So people who perhaps hadn’t heard the idea before, or
hadn’t heard it enough, will perhaps make a better decision next time they
have an opportunity to.

So, to any interested readers, respond below with how you see it:

Poll closed