This morning I was rewatching the “meme” speech from metal gear rising revengence, which - while silly to most of us due to the modern connotation of the word “meme”, is actually a pretty good introduction to the concept of a self-spreading idea. Monsoon says many things, but his comment of “free will is a myth” got me thinking again about the whole concept of determinism vs free will.

To those who don’t know of this debate, I’ll give a quick rundown:

• Free will is the belief that conscious beings can make decisions without outside coercion. When I go to buy ice cream, it wasn’t because god made me buy ice cream, but because I freely chose to do so.

• Determinism is the belief that every event that happens occurs because of a prior event that caused it: if a rock falls then something pushed it, it didn’t just fall for no reason. Following that we can argue that because everything follows what caused it, that it is possible (though improbable) to predict whatever event you want in the future by taking the events currently happening and deducing what they’ll cause next. As such, it can be said that every event since the big-bang could have been foreseen, and therefore every event that happens is predetermined.

• Because determinism states that everything can be foreseen, it can be argued that we never really make decisions because they are all predetermined events, and that we could not have chosen otherwise.

This is a discussion that’s gone back to ancient greece with no real answer in sight, but I am not sure these two ideas are necessarily in conflict. It’s a hidden assumption here, but… can we have free will with determinism? I think we can.

A decision made by a conscious being means that this being considers what it knows and tries to come up with what it believes to be the best course of action. If we were to take a human being, clone them 30 times, and ask all 30 a question before they’ve had enough time to start meaningfully changing from their creation as clones, we’d get the exact same answer 30 times because all 30 beings have the same information and beliefs. All of these clones have “free will” as we traditionally understand it, but it’s still predetermined in a sense.

Free will states that we are able to come to conclusions on our own, but our conclusions are still “predetermined” based on what we know and believe, so how does determinism affect that thought process any more than usual? If anything, if we believe the universe is not deterministic and god “plays dice” in a sense, I’d argue that’s even less compatible with free will because it means that we can make decisions that we don’t actually believe in just because the universe decided to fuck with us.

Considering this is an argument that’s been going on since antiquity I’m sure this isn’t a particularly groundbreaking thought¹, but hey, this is my blog and I get to post what I want on it.