Free Will: A Natural or a Social Phenomenon?
摘要
The penultimate chapter probes into the important question of free will in a world of determinism or one that is entirely governed by natural laws. The existence of free will is part of the manifest image as an indispensable feature of human beings as we want to ascribe to them responsibility with respect to acting and thinking in relation to judiciary laws and moral obligations. Kant emphatically acknowledged this issue, but the scientific image at his time was fully deterministic. After the discovery of indeterminism in quantum mechanics, some scientists and philosophers have invoked quantum mechanics to explain how free will is possible. There are, however, good reasons to think that the indeterminism of quantum systems is not operating between neurons even if we take decoherence into consideration. How they operate is not necessarily deterministically, but this sort of indeterminism has nothing to do with quantum indeterminism but owes its existence to the huge variations in the initial conditions of the brain processes. In this chapter, I discuss various contributions for or against people having free will. My approach to free will is that it is not a metaphysical concept. The ascription of free will is a consequence of how we have chosen to describe an empirical fact about humans and some other animals according to which we can choose between different possible actions. We have strong introspective evidence from ourselves and by watching others that we can choose between alternatives and therefore select the one action we think serves us best with respect to our short-term needs or long-term needs.