• Question: do you believe we have free will or all our reactions are predetermined?

    Asked by anon-297158 on 16 Jul 2021.
    • Photo: Lisa Newson

      Lisa Newson answered on 1 Jul 2021:

      interesting… so I’m going to say on the surface free will… but I’m going to go brian cox style here…

      so stay with me….

      We get our light (to see things) from the sun.
      The sun is 152.09million KM away from earth.
      The light emitted from the sun takes 8 minutes 20 seconds to travel to earth.
      Therefore technically time in the present as we know it, is in real time- 8 minutes in the past.

      as you are reading this now, actually 8 minutes ago the light was produced by the sun

      – so based on this our current time is technically the past. So with this in mind, perhaps our we are predetermined (a bit).

    • Photo: Naomi Heffer

      Naomi Heffer answered on 1 Jul 2021:

      I think we have a degree of autonomy over all of our actions, but how easy we find it to control and direct our actions will depend on a whole host of background factors – the environment we find ourselves in, our current levels of stress, even our genetics!

    • Photo: Samantha Harrison

      Samantha Harrison answered on 1 Jul 2021:

      I think we have the ability to choose our reactions/behaviours, but some predetermined factors may affect the choices we make. Such as our home environment, stress, genetics, our heritage/background, subconscious information, biological factors

      But who knows, perhaps I was always predetermined to type that response! 😱

    • Photo: Gustav Markkula

      Gustav Markkula answered on 1 Jul 2021:

      I think like some philosophers of mind, who would say that yes all our reactions may very well be predetermined physically, but we can still sensibly say that individuals have free will, because individuals still make decisions, based on processes in their brains like weighing pros/cons, exercising impulse control, thinking about possible impacts of the decisions, and so on, which are all aspects of what we would typically call free will. Those processes may be predetermined, but that doesn’t really make any practical difference to anything.

    • Photo: Ola Demkowicz

      Ola Demkowicz answered on 1 Jul 2021:

      This is a fantastic question and one with so many different schools of thought. My two pence: a lot of what we “choose” to do is based on an already narrow pool of options, that have been whittled down based on a number of factors. So, whether or not we choose to do something is influenced by things including:
      – Our evolutionary instincts – that is, what our brain tells us is and isn’t safe based on the things that kept us going through natural selection to date
      – Within that, social norms – we’re inherently social creatures, and the society and levels of culture we are in dictate what is and isn’t “appropriate”. We are strongly bound by that a lot of the time, even when we don’t realise it.
      – The specific psychological and environmental factors that shape who “we” are – our personality, our values, the resources available to us. We usually don’t exactly choose those, but they heavily influence the things we can and can’t imagine or choose even if we could.

      So, we do make decisions, but ultimately the things that influence what we can think to actually do and then our ability to do them is already mostly predetermined. So… is it really free will? Who can say!

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