How can freewill and causality both exist?

Question

Freewill is not the limited ability to make a decision, it's the ability to make ANY decision and to make a decision without a catalyst. The only act of freewill is an unconcious decision since the world shapes our conscious. What's so complicated about it? You say you have a choice because of freewill, but you did not pull your conscious out a magic hat, it was forced on you. If I never had the ability to choose the ability to choose then that is not freewill.

Answer 1

The best explanation I have heard is that causality is only relevant when a determinate link can be established, and it is not possible to establish an ULTIMATE determinate link because of the implicit uncertainty embodied in the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. At some point, however small -- such as the quantum level -- there is a statistical element. At very small scales, Newtonian mechanics, which is based on causality, becomes statistical mechanics, then quantum mechanics. We start dealing not with particles with definite trajectories, but with probability waves.

Although physicists such as David Bohm have argued forcibly for the deterministic school of thought (cf. Bohm's book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order), it's pretty much taken for granted that a level of uncertainty exists, upon which ultimate causality cannot be determined. If only partial causality can be determined, then free will -- or at the very least, uncertainty -- must co-exist with causality.

One assumes that free will is one of the effects / implications of uncertainty.

Answer 2

If by being truly free you believe that you can deny your own existance then causality is a product of free will and vice versa. You are the cause of your free will and the cause of your causality and you ar truly free to do so because you do not exist. You are everything and nothing at the same time. In short, you are God, or at least Godlike for those who take this literally. Think geometrically. You are a point in the phenomenal plane but a form in the nominal plane. You are a person and you are an idea or soul. While phenomenally you may have limitations, nominally you have none. You are multi dimensional. Your problem is that you are thinking linear, right and wrong, good and bad, possible and impossible. Most things in life are this or something else, not this or that. You seem to be stuck with the concept of time and the reality that an action can be both free will and causality based on how you look at it in time. Again you are a point in the phenomenal plane but a form in the nominal plane, and as such time will effect your perspective in the phenomenal plane but in the nominal plane there is no truth, only fact and the fact is that something is new, it exists, accept it. My terms may be confusing or slightly off but the ideas are there. Glean from them what you will.

Answer 3

How is freewill a denial for causality? How could freewill negate reality. You say 'Freewill is not the limited ability to make a decision' and with that you define freewill as infinite, without identified limit, but limits are obvious to those who have good sense. You do not differentiate good decision from bad, so in your mind freewill is the power to 'make' ANY decision and any from the infinite is infinity. You have ego but no anti-ego. You are one-sided.

Answer 4

Those are big ifs. Maybe we chose to do this life thing, and it meant not remembering who we really are while we are living.
Causality theory presumes time is what we perceive it to be. In reality, there is nothing that we sense that has not already happened by the time we sense it. Therefore we are continuously acknowledging what has happened in the past. This gives the perception of predetermination, however, each choice we make alters what is possible to occur, and as it occurs, we view it only afterwards. In order to make any progress towards understanding the truth about causality, we must first eliminate what is false about our understanding of time.

Answer 5

freewill is not freedom from causality, but the freedom of us being the cause, ie freedom of our choosing to be free from coercion by others - we are caused by other things, so we are not ultimate causes -

but we increase our activeness and decrease our passiveness by increasing knowledge of causation paths or strings - the more we know about causal paths, the closer we are to being perfectly active, ie originators, causes, and the further we are from being passive, ie caused by other things - ie, when we dont know a cause is acting on us, we cannot choose whether to be influenced by it

that we have free choice is a fiction generated by the imagination - our concept of freewill derives from our imagining ourselves contemplating the alternatives - but in this imagination of ourselves in the act of choosing, there is no remembering or contemplating the causal chains which create our choice

free will is selfcontradictory - if i choose, choice is an event, and must have a cause - therefore there cannot be a choosing without causation - no causation, no choice is made - so freedom from causation necessitates no choosing - no cue-thrust, no billiard ball movement

so the idea of freewill is caused by our inevitable ignorance or ignoring or forgetting of the causal chain that causes the choice - we will always believe in freewill, because we will always be ignorant or ignoring of the full causation chain or chains - which ultimately involves the whole universe

in our rational theoretical brain we know that every event [including choosing] has to have a cause - but in our imagination, we continue to see ourselves choosing - we say i could have chosen the alternative - but 'could' merely means: i do not know that i couldnt have chosen the other - we assume that could means: i was, able [ie, free] to choose the other - 'i could have chosen the other' doesnt mean 'i was able to choose the other', it means only 'i am ignorant of the cause that i couldnt choose the other' - ie, it seems to me i am free, but only because i am partially blind, not because my freedom is real

all our concepts are infected with imagination, with 'bodying forth in forms the things unknown', as shakespeare says - eg, we say god is love - this shows that our concepts of god and love differ and this says that our having different concepts of god and love is wrong, this is saying that our concepts of god and love should be the same

ie, that our ignorance has added 'flavours' [connotations] to our concepts, which have made the same thing seem two things - either our concept of god or our concept of love or both are wrong

like the blind men who feel the elephant and form different limited ideas of the elephant - forgetting that the elephant might be like a palmleaf [an ear] and like a column [a leg] and like a snake [trunk] and like a shower of sh*t

freewill is a necessary false concept as long as we have limited consciousnesses of the details of the whole universe

'could' sometimes doesnt mean 'able', it only means 'dont know that i am unable'

freewill means something like: i am able to choose either - but i am in fact unable to choose either, for one, because i can only choose one

to prove that i can choose either, i have to choose both in exactly the same conditions - which is impossible - i can bring forward twins who have been reared identically, and perhaps they will choose differently, but i can always say that it is unprovable that they were identical - heredity was different, rearing was not identical -

or i can have the same person choosing in same circumstances, and perhaps the person will choose differently, but again, it is unprovable that circumstances were identical

so freewill is at least unproveable - as well as nonfreewill following from causation

but i am free insofar as i can say that the causation was me - but i can only say that relatively, not absolutely, since 'me' is caused by 'notme' - unless i am all

the doctrine of freewill is contradicted by the doctrine of hell - i certainly am not free if i am under the coercion of threat of hell

[amusing point: no christian believes in hell, because they would act very differently if they did - they would have a confessor and absolver strapped to their back, and they would infinitely fear: death before they had time to confess - since the punishment is infinite]

Answer 6

meh....

free will is merely a guise to convince ourselves that we have some control over the events and happenings surrounding us.

i could even doubt that there are even such a thing as 'unconscious decisions' since technically our options are limited (even on the subconscious level).

i seriously think you've answered your own question... and any attempt to wriggle out of it (by most) is rather silly.

good job

Answer 7

Try not to dichotomise the two; then think about.