Do you think free will can coexist with cause and effect? Why or why not?

Question

I was thinking that free will is just a product of consciousness, since we don't have the ability to know all the causes that produce an effect. But I could be wrong. What are your thoughts?

Answer 1

I don't see why they could not coexist. Our decisions are the cause and each cause has its effect. In turn, our decisions are effects of certain causes. But those causes don't necessarily have to be found outside ourselves. They can be seen as interior causes.

Answer 2

Cause and effect exist without our participation. However, we have a choice to participate. For instance, we know that if we steal, there are specific consequences, or effects. Those effects are existing whether we steal or not. If we choose to participate in the effects, then we have chosen to enjoy those consequences. We may get caught, go to jail, lose our status, home, etc.. We may not know all of the effects of our choices, but each choice comes with a predetermined package, or effect. This is the law of karma: action and reaction; cause and effect; enjoyment and suffering. We have limited knowledge of the causes and effects. We may choose to give some stranger some charity in the form of money, and our limited knowledge tells us that we have provided a good service to mankind. But we cannot know what that stranger will do with the money, so we have limited knowledge of the effects, and our lack of knowledge does not determine the effect. The person may go buy some liquor with the money, and then get into a car and run over your child, and therefore the effect of our charity is not good. Sometimes, we can only know the effect after the fact, and even then, we may still have limited knowledge. Free will simply means that we can choose to participate.

Answer 3

Cause and effect, or Determinism, is all there is. It IS often too complex to grasp. But "free will" is just an illusion.

Its greatest value lies in its use for justifying our (supposed) relationship with, or need for, God.

It gets complicated, but without free will, there's not much (any) need for us to dwell on God. I'll try to explain it briefly.

If determinism were accepted by religious leaders, then how God has put things would be part of cause and effect and everything we do (including seemingly "evil" things) would be exactly as God planned, and there would be no reason (or way) to be good, or better. But the leaders of any religion want to influence behavior. Therefore, it must be possible to "freely" choose to do things that are "against" God's will. The same freedom, allows the religious leaders and writings to then direct us by action of "free will" to do what they (and God, who we can defy) actually want us to do.

Free will is simply our ability to imagine making different choices among alternatives. However, in "real" life you only get to pick one thing (at a time). With close scrutiny, free will requires that you be able to chose at least 2 mutually exclusive alternatives SIMULTANEOUSLY. This however, is impossible. Therefore, the concept of free will exists only in the world of "what ifs" but not in actuality. It is a useful tool for considering (imagining) the future before you get there - and picking the best course, from the information you have.

Answer 4

The problem with the question of free will is that it's bogged down in various other ideas which may or may not exist.

Let's start with the whole idea of 'free will'. What is free will? How do you know if you have it or not? This question alone has been the subject of copious debate. One definition has it that if you were free willed you COULD choose a different option given a repetition of a circumstance. It doesn't say that you would (you could choose the same thing over and over and still be free willed), nor does it say how, exactly, to provide an identical circumstance - some people argue that such a thing is impossible.

And that's not even including the possibility of Schrödinger's past and any number of other assumptions necessary to keep the idea going.

The bottom line is that I think the WHOLE CONCEPT of free will is too vague and devoid of descriptive power to have much relevance to anything whatsoever. Let's instead talk about something else - ethics. (Hang on. You'll see where I'm going here.)

There can be little doubt that plants adapt to changes in their environment. They make decisions, whether it is at a biochemical level or further up. Animal decision-making is complex enough to actually get the term 'behaviour' applied to it, and humans may be the most varied of all.

A human child can learn lots of stuff and usually does! But the level of decision-making a child possesses is primitive compared to an adult. One of the primary differences is in not only in deciding one course of action over another, but is a branch or two up, deciding one kind of decision over another or one method of decision making over another. Children do things because they should, but adults can ask whether those 'shoulds' are right or not.

This, I think, is a better vantage point to measure something that you may choose to call 'free will' if you like (I usually call it 'adulthood'; something quite separate from 'maturity'). To draw an example from another species, computers execute programs, but never choose which programs to execute. They are like children - capable of learning a lot and making decisions, but not true moral decisions about right and wrong. Likewise, an adult is given materials from his environment and genetics and may choose among those materials for behaviours, or may choose to find or invent new systems. This is something we observe all the time.

Are those choices limited by environment and genetics, by the various causes which have effects on a person? Of course. Everything is. Are they completely determined by them? I'll leave that for you to decide for yourself.

Answer 5

I believe that they are very much dependent on each other. People have free will to make their own decisions about things. And these decisions are the cause, and they have an effect. That's a very simple thing, though. When you think about it more, how do you make decisions? Some past influences (causes) will help you make decisions (effect). So, is that really free will? Or are decisions just all part of cause and effect?

Answer 6

There is much in life that seems to be a paradox, this being part of that category. Yes--you are responsible for your actions because you have free will; and at the same time there are things that will happen to you as the result of others actions, these being the "effect" of their causal action.
While you can choose a great many actions, you cannot choose the effect they will have.

Answer 7

Depends on how "hard lined" your determinism is. If you're a "soft" determinist then yes, otherwise no. Look up determinism in wickipedea or the Internet encylopedia of Philosophy.