Welcome back, Fiends! We find ourselves pulling once more into the Liminal Waystation. We chose to be here, made a series of decisions that led us to where we now sit. Or did we?
It’s time to explore a new liminal space.
The space
Between Free Will and Determinism
Is freedom exhilarating or frightening? Does it make you anxious or serene? If you’re like me, it’s a bit of both. Freedom is both a presence and an absence, an opportunity and a lack of barriers. This makes it difficult to pin it down as a concept. But let’s take a stab at it.
Freedom. What’s that?
Free will is broadly defined as, “the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one’s own discretion.
A more nuanced definition notes that free will is, “the supposed power or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe”
We are not directed or determined but rather direct and determine ourselves and what we do or do not do.
It’s a nice thought. Unfortunately, not everyone is onboard with it.
A growing group of philosophers, physicists, biologists, and neuroscientists argues that free will cannot exist. We do not consciously choose every action. Doing so would be prohibitively difficult and time-consuming, a truth supported by neuroimaging. You have to admit – it’s a little bit of a relief not to have manage all the things.
In a recent article in The Guardian, Oliver Burkeman writes that,
Arguments against free will go back millennia, but the latest resurgence of scepticism has been driven by advances in neuroscience during the past few decades. Now that it’s possible to observe – thanks to neuroimaging – the physical brain activity associated with our decisions, it’s easier to think of those decisions as just another part of the mechanics of the material universe, in which “free will” plays no role. And from the 1980s onwards, various specific neuroscientific findings have offered troubling clues that our so-called free choices might actually originate in our brains several milliseconds, or even much longer, before we’re first aware of even thinking of them.
The evidence is mounting against the case of our determining ourselves and making our own decisions. So, supposing that we don’t have free will, do we have responsibility? Why care about our actions if we aren’t in control of them?
Determinism is Free Will’s equally frightening counterpart. It offers a kind of safety from thinking about our actions too deeply and holds that we are the result of forces and processes outside our control. Our actions are inevitable and always will be. An article in Britannica notes,
Determinism, in philosophy and science, the thesis that all events in the universe, including human decisions and actions, are causally inevitable. Determinism entails that, in a situation in which a person makes a certain decision or performs a certain action, it is impossible that he or she could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did.
But, just as light and dark have more in common than one might imagine, each working to define the parameters of the other, free will and determinism are the extreme endpoints of a liminal space in which we are becoming. More determined in some cases…less constrained in others. Either extreme feels like losing something invaluable – our selves. We are not responsible for everything. Our brains take shortcuts. Our decisions are the result of processes, but we can disrupt habit and forge new pathways if we dare to be engaged, present, and mindful.
Certain scenarios will require less freedom. Sometimes we will asked to navigate through so much freedom that it will feel like a hindrance.
It’s time to call a truce.
Maybe we are heavily influenced rather than determined.
At any rate, we still have volition.
Simply defined, volition is the faculty or power of using one’s will.
You’ll note that the word free is not featured in the definition.
Volition
Volition does not suggest where will comes from, simply that we exercise it in some way. While free will is up for debate, we all have volition. We should be responsible for our actions even if it means coming to understand the decision-making process and sitting with our choice before acting if the situation allows for it. We are responsible for establishing and maintaining better habits and inclinations. We don’t decide everything, just like we don’t read or see everything. We are limited by our physical apparatus and the huge amount of data we have to sift through. We occupy the strange liminal space between the Determinant and Determined. We act upon one another and our world, but the delay in processing means that it’s a bit like receiving commands from a higher-up; only that higher-up is also a part of ourselves.
It’s all very complicated. All we can do is keep on swimming and hope the current’s been determined to be in our favor.
Book Recommendation
Head Full of Ghosts
by Paul Tremblay
Head Full of Ghosts is a great foray into the line between free will and determinism and the liminal space between the two. Is the possessed girl at the center of the story truly possessed? Mentally ill? Faking it? Does her family allow her exorcism to be taped to get the word out or because they are so financially desperate? Can we say that free will truly exists under such constraints?
There’s nothing like a good possession tale to reignite the debate about free will and what it means to be determined.
Description:
The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia.
To her parents’ despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie’s descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help. Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession. He also contacts a production company that is eager to document the Barretts’ plight. With John, Marjorie’s father, out of work for more than a year and the medical bills looming, the family agrees to be filmed, and soon find themselves the unwitting stars of The Possession, a hit reality television show. When events in the Barrett household explode in tragedy, the show and the shocking incidents it captures become the stuff of urban legend.
Check it out today!
Writing Exercise
Think about the last “decision you made.” Now, recast that decision not as a thing you chose, but as a thing you were somehow determined to do. What caused you to act as you did?
