Free Will

Discussion

The Three Crises for Free Will

Albert Yuan:

"The question of free will has survived three major crises in Western intellectual history, each one threatening to extinguish it entirely.

The first was in ancient Greece, roughly 2,500 years ago, when philosophers like Democritus and Leucippus looked at the world with admirable rigor and concluded that everything — atoms bouncing in a void, future events — was already determined. The first crack: determinism. The second crack: the causal chain. Your choice of breakfast traces back not to you but to your caffeine dependency, which traces to your addiction-prone neurobiology, which traces to your parents, which traces to the emergence of mammals, which traces to the birth of the solar system. At some point, the causal thread escapes your body entirely.

The second crisis emerged with monotheism. If God is omniscient and omnipotent, in what sense are human choices genuinely free? St. Augustine answered with characteristic ingenuity: God gave us the freedom to choose good, but our ancestors squandered it in the Garden of Eden. Thomas Aquinas deepened the synthesis, positioning God as the “first cause” and human rational agency as a “second cause” — not in conflict, but nested. For centuries, this reconciliation held.

The third crisis is the one we are still living through, and it is the most democratized of the three. It began with Newton, accelerated through Darwin and has now arrived, via neuroscience, in everyone’s living room. The physicist showed us a clockwork universe. The biologist showed us that organisms are the undesigned products of genetic mutation and natural selection. And neuroscience — particularly one elegantly simple experiment — showed us something that feels, to many people, like the final blow."

(https://www.noemamag.com/the-nature-of-free-will-in-the-age-of-ai/?)