The Reality of Free Will: A Case for the Genuineness of Freedom

By Dave J Blanchette

The most familiar of experiences is of the conscious self. And it is of the conscious self as a free determinant; it is an entity that consciously decides what it will do.

And the experience is that the freedom that is experienced is authentic in a sense that it is true freedom. The experience is that freedom is as real as other real thing

• Language: English
• Publisher: Freeflight
• Release date: Dec 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9798987406816

Book preview

One

A CASE FOR FREE WILL

The most familiar of all experiences is of what many think of as the conscious self. And it is of the self as the personal self who is conscious and experiencing all one’s experiences. And when a person is awake it is perpetual, and it continues regardless of what is also experienced but in passing.

And it is of the conscious self being free, in the sense that it is free to decide what it will be. It is of the conscious self as a free determinant, that unlike all other determinants of nature’s course can choose what its influence upon nature will be. It is of the conscious self that is an influence of its own.

Some wonder though whether the experience of the conscious self is for real. They wonder whether such a wonderful determinant can truly be. It is so different from all the lesser determinants that populate nature’s realm. Can it truly be that a conscious self can decide for itself what its influence upon nature will be? Can oneself as conscious self truly be as one experiences oneself to be?

Or, is it all be a wonderful illusion? Might it be that no one can truly be so wonderfully free? Might it instead be that the experience of being free is but a way of falsely escaping a tyranny imposed by lesser influences that but do what nature has commanded they do? May it be that the conscious self, that experiences itself to be so high, is but an ersatz self that’ll never be truly free?

Some wonder whether people truly have free will, and thereby, influence over their destinies. And it is reasonable to wonder whether people are free, given the lack of consensus on the nature of the conscious self that experiences that it is free. The authenticity of the experience can be questioned.

Everyone of course experiences the experience. Everyone experiences that he is free to choose to do whatever he wants. Also, everyone experiences that his freedom is real. In everyone’s ordinary wakeful experience, his freedom is as authentic as any of the other things that he experiences to be real.

Also, resultingly, most people likely assume that they are as free as their experiences of freedom suggest. As the experience of freedom is of it being real, and as other experiences of reality are generally assumed to be of reality, it’s natural to presume the experience of freedom is as real as the rest.

Some question the experience’s authenticity though. Some think that it’s but an illusion, and that choices are determined by other influences that aren’t consciously experienced. Also, obviously, anyone wishing to do so can argue that the experience of freedom is illusory, and that it does not authenticate itself. It can be argued reasonably that the genuineness of free will is not proven.

Which obviously at least raises a controversy. Regardless of what the reality truly is, the presence of disagreement over whether people are free at least presents an opportunity for anyone wishing to do so to argue in favor of what they think, and try to resolve the question of whether people are free.

Also, regardless of what the truth is, the issue of whether people are as free as they experience themselves to be is one of the most interesting of all the issues that relate to the natures of people. It concerns one of the last remaining elemental controversies of human nature, which is of whether people transcend currently understood nature by having capabilities which exceed its limits.

It also thereby concerns the equally interesting issue of whether people are limited to what is believed to be materially possible. If people are as free as they experience themselves to be, they transcend what seem to be the limits of material possibility, and suggest that human nature transcends material nature. At least, the issue of freedom raises an issue of whether all nature is but material.

Also, the question of whether people are truly free to influence their destinies raises an issue of whether people are for real in a sense that they are authentically as they experience themselves to