Free will is not the only problem

Endless flows of ink have been spilled debating the nature of free will, and given that I only hold half a PhD[1] (not even one in philosophy) I don’t think I’m qualified to do justice to them all[2]. Nevertheless, for the purposes of context, I’m obliged to at least delineate what I see as the three main camps:

In practice, if you’re religious, you probably subscribe to libertarian free will. Without this kind of free will, all this business about choosing to believe doesn’t really make sense (and the idea of burning in hell for not believing in God seems a wee bit unfair, if you don’t have any choice in the matter). Other beliefs adjacent to or overlapping with religion — things that might be labelled spiritual, or mystical, or supernatural — are also likely to lead you to choose this version of free will; if you believe in something like a soul with an existence that is independent of the physical substrate of our bodies, if you believe in reincarnation or out-of-body experiences, for example. Even if none of the above apply, it’s still possible that you might have a view of selfhood rooted in your subjective experience which leads you to feel like there is something inside you that is actually making decisions.

Atheists, scientific types, and such, are more likely to believe that determinism rules out real free will as a possibility. When two particles in a system collide, the laws of physics tell us what happens next. Your body and your brain are made of lots of these particles. Given enough knowledge about the configuration of all those particles at any given point in time, these laws should tell us what the configuration will do as it evolves over time. In this view, the appearance of free will is just an emergent phenomenon that arises from the low-level details of the system playing out. At the macroscopic, subjective level, we perceive our decisions as being products of "free" will, but the argument is that they’re all really determined.

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