Free Will through Determinism (Copyright 2002, Stephen R. Deiss, all rights reserved)
The phenomenology of freedom is such that we feel free when not arbitrarily limited by reality, other people, or social institutions to do what we perceive to be what we most want to do. We feel un-free when we have our choices limited by external factors outside our control. There is a whole continuum of feelings of being free or limited. Most people are not bothered by not being able to defy gravity nor run at 50 mph. They do not want to be a bird or a cheetah. There are exceptions in rare individuals that are often the source of innovation and progress (e.g., airplanes and cars). It feels ok to limit yourself if you have set yourself reasoned limits in one area in order to achieve a higher goal in another when the two goals are not 100% compatible. You still feel free because these self-limits are in line with consciously thought out and accepted hierarchy of goals/desires.
We discover ourselves by how we prioritize our wants and needs. Until conflicting goals are made conscious and ranked we are often perplexed. The crucial thing that makes free acts feel free is that they coincide with our uppermost values and desires reflected in our context-sensitive hierarchy of wants and preferences. These arise from our private experience of who we are based on our feelings, memories and perceived behavioral dispositions, our identity or what we identify with. If we have no internal conflicts about who we are and our desires, then we feel free when we pursue them. Compulsions are extreme forms of value conflicts. They result from wanting to do something causing discomfort for one set of reasons, often unconscious, while wanting to avoid doing it for other, usually conscious reasons. It is hard to identify with the unconscious reasons precisely because they are unconscious, by definition not perceived as part of our Self. We do not identify with the compulsion as much as with the conscious desire to overcome it. There can be a range of conflicts between our private values even when they are all conscious. If our identification with and prioritization of our values is clear, it is much easier to make spontaneous decisions and to feel free doing so. When in conflict, our choices involve struggle, "de-liberation," and a consequent lack of spontaneity. Resolution of such conflicts may have been the original driving force behind the evolution of rationality.
It is possible that a person raised in an oppressive authoritarian culture may have been so well indoctrinated in that value system as to be effectively brainwashed. The person may identify with (internalize) those norms and customs that limit his or her choices. They may not be interested in choices or opportunities that the rest of us take for granted and demand in a democratic society. For example, they may not get to vote every few years. They would not perceive this as limiting because they do not perceive themselves as voters, nor is voting a highly valued citizen activity. When ordered to serve the state, they may perceive it as a privilege, an opportunity to promote the greater good or, more selfishly, simply as a promotion. Such a person could feel free when they do the appointed tasks if their values align with state wishes. Any choice to do otherwise would seem like the foolish acts of a rebel, or an antisocial person and that is not who they perceive themselves to be. Their values have been learned from the state via its educational/propaganda institutions, and the identification with those values has been imprinted by excessive indoctrination and peer interactions. Their perception of freedom follows from this self-identity experience.
The idea that the blueprint for one's life might have been drawn up at the moment of the Big Bang makes some feel oppressed or un-free in some way. At the least one might perceive a conceptual contradiction between freedom and such predetermination even though you do feel spontaneous in daily decision making through a well-integrated identity. It’s more of a metaphysical lack of freedom than an experienced one. Our Western worldview carries with it a belief in cause and effect on the macroscopic level and the belief that ultimately, having brains and believing in reductive scientific explanations, we are part of these macro scale causal chains. Quantum mechanical indeterminacy arguments do not apply much yet in our every day thinking and perhaps never will at the macro level where we live and experience the world. In our society psychological determinism is routinely used as a defense against strong consequences for crimes, even when guilt is certain. Youthful impulses are often an excuse for bad choices. Drug abuse is understood to act directly on decisions and to influence choices and drastically limit them. No one was ever acquitted because of quantum uncertainty or because of chaotic nonlinear feedback traceable to the Big Bang (yet).
At the same time, our Western Judeo-Christian heritage (with a touch of paganism) would have us believe that through grace or will power or luck, we can transcend ourselves and go beyond our personal history to create a new future for ourselves. The United States was founded on such optimism. The protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism also derive from this faith in ones ability to transcend (albeit with God’s help). Belief in transcendence without divine help in combination with the belief in strong causality from acquaintance with science is the basis for a conceptual, if not experienced, conflict. Usually the conflict remains conceptual/metaphysical and does not play a large factor in daily experience. There are times though when this conflict becomes pertinent, e.g., as a large element in the debate on capital punishment. There are shades of gray here as in most conceptual muddles. The key question seems to be “Could bad people avoid doing bad things?”
Nevertheless, if your definition of self does not require the need to control all the factors that led to you being who you are (genes, family, cultural norms, historical context, quark-gluon plasma configuration shortly after the big bang) nor a responsibility to transcend some or all these influences to achieve some personal goals, then you would not feel un-free or determined knowing that you and your choices are unfolding like clockwork. If you identify with your upbringing and your inherited situation, you will feel free making choices that reflect all those internalized circumstances and cosmic history. To the extent that you believe in strong causality combined with the need to transcend, you will likely feel intellectually that there is a conflict between the very ideas of free will and determinism. On the other hand, through persistent meditation, one might achieve an experience of merging or identifying with everything in the universe. In that situation you would probably experience a grand euphoric freedom because now you identify even with the things that used to be non-self and limiting.
Identification is the real crux of feeling free and of experiencing free will as well as the source of the conceptual muddles about metaphysical freedom versus determinism. It is not necessary to rationalize "existential leaps" on the basis of quantum mechanical wave function collapse. Experiencing freedom and feeling able to exercise will has nothing to do with whether one lives in a universe of strict causality or not unless one is possessed of the pathology that insists on having control over every factor that goes into making a desire or a decision their own personal one. It’s pathology because we cannot choose or design the universe we are given. However, you can live in a medieval clockwork universe and still feel free.1 Many people have already done it. Even if quantum indeterminacy somehow directly affects our choices, it will not make us feel more freedom. If your deepest desires and your most carefully considered choices arose from an unconscious and probabilistic wave function collapse (something NOT YOU) or from the will or grace of a self-transcending soul-spirit living inside you (also NOT YOU), would the resulting decision feel like it was YOURS. Would such discontinuous or transcendent choices belong to you as an individual? Who are you anyway? Would not such choices be on a par with demon possession minus the malevolence? To be free, you have to know who you are and what you want (feel and be yourself). Then if there are no external obstacles, just do it. If there are obstacles, overcome them. If you can’t overcome them, vote for people who can remove them. If that is not possible you will find your Self evolving naturally to ensure your survival towards another configuration of desires and identification that fits the world in which you live.
