Why there is No Objective Free Will

    Suppose you throw a tennis ball in the air. The assumption would be, given all the other laws of nature, that the ball must come down. But was this inevitable? Was there some way, in which the ball could have remained afloat, or continued to go up indefinitely? Was there really no other way? As absurd as it might seem the mere exploration of alternatives to the ball coming down, I argue that it is no more absurd than to challenge the notion of everything being predetermined in the same way.

The 21st century has witnessed the widespread acceptance of many scientific theories considered revolutionary or absurd at the time of their inception. Perhaps it is the same for all great things. But here I would call your attention to one particular scientific explanation for the origins of the universe; the Big Bang Theory. While we need not go into the details of how it works, or its many flaws and the consequent new unanswered questions, suffice it to say that it provides a plausible scientific answer to one of the most pressing questions of human existence: that of the origin of everything. 

When we use the word origin, we imply the origin of some phenomenon that succeeds it at some point. Tied by it is the concept that all existence must have some origin, or causal explanation. If so, then everything that has occurred must have some cause that induced it to occur in the manner that it occurred. Thus your waking up today at the time you did has an explanation, a cause, a reason that compelled you to do it, much in the same way a cause compelled someone else to drive to work, or for someone else to sleep at a particular time. In all these cases, some cause, say cause A, B, and C, respectively made you, and those individuals, act in the way that they did. It then follows that something else must have caused causes A, B, and C to exist, and so on. But if that were the case, then they all must lead to common causes further back in time, till at last they reach the origin of all causes. What caused that cause to occur is a moot point.

So it goes that an atom must have interacted with another atom, which then would have interacted with another group of atoms, following fixed laws of physics, as our universe seems to follow, going on and on till some particular phenomenon occurs, all due to an unbroken causal chain, as for example in the flowing of blood to an arm, following pulses from the brain, causing the arm to pick up a cup of coffee. It can be argued here that even in cases where such atoms may not have directly interacted with each other, as in the case of a person chancing upon a random video of someone singing music and causing them to sing in tandem, the outcome is predetermined, though now due to two different causal chains interacting.

But if this line of thought is followed, then surely no one can claim to have acted in free will, as all actions were caused by some other phenomenon. This can have great implications, as a criminal's actions can be attributed to circumstances beyond their control, much in the same way a good samaritan's actions were not really theirs, but compelled on them by outside forces. If the argument stops here, this means that you cannot really blame the criminal for their actions, as what fault could you attribute to a person with a circumstance over which they have no control?

We can here distinguish objective free will, which under such circumstances cannot exist, against subjective free will, which can still exist, subject to the condition that the whole causal mechanism remains beyond understanding. The argument for such a form of free will would be that the complexities involved in such a causal system are so great that it is simply not possible for human beings, in their present forms at least, to even minutely grasp them in any meaningful manner. This would then give the illusion of free will, when in fact everything is still objectively predetermined. This argument would then allow for some social phenomenon, such as the criminal justice system, or the so-called meritocratic promotion structures in an organization, to function relatively impartially, applying the principle of subjective free will to give the illusion of a fair chance to everyone. For it is simply too inconvenient a thought to see that you cannot control anything, and yet can still be held accountable for such actions.

There is nothing to worry about then, for the time being at least, on whether our social structures are built to account for this postulate, or whether your decision to do something is truly your decision after all. Chances are, your atoms will simply forget what causes them to act in the manner they act, much in the same way you probably cannot truly pinpoint exactly what caused you to read this article after all, even though, I assure you, this was predetermined billions of years ago.