Any answer to the question whether human beings have FREE WILL must begin by a definition of "what is our minds's deciding agent", in other words, what is supposed to be the being which may be considered free or not.
A "deciding agent" within us is a vague notion that philosophers and psychologists must make clearer before any attempt to utter any opinion on this difficult point. Does that agent have complete freedom to choose among the options presented before it, or are its choices always determined by external forces, which may even remain inaccessible to human awareness.
A first answer could be that such deciding agent is the human consciousness. When facing a situation that requires a choice, each one of us ponders pros and cons of this or that, and at some point says, for example: "I want to drink a cup of coffee, instead of tea!"
In normal circumstances we are not forced by external constraints to choose coffee and not tea, nor the opposite.
This may be taken as a first answer: human consciousness may be seen as the deciding instance.
But what happens if we think that our present consciousness, this instantaneous flash, is predetermined by unknown forces.
A popular deterministic theory, Freudian psychoanalysis says just so: our decisions came from the Ego,which resulted from our instinctive desires (Id) fighting against our paternal prohibitions (Superego). According to this perspective our conscious decisions were predetermined by our autobiography. All freedom of will that we could have ought to be no more than illusion.
I have mentioned the standpoint of Freudian "psychoanalytic" theory just to point out that the conscious agent, a human self, may be free from a perspective centered in the instantaneous present of a given decision, and also not free when we look to his/her origins. There is no real contradiction here, because the opposites do not assert their conclusions about the same facts. Or, meaning the same, it could said that the human self is indeed free AND also that he/she has all its choices previously determined.
But putting Freud aside, an analogous reasoning path may be applied inside the theoretical frame of the biological genesis of our brains.
A "deciding agent" within us is a vague notion that philosophers and psychologists must make clearer before any attempt to utter any opinion on this difficult point. Does that agent have complete freedom to choose among the options presented before it, or are its choices always determined by external forces, which may even remain inaccessible to human awareness.
A first answer could be that such deciding agent is the human consciousness. When facing a situation that requires a choice, each one of us ponders pros and cons of this or that, and at some point says, for example: "I want to drink a cup of coffee, instead of tea!"
In normal circumstances we are not forced by external constraints to choose coffee and not tea, nor the opposite.
This may be taken as a first answer: human consciousness may be seen as the deciding instance.
But what happens if we think that our present consciousness, this instantaneous flash, is predetermined by unknown forces.
A popular deterministic theory, Freudian psychoanalysis says just so: our decisions came from the Ego,which resulted from our instinctive desires (Id) fighting against our paternal prohibitions (Superego). According to this perspective our conscious decisions were predetermined by our autobiography. All freedom of will that we could have ought to be no more than illusion.
I have mentioned the standpoint of Freudian "psychoanalytic" theory just to point out that the conscious agent, a human self, may be free from a perspective centered in the instantaneous present of a given decision, and also not free when we look to his/her origins. There is no real contradiction here, because the opposites do not assert their conclusions about the same facts. Or, meaning the same, it could said that the human self is indeed free AND also that he/she has all its choices previously determined.
But putting Freud aside, an analogous reasoning path may be applied inside the theoretical frame of the biological genesis of our brains.
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