Often times I philosophize countlessly in my head. I think I am a person who in general will not take a side easily to unanswerable questions and stick with the side through thick and thin. I think it is because doing so would prevent me learning, unbiased, through all the different ways there are to think about the subject. One that has been going on recently is a classic: free will. I remember earlier laughing at people who debate this. I guess originally I thought that since there is no way to find out, why debate it? Since then, I now am beginning to understand the reason this is important to discuss. Accountability. If we have free will, then everyone is accountable for their actions. If we do not have free will, than no one is accountable for their actions.

I think most people will grasp and accept the concept of having free will, more than that of not having free will. Everyone feel’s comfortable with the idea that they choose the decisions in their lifes. I choose to go to the store. I choose to go on a morning jog. By believing that we have free will, we are allowed to discuss and judge our decisions and others. We can place accountability too on these decisions. A man murders an innocent women, he chose to do so, he is accountable. Punish him, give him the death penalty.

But what about not having free will? How on earth does this work? How could it be that in reality we are not chosing our own decisions. There are many ways that one could look at this, using words like “predestine”. Here is what makes the most sense to me. It is “I” that makes these choices. But “I” consist of a brain (nature) containing a bunch of experiences (nuture) that define how I perceive the world. It is only because of my brain and my history of experiences that I am led to make these in-the-moment decisions. When I was born, I couldn’t chose the environment around me, and I couldn’t chose my brains genetic make-up. After I was born, life kept on, I sucked up the environment and learned, and my brain developed to a point where I could finally start making decisions. The choice of these decisions though are only the result of my brains makeup and this past experience from my environment, neither of which I have control over. These decisions, which I have no control over, shape the future of my life.

The result of not believing in free will? You could say “Don’t blame Hitler for killing millions, he couldn’t help the brain he was given and the environment he was raised in.”

Could you prove whether we have free will? I would say no. Maybe if somehow you could predict the future, then specifically make decisions other than what you channel. Although here’s the issue with this - if you could predict the future, it shows we don’t have free will. The future is predestine. If we altered our decisions after seeing the future, then we would have free will. But only because we could predict the future. Hmm, so by typing this, sounds like I just stated we don’t have free will if we can predict the future. I guess this makes sense. If we did have free will, the future would be unpredictable, because every decision in the moment would be changing it.

Speaking of choices, I chose (or did I ) not to include all the religious aspects of this. This could be a another whole entry, with topics including the belief of good souls and bad souls, human spirit versus the human mind, the belief that God has a plan, fate, etc. I think I’ll leave it out for now.

What’s the purpose of me writing this? This whole topic is filled with paradox, infinity, and headache causing items. Maybe I’m indirectly saying that we should all look at situations with both ideas in our head. When feeling frustrated about why someone made a certain choice, maybe we should look both how they chose their actions, and how they didn’t chose which upbringing and brain they have that led them to make it. If someone is an abuser, chances are he or she was raised in an abusive environment. But that person still chose to abuse.