Free Will Vs Determinism

7 Pages 1768 Words

Free Will Vs. Determinism


Psychological theories of personality and behavior can be placed on a continuum between Determinism, the belief that who we are is largely governed by outside forces, and Free Will, which obviously assumes that who we are is a result of the choices we make.(Abascal p. 19)
Nobody can predict how something as complex as the human brain would behave under all circumstances. With more than ten thousand million nerve cells, each connected to thousands of it’s neighbors, the human nervous system would defy detailed prediction even if the matter of which it is made behaved according to classically determinate physical laws. To some people this may be a comforting thought. The idea is widespread that if any of our actions could be predicted from knowledge of the state of our brains, we would have to be denied responsibility for them. Others might go further and argue that even if in practice nobody could make successful predictions of our actions, any suggestion that in principle they were physically determined would rule out the possibility that they could be determined by our conscious thinking and deciding. Our future actions in that case would be “inevitable”( the argument runs), and we could take no more responsibility for them than for the future of the solar system. ( qtd. In Gregory 191)

Determinism, the view that the state of the world at any instant determines a unique future, and that knowledge of all the positions of things and the prevailing natural forces would permit an intelligence to predict the future state of the world with absolute precision. This view was advanced by Laplace in the early nineteenth century; he was inspired by Newton’s success at integrating our physical knowledge of the world.(“Determinism” A197-98)
Contemporary determinist do not believe that Newtonian physics is the supreme theory. Some do not even believe that all theories will someday be integrated int...