Itch

Free will is an illusion, of course; human beings are just biological creatures subject to the same physical laws as everything else.  We no more “choose” to do things—from deciding to get out of bed in the morning to agreeing that drinking beer and riding bikes on the first Thursday of summer is a good idea—than does the cottonwood tree “choose” to float its cotton-covered seeds onto the evening breeze at the same time.

Nevertheless, it feels, from the inside, as if we are exercising our agency, deliberating between possibilities, and preferring one option over another, like taking the gravel path instead of the busy road, or opting for a six-pack and a bag of beet chips instead of the usual half-rack and Reese's cups.

That’s why many contemporary philosophers find “compatibilism,” or “soft-determinism” to be the preferred option in the debate over free will; the idea is that human free will is compatible with a deterministic universe.  We can distinguish between choices that are compelled, like when we stop for traffic so as not to be run over by a semi-truck, and those that are deliberated, like when, after looking both ways, we pedal through the red light anyway.  The former, we can say, are not free choices; that latter, by contrast, are.

But the proverbial devil is in the details: did we freely choose to bust up the palette and add it to the already-roaring fire or is that just an automatic expression of our animal natures?  And surely, no volition is exercised when fireworks are ill-advisedly set off in the midst of a crowd; there’s no way that’s not going to happen, right?  The itch will be scratched.

Contemporary philosopher David Sosa has argued that in order to maintain a conception of human dignity, we must preserve some notion of individual agency; I dunno; I like being part of a big cosmic machine that just unfolds according to natural laws; happens every Thursday on bikes, after all.