The topic of today's article is "Freedom of the will of man."
According to Wikipedia, “Free will is the ability of a person to make a choice regardless of circumstances. Circumstances here can be understood as both purely external circumstances (violence, coercion, reward, etc.) and internal ones (instincts, likes and dislikes, prejudices, etc.).
Such human behavior implies that he is not conditioned by the external environment. As if, in the presence of free will, he makes a choice, regardless of what caused him before that time.
But to what extent can this statement claim to be true? If a person exists in a certain environment, can he act without being conditioned by the causal relationships of this environment?
Free will is, as it were, something that happens in spite of the cause-and-effect relationships in which a person exists. But I would say that in my opinion, there is no pure "free will".
If by this phrase we understand the action of a person, then the implementation of this action always depends on the totality of the factors accompanying this action. The word "freedom", in this case, is not entirely appropriate.
A person is conditioned by his physiology, external environment, his environment, is conditioned by everything that was formed earlier with his environment, the same environment and physiology.
That is, everything that is now is the result of the past. If an action is caused by something that has nothing to do with the influence of the external environment, then the question arises: what meaning can this action have?
In the case of free will, the first thing that is needed to identify the absurdity of this definition is an understanding of one's conditionality. Man always interacts with the environment in which he exists.
His attitude to reality is shaped by his environment. A person can change his environment, but this has nothing to do with free will. The very phrase "free will" is absurd, since it implies that the will was generated regardless of the causes. Free will is just a beautiful definition.
A person reacts to his environment and, depending on this, can make certain decisions regarding his actions. That is, a person can dress, reacting, for example, to the cold, or build a house for himself, make tools.
That is, these actions are called as a reaction to environmental conditions, they did not arise from scratch. Other representatives of the animal world cannot make tools of the level that a person makes, perhaps due to the lack of such a functional biological tool as a brush. A person, in this case, uses his brush, because the conditions of the external environment encourage him to do so.
That is, all human actions are caused by the influence of the environment on him. Even the new that a person creates is based on his previous experience, and, therefore, on causal relationships. The concept of free will is presented as something independent of circumstances, caused solely by some intention, but the intention does not appear by itself: it is caused by causes, external or internal. Although the division of causes into external and internal is also conditional, since nothing internally exists without interaction with the external.
What is the falsity of the concept of free will
The falsity of the concept of free will lies in the fact that it is presented as a kind of given, which, due to some unknown reasons, is endowed with a certain individual. But even if we assume that this freedom of will is given by someone, then this is no longer freedom, since the individual, in this case, depends on the fact that someone endowed him with this very freedom.
Therefore, he cannot use this very freedom as something of his own, since initially it is not his, because he was endowed with it. That is, it is no longer freedom.
Nothing happens just like that, but only for certain reasons, therefore the concept of "Free will" is absurd. Based on the main idea of this article, we can conclude that a person is determined by external factors, but the term determinism is not entirely correct, since it has an antipode - indeterminism.
As if there is something conditioned by causes and not conditioned by causes. But objective phenomena have no opposition, since they exist in interaction with each other. Determinism and indeterminism are just two definitions that mean themselves and neither of them reflects the essence of processes.
If a person goes against the relationship system
For me, this was a kind of deconditioning from the psychological system of relationships that surrounded me at that moment. I mean the environment of my relatives.
But I don't see it as an act of free will. I consider this my own action due to my personal subjective and conscious motives and nothing more. It was not an act of opposing one's act to the external environment. Although, according to the results of this move, it was so. BUT there was no such conscious goal.
A person can change his life, but does it make sense to interpret such actions aimed at changing his own life as something called some general criteria?
Addendum 08/14/2021
The concept of free will means its absence.
If there is a concept of free will, then there is its antipode - lack of free will. Then the question logically arises - on what does the existence of free will depend? As if the person himself took and decided that he has free will and decided to do something, guided, as it seems to him, by free will, that is, without taking into account any external conditions surrounding him, as if nothing existed before he made such a decision.
About the right path in human life!
Psychological reasons for the need for this concept
I would rather discuss not the question of the presence or absence of free will, but the psychological reasons that prompt a person to ask such a question. Maybe he creates the concept of such a phenomenon from the fact that he wants to instill a certain optimistic attitude in himself, or he does it for some other reason, but I am inclined to believe that he does this from a tendency to idealize the causality of phenomena, or rather, completely rid them of causality, as in the case of free will.
Like him, a kind of idealistic dreamer believes that by default there is just such a free will and that's it. Moreover, it is not entirely clear how it manifests itself, what determines its presence, because if it exists, then it may not exist, if we assume that it exists at all. And most importantly, it is not clear what the nature of free will is: why all of a sudden, a person was conditioned by a set of certain processes that conditioned him, and suddenly he got rid of this conditioning, calling it free will.