Free Will

I recently discovered a brilliant blog by the creator of the Dilbert cartoons. You should it check out. No really, you should.

At the moment they are discussing free will (First, second, and third posts on the subject), brought on, as are so many theological and philosophical questions, by the Pope's propensity to label millions of people evil because their religious dogma is different from his.

It all began with this simple question "If a man goes into the forest and pokes a bear with a sharp stick, and the bear kills the man, whose fault is it?" (it gets more involved but you'll have to go there to read the whole thing)

Some people seem to think the stick (or the manufacturer of sticks) was to blame, which seems rather "clever, clever" to me rather than having any real meaning. What was particularly interesting though was the fact that the Dilbert creator (aka Scott Adams) basically thinks the answer is forget fault, all we are is "moist robots" whose actions are entirely predetermined by the mechanics of our brains, bodies and the way we interact with the environment.

His argument boils down to this: The bear is going to kill anyone who pokes it with a stick, but the man, although he may have more general ability to appear rational is just as confined by his poking desires, all his life has led up to that moment and he could do no other - you might as well blame the stick for as much ability either had to change course. "Each creature acted according to its nature and its programming, as all moist robots must." Whew! Full on.

I did muse about the meaning of life (of all things) in an earlier post (here) in which I big up the main man Sartre (who I spelt wrong, doh) who believed that we are *condemned* by our free will and therefore responsible for our actions - but I also think that Wittgenstein is handy here too, in that he questions the very paradigms we use when posing philosophical questions. In some senses philosophical debates are often word games, where the shape of our language limits and shapes the argument, rather than being plausible explorations of the truth.

We think, we feel, we make decisions - in what way is it relevant to say could I have chosen another path at a certain point in time if I did not? What bearing do the concepts determinism and free will have upon us apart from as convenient moral cloaking devices to back up our positions on other questions. "He chose to murder" / "he's a product of his environment" would be the classic example - and in my mind BOTH things are true and useful simultaneously.

If we want to reduce crime (for example) we know that crime is a social phenomenon whose rates vary according to a number of social factors. Looking after the health, wealth and happiness of the population has always been a better method at reducing rates of crime than prison, the noose or 501 new flavours of law. But it's also true to say that if you kill your wife you bear "some" responsibility for this. The individual should not be lost whilst looking at the way social factors shape the members of that society.

Certainly it's no use expecting Islamophobic cartoonists not to be offensive, just as there's little point pretending that people will not get offended if you deliberately target their beliefs - but we should behave as if we can make a difference in the world and that our actions can change the outcome of events, preferably for the better.