The Illusion of Free Will

While struggling to fall asleep the other night, I found myself pondering the idea of free will. Like all moments, day or night, whenever I get a free moment to let my mind wander, I always begin by asking myself, "what do you believe?". This happens quite a few times during the day. I'm not sure why it's so important, but I'm constantly in a state of questioning myself. I'm at a point in my own personal philosophy in which I will refrain from calling anything a fact. I'm a human. I'm faulted. How could I possibly know anything for sure? By always using the verbs to think or believe, I'm implying a theory, to the best of my knowledge.

So I'm staring up at my bland white ceiling wondering why the hell I can't put myself to sleep, and then I start wandering, keeping myself awake for another couple of hours. I then ask myself what I believe. Reverting back to a conclusion I came to several years ago, I reiterate to myself that we're just a bunch of complex particles. Reading a biography on Einstein, I remember that he said we were all nothing but interacting blobs of energy. Energy, atoms, molecules, matter, we're just a bunch of stuff that by chance interacted and coalesced. After billions upon billions of years of chemical reactions and evolution, here we are.

Now when I say, by chance, I don't mean out of thin air. As a logical sort of individual, I have a strong affinity towards the idea of cause and effect. This leads me to a term I have casually researched: Determinism. This philosophy states that everything that happens is determined by prior events. It contains both the ideas of Materialism(everything contained the universe is nothing but a bunch of material), and Causality(cause and effect).

This then brings me to many aspects of Existentialism. Over the years, I've become a pretty big fan of the ideas postulated within this philosophy. Putting it in a nutshell, one of the most attractive ideas is that we are totally free and individually responsible for our own happiness. Thinking about the idea of being free while believing in deterministic variables naturally leads to some contradictions.

According to determinism, everything including thoughts and actions are determined by prior events, or prior configurations of the molecules in the brain. With this in mind, freedom or free will seem to be nothing more than an illusion. While I think and make decisions of my own accord, it is nothing more than the effect of the firing neurons in my brain. To me, claiming that we do have absolute free will is the same as saying that we have a soul that acts independent of the laws of nature.

I suppose it also depends on the semantics.
- Mirriam Webster: "freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention"
- Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "“Free Will” is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives."

With the first definition, I would argue against the idea of free will because it's required that prior causes be absent. With the latter though it would seem that determinism and free will could coexist. The choice of the alternatives though, is deterministic.

Putting more thought into the subject, things start getting a bit fuzzy. Thinking back to existentialism, every person is responsible for their own happiness. Determinism denotes that even happiness is deterministic. This is where it gets fuzzy, at least for me. While happiness may be deterministic, the issue of whether we end up happy or sad is not fated. There is a lot that goes into human emotion, and I won't even attempt to explain it here and now.

If I write any more, I'm going to start confusing myself again so I'll stop here.