The missing dialectic of Free Will
from Its Gray
Free will is an interesting concept to think about especially considering what is missing from the free will discussion. The debate about Free will almost entirely revolves around the individual and the capacity of the individual but divorces from the individual the known ways in which our brains physically functions, the known effects of the environment, and how society plays a large part in shaping an individual's ability and philosophy. It assumes the individual is a monolith either as a cog in the machine or as an unchained arbiter of Freedom. It largely ignores the circular nature of human choice.
We can define Free will as the ability to voluntarily choose a course of action. I believe this will do wonderfully to cover most layman uses of the term. Free will as defined by the libertarian philosophers (not the political position or party) is the ability to choose differently. In philosophical practice what this means is that the “person” is assumed that they always could have made a different choice and that if we could rewind time it is possible that the person would make a different choice.
If we consider all actions to be predetermined, we are placing too much emphasis on the role environment has on shaping human choices and not enough on individual perspective. As a result, when people talk about “Free Will” its inevitable that the discussion turns to “responsibility” for choice and we pretend our past experience making a lifetime of choices isn't applicable. We act as if a person can't make a choice willing and consciously. Some philosophers, such as Arthur Schopenhauer, will instead make an appeal to our desires or wants. They claim that we are entirely unable to curate what we want for our wants. In a simpler phrase we are unable to control what want or desire. If a person is starving they can't suddenly decide to make their hunger go away or for their want of food to leave them. A queer individual is unable to control their sexual desire toward other genders, or lack thereof, that do not agree with their chosen religion or morality. They argue that some parts of us are not things that we control which is true but then, these philosophers will try to extend this argument, saying that since we can't control some parts of our life, it follows that we must not be able to control any part of our life, that the environment is what presupposes our decisions. That if we could see our environment and life experience in totality at every instance, we would always know the right chosen path as if we were trying to play chess and determine the best way to win.
Herein lies the problem, though. It is impossible for a system to exist that can comprehend the totality of our universe in such a way as to predetermine the choices made by living beings and that living beings don't have a state of stability or a desired state to be in such as winning a game of chess. As we know from personal experience, it is impossible to reference the entirety of our knowledge in an instant or at every moment, after all, it's a universal experience to forget something important that we need for decisions and that we are always unable to comprehend our environment in it's totality, there is always a need to narrow our focus down to the specifics of situation casting aside anything our brains decide is spurious.
When we consider our choices we are using our internally created philosophical “tools” and our logic and reasoning built from a lifetime of experience. Experience that is driven both by our environment and crafted by our own hands through internal reflection and some control of their environment. This in turn acts as a mirroring of a persons character, defined by the amount of work a person has put in to self improvement and honing personal philosophy. A persons character, that is a summation of an indivduals perspective and philosophy, is going to determine the course of actions a person will take in moments of choice. Regardless of the circumstances, every person is capable of both, shaping their environment, in at least some small way, and reflecting internally on the effect of our choices. Accordingly, a person is responsible for all actions they take, not including mitigating circumstances where the reason for actions taken was physically out of the persons control.
With this framing in mind this means, paradoxically, we are both in control of our actions and not in control of our actions. When we start interrogating and rectifying the contradictions surrounding “choice” we begin to understand what creates the concept of “choice”. We know that it is physically impossible to have an organic being that is capable of determining all events in the universe due to the sheer scale of information and ability to process it all. We also know about “shortcuts” our brains take in order to process all of this information into something useful. That is, the brain works in approximations and predictions to efficiently detail the situtation. We can see this in the absolutely astounding lack of observation skills that all of humanity displays at one time or another. Conscious choice seems to be driven by the need to use tools that are inaccessible to our unconscious mind like deductive reasoning or Formal Logic or Dialectal thinking, etc. Necessarily, when a person encounters a situation that requires the use of such tools, the unconscious elevates the “choice” to our awareness so we are able to take full use of our curated reasoning skills. After this if the person has encountered a similar situation they unconsciously make a “choice” based on their previous experience and their pattern matching abilities before they are even aware that a choice was made. This is done in the name of efficiency.
Before we move on I want to explore the “unconscious” choice and explain why I think this is still completely within our ability to control, albeit in an indirect way. As touched on previously everyone has the ability to shape their environment and shape their thoughts. We can take an active role in cultivating our knowledge and thought process through a variety of means like – therapy, philosophy, journaling, introspection, meditation, prayer, etc. When we do this we are actively shaping our thoughts leading to our indirect control of our unconscious ideals. This can be accomplished through honest pragmatic interrogation and investigation of our thought processes and reasoning. In this way, we can dialectically discover our reasoning for our reasoning or maybe our lack thereof, which allows us to, for a lack of a better word, “clean” our thoughts and ideals. Critically, when undertaking this process of “self work” it is necessary to be kind and compassionate towards oneself regardless of an individual's opinion of oneself or the result will corrupt, distort, or destroy a person internally.
Earlier I stated that when we say an action by a living being is predetermined, what are doing is making an assumption that a living being is seeking a position of stability. Like a satellite that orbits a planet or boulder on its final resting place at the base of a mountain. This is an incorrect assumption with living beings in general, because living beings do not have a state of stability. Each goal completed leads to a new goal that now needs to be completed in a cycle that only ends at the death of the living being. For example even if an individual was to sit down and do nothing and actively concentrate and make a honest effort to do nothing, it would be impossible for them to do so. Living beings are not just a singular living Thing. We're a combination of a multitude of living things, like, cells, and bacteria, and microscopic animals, etc, that come together to create an individual organism with consciousness and thus become a living being. Even if a person sits completely still, as if frozen in time, all of this internal life continues to move within them. Our body, despite our concentration and willing ourselves into standing still, will continue to send chemical message to cells and continue to send electrical impulses so that we continue to breathe and continue other needed functions to live. A person, therefore, is in a constant state of flux. We are not at all like the simple physics objects that mathematicians and scientists test and make predictions for.
When considering the idea of a “stable” state, I suppose humans are always moving towards baser desires that need to be adhered to: sexuality, hunger, pain, fear, excitement, pleasure, community, to list a few. However this list is not exhaustive and its also up for debate. Many times these desires can be contradictory or even need to be fulfilled at the same time, leading to situations that need specific logical tools to ensure surival, in the name of efficent evolution, that help create the conditions that form consciousness. What this means is that in times where a choice can not simply be predicted based off of circumstances due to contradictory desires and avaliable options it becomes necessary for a concious choice to be made in order to best achieve all desires needed for survival.
To get to the idea of the abolition of free will a philosopher has to take an outside observers perspective of a situation and assume unlimited time to examine the situation and environment in detail before determining the best course of action. When a thinker takes such position it becomes easy to logic and reason out that one's path and actions are all predetermined. That is every action a person takes is based off the preceding events and life experience before the action taken and which could only result in the action that occurred. This idea comes from the classical Newtonian idea of physics that everything is predictable with Mathtm. Even famous quantum physicists like Steven Hawking believed that everything in the universe is at least probabilistically predetermined.
But as we discussed there is a major flaw in this type of abstract thinking. Humans live in a state of flux. There is no predetermined desire state that a human wants to be in and thus there is no way to determine what actions or goals a person might take. However because of the evolutionary strategy of using “thinking shortcuts”, humans could be seen as “predetermined” since we are going to follow the “system level thinking” adopted by an individual's society unless the individual has taken steps to change their “systems thinking”. This makes a person predictable if enough information is gathered because our brains operate on the same evolutionary shortcuts and we are all influenced by our environment in similar ways. It's important to note that predictability is not the same thing as being predetermined. If something is predetermined, it will always occur given a set of preceding events while predictability is an educated guess which can be wrong. Much of an individuals experience is an amalgamation of assumptions made by the brain (resulting in an individual's unique perspective). We can actually see this in the case of genetic twins that go on to lead completely separate lives despite being genetically identical and living in nearly identical situations. If human action was predetermined, then these genetically identical individuals with near-identical life experiences should act the same way with the same likes, the same dislikes, the same preferences, and live with a similar set of life circumstances, but they don't. In many cases, these wholly identical individuals grow to be completely different people with their own preferences and morals.
While it is still true that each person is highly influenced by their environment, its' control is not in totality. As discussed before, people live in a natural state of flux and fluidity that can be shaped by both their own hands and the environment. What this means is when a person has made a series of bad choices that have lead them to commit grievous violence or injury against society the fault becomes split: Society has failed to to cultivate an environment for a person to learn the right tools to avoid such issues, and this person has failed society by wounding the community. In order to safeguard Society, the people of said Society need to provide the tools needed to survive and function, in order for each individual to be held to account to, what I am calling, their “duty” to society and to accomplish their individual goals and desires. We can define an individual's duty to society as based on the concrete reality of needing to live in a community which include a set of conditions that must be adhered to, like a commitment to non-violence. As such, when someone commits a grievous injury to the community, they must make whole the injured party in the form of punishment. We know that if retribution is not attempted to rectify such injuries that it becomes detrimental to both the individual and the community. Thusly the aggrieved individuals' mental health will deteriorate due to lack of “justice”, and the community may become so enraged at such a lack of action they fall to vigilantism in order to avenge the aggrieved party.
Punishment also has another primary effect of acting as a deterrent against those that may plan on committing like actions. Along with this fact and the fact society has also failed the perpetrator, they too must also be given justice in the form of temperance of their punishment. Society must stay its hand when the punishment stops acting as a deterrent and becomes vengeance for the aggrieved. Society must also seek to correct the perpetrator's ignorance that allowed them to commit such atrocities, however, society must also examine how this course of action came to be and why these event occurred and do what is necessary to interrupt that course of action for others. If society does not retrospectively address the reason for the injury, than the injury is doomed to reoccur over and over again perpetuating a cycle of violence.
Formally, It is the duty of a society to craft an environment and share communal knowledge in such a way to enable both the success of each participant and the society itself.
To live in a society, it is the duty of each individual to understand their responsibilities to the community and to meet them to the best of their ability.
When either duty is not met violence and injury become inevitable. Take the historic event the Second Intifada, an attack against the occupation in Palestine. Using the framework above, we can see the occupier society is in dereliction of duty which then leads into the violence of this event. To examine how the occupier society has failed the Palestinians we can use the historical context from the previous intifada that occurred from 1987-1991. As discussed above Society has a duty to create an environment to ensure an individual can succeed and a duty to exercise temperance when an injury has occurred. In the case of the opening salvo of the First Intifada no such temperance was exercised resulting in the deaths of many who's only crime was dare to complain about there situation. In the first year alone the occupiers killed 140 Palestinians unjudiciously without attaining any causalities themselves. In fact while the occupier society is in complete dereliction of duty the Palestinian society continues to execute temperance as shown by the very clearly nonviolent actions that marked the entirety of the First Intifada. By the end of the intifada nearly 1200 Palestinians were murdered, 200 being children, with nearly 150,000 people being arrested. Lawyers, leaders, journalists all massacred in the name of the Occupation's security. That is almost a quarter of the Palestinian population in Gaza arrested. All this nonviolent action taken by the Palestinians' resulted in a paltry prize of autonomy in name only of the West Bank. A Palestinian state wasn't even acknowledged and none of the occupiers atrocities were addressed.
The Palestinians initially followed their duty to society by attempting to work with the occupation force peaceful and were rewarded not by temperance but by wanton violence meant to force the Palestinians into compliance. When a society ignores its duty, violence becomes inevitable and this became reality for the occupiers in July of 2000. The latest attempt by the Palestinians seeking peace and self-determination had just fallen through. The PLO is looking less like the arbiter of Palestinian freedom and more like the new Warden of the occupiers. One of the occupiers politicians, and soon to be new leader, went to a revered holy site of both the occupiers and the Palestinians. This leader, Ariel Sharon, was particularly controversial for the military and political role he played in the history of colonizing the land, and for his planning and execution of multiple massacres resulting in nearly 5000 slaughtered. A person such as this, who has so grievously injured the Palestinian community, was obviously not welcomed at the site where he was met by nonviolent protests of his visit. Naturally for someone who commanded a massacre, he has the occupation force's Police and Military attempt to break up the protests. This quickly escalated from the use of rubber bullets and tear gas to live ammunition and deadly force. Once again the occupiers society, absent in its duties, inspires a new round of violence that lasts until 2005. This time however the Palestinians were done with temperance and responded with violence of there own. In seeking to use force to abdicate their responsibility to the Palestinians, the occupier's society has ensured the cycle of violence continues.
We can further use the history of the land to show this duty is the responsibility of the occupiers.
The violence of the Palestinians was always inevitable once the duty of the settlers society went unheeded. In the early days of the occupation of the Levant, the Zionist settlers created closed off communities as an alternative to the indigenous counterparts or as a replacement in many cases. The official policy of many of these settlements involved only hiring Jewish help and only those that were Ashkenazi. Many of the Zionist settlers found their Jewish counterparts in the Levant to be “uncivilized” and initially were not desirable in the Zionist settlements. Theodore Herzl and the Zionist council openly opined in the mid 19th century about removing the current character of the newly settled land and turning it distinctly Jewish. Many Zionists, when you search their writings, talk as if the land is full of barbaric savages that have no morality or ethics and as such are not even worth considering, a common eurocentric idea at the time. These Zionist leaders even talked of creating a new image of a “distinctly strong Jewish man” away from the orthodox views and the Jewish society standards of that time (note Jewish society is not a monolith). To that end, we actually see groups of early Zionist settlers appropriating Arabic culture to seem more masculine. By carefully crafting such a society, that believed in its own superiority to the indigenous, that did not respect the history of the land, that didn't even acknowledge the already present indigenous community, the Zionist society created the contradictions the directly lead to the violence of Hamas.
When the occupation was new the Palestinian indigenous took their grievances to the powers that oversaw the area. First the Ottoman Empire and then then dreaded United Kingdom after 1918. In many cases Palestinian concerns were waived away and little was done to assuage the friction caused by the new occupiers. We can see a particularly egregious case of this in 1917 when a declaration from Lord Balfour committed to creating a “Jewish state in their ancestral land” before the United Kingdom took over mandatory Palestine. This was in direct contradiction to the negotiations of the Palestinians to try and secure their own freedom with the United Kingdom government. In many disputes the Palestinians were given pretty words, and then little material action, if any, was done, echoing the history of the US genocide of The First Nations and of other European colonization projects. To compound these problems, the occupiers were quick to violence and faster to claim ancient holy sites as solely the occupiers land and solely under the occupiers control. Many Zionists believe that the land is given to them by God and under such a mandate, there is no need to follow the rules of man. This included talk of establishing an outpost of “civilization instead of barbarism” among the occupiers. This friction made greater by the establishment of a new Zionist occupation force to ensure that any traditions that used to govern the land can not be enforced. Only the power flowing from the barrel of a gun matters in this new society of occupation. This is the lesson that the occupied people learn. This is the inevitable lesson of all oppressed peoples. That violence is the only way to get retribution and to find a balance of so-called justice.
With the duty of the occupier's society well and truly broken the Palestinians take heed of their lessons and reach for the bulwark of the oppressed. The Palestinians incorporating these lessons use violence whenever peaceful attempts to negotiate the freeing of the Palestinians is rejected. Historically we see it has only been the use of violence that has forced the occupier's to make concessions. This is reflected in the history of Hamas. Violence is only used after peaceful negotiations are offered. This was true during the first attack by Hamas on the occupation and is true now. Hamas' creation came about after the First Intifada which was characterized by historians, and confirmed by the material circumstances, as a non-violent movement along side civil disobedience and some sporadic riots. The extreme violence that the occupation force responded with is direct break of a societies duty of temperance and directly leads the violence that Hamas responded with during the Second Intifada. That only violence can bring the conditions for Justice for those under the boot of the oppressor's. This is actually the reason given by the previous Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, for the indiscriminate launching of rockets into the occupied land. To the Palestinians, it is either launch the rockets to get their voice heard, or sit quietly and die in the dirt of the largest open-air prison in the world. It is not, as the occupiers claim, an indiscriminate attack on the occupations' civilians based on hatred and wantonness, but a desperate cry for help from a people that have been suffering mass slaughter for the better part of 80 years.
We see the duty of the occupied forces complete abandoned in ways that seem to lack humanity. 2 million people are being forcefully starved with nearly 100 a day dying due to starvation. The Palestinians are unable to fish to occupier restrictions. Little water flow through entirely controlled by the occupation forces. Aid has been severely restricted and turned into a weapon of genocide. Practically every single residence in Gaza has been destroyed. Every single hospital in Gaza has been attacked with over half of them completely destroyed. The occupation forces are even supplying ISIS lead groups to attack Hamas and innocent Palestinians. At this point any hostages left will be suffering from severe malnutrition if they haven't been killed by the occupations indiscriminate bombing and slaughter.
Since October 7th of 2023, we have seen rampant increase of the deaths of Palestinian journalists and Palestinian children. More journalists have died in this sustained slaughter than have ever died in any previous war. More medics have died than previously ever recorded. More children have died in Palestine than in the Ukrainian-Russian war and every other genocide concurrently occurring in totality. When we look at the material conditions such as these it is clear of the dereliction of duty from the Occupations' society both to the Palestinians and to the global society. The conditions and contradictions created by the occupation force is endangering the entire world not just the physical area where the slaughter takes place.
As a consequence the Occupation bares full responsibility for creating the conditions of violence in the first place and for sustaining the conditions of violence which guarantees sustained violence against the Occupation's Society. Until society is able to correct and make whole the Palestinians as individuals we have a duty to the Palestinians. To support the goal of Palestinian liberation we as a society should offer tactical support of Hamas insofar as they continue to try and advance conditions to bring the liberation of the Palestinian people. This is also to help discourage needless violence from the resistance forces against the occupation's civilians as resistance should be focused on the liberation of their people and not on vengeance. We should all be lifting our voices, calling our local politicians and participating in the BDS movement of Israel the Occupied Land.
As a society we owe a duty to Palestine. We owe them our energy and actions so they can find peace. Society can not heal as long the genocide continues and that endangers us all.
From the River to the sea Palestine will be Free.
- Gray
