Free Will, Determinism, and Physicalism
Some people are weird. Sorry. They choose to be weird. Sorry, again. They are destined to be weird. They have no choice.
Some people are confused because they believe they have no free will. The truth is that humans have free will. All people who reject it will always blame others or situations.
As a Christian, we believe that everyone has free will. This is why God commanded Adam to not eat a certain tree.
16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
I found a funny article written by Zero Contradictions. The author is a confused person. How do I know that?
There is a section in the article tried to answer the following question:
Why should people be held accountable for their actions, if they could never truly choose their actions in the first place? Isn’t that unethical?
The question is smart. If we are programmed, why do we need to be responsible for what we are doing? We have no choice anyway.
If we read together the first sentence of the answer, we will see the following:
To the contrary, it’s precisely because people don’t have free will as to why people should be held accountable for their actions (if they knew what they were doing).
Can you notice the madness? I assume that the author is an atheist or a believer in a stupid religion.
Think about the logic behind the statement. A person does not have a free will. This person's life has been set up to do a crime. This person has no choice. But this person gets punished for doing a crime. Where is the justice behind this? That is a very evil statement from the author.
Then, the author states that punishments exist to discourage undesired behavior in the future. This is insanity. If humans do not have free will, how do they stop doing undesired behavior? They have been programmed. They have no choice. This means punishments do not work at all.
If there is no free will, why do we need to have a law anyway? The existence of the law proves that humans have free will. They can choose to do good things or bad things. People who choose to do bad things will get punished. But punishments do not stop people from doing evil actions. Why can that happen? The reason is people have free will. They can choose to keep evil actions regardless of the consequences.
Moreover, who does love to be punished anyway? If there is no free will, punishments will solve everything. This is the same as machine learning. If you train a machine to complete a game, you instruct the machine to avoid spikes. If they do not avoid them, you write a program that will reduce the score. This way the machine will learn that it needs to avoid the spikes to keep the score.
Can we do that to humans? No, we can not. Punishments can reduce criminal actions to a certain extent. But punishments can not stop people from committing crimes because people can still choose to commit crimes regardless of the consequences. This means humans are not programmed. Humans have free will.
If people truly had free will, then environmental factors wouldn’t influence them.
The author makes a stupid statement. How do people have free will without any challenges? If humans do not get influenced by their environment, humans do not have free will. For example, if everyone around us is a lazy person, we will feel tempted to be lazy too. But we can choose to be diligent.
If a person has been programmed to be unique, the person will not be influenced to wear the same clothes. A person will not feel awkward when this person notices that others wear the same clothes except this person. But why do most people become self-conscious when they are different? Do you know the answer? This is because humans want to be the same. That wish is the challenge. But humans can choose to ignore that wish.
People have free will. This means they have the power to decide. Environmental factors may influence their decisions. But people can choose to ignore all environmental factors. For example, Jane is hungry. Then, she notices a hamburger in front of her eyes. She feels more intense hunger. Her stomach growls. She can choose to eat it right away. But if she is on a diet, she can ignore the hamburger. She can put the hamburger into a refrigerator.
By the way, the article is hard for me to understand. This is because I do not have the free will. I have been programmed this way. I hope someone in the earth is programmed to help me.