I had to be rejected by my job for the first time ever in order to find a job that I wanted for the first time. I can only hope that my (first?) rejection from a relationship can lead to the same sort of turn of events. Can my house reject me too? Does it count when the people living there don't want to live with me? Because I've already got some ideas on where and how to live.
Maybe also food can reject me, so that I can be more serious about growing my own. And then my body and my mind can reject me. What's left of me?
I did some talking about one of my favorite concepts, free will. I'm being sarcastic about calling it a favorite, but maybe it really is, because I can never resist telling people my opinion about it, and very very rarely get my point across... including this time. She didn't seem to like my questions, and she was also feeling under the weather, but more importantly she didn't like my questions, which were only questions because she crossed that threshold that you sometimes cross in a conversation where you state your opinion as a fact, indicating, consciously or not, that there isn't much room for negotiation. When that happens I usually switch from sharing what I think to just prying at what the other person thinks.
So I figure I'll lay out my explanation here, because you can't talk. Well, you would have to scroll down the page to talk. I should put my chat app to use for comments, which I've resisted for very very long because I don't want people to write stupid comments below my wonderful amazing articles. And if that isn't welcoming to you, then what could be?
I think I had a new insight into the idea of free will. Mainly, the relationship between free will as the legal system defines it, versus what it means simply to say that somebody or something has free will. Acting of your own free will, as they say in a court, just means that nobody made you do it. It defines an inside and an outside. Your body is the inside, other people and things are the outside, and free in this case means that the inside was not forced by the outside to do what it did. (There could be some debate over what forcing means, but I'll let that go for now.)
However, saying that something has free will destroys the border between the inside and the outside, and yet still intends to describe the idea of choice versus forcing without that border. What destroys the border? Acting of your own free will is obviously not permanent, meaning you can be forced, meaning that sometimes you act of your own free will and sometimes you don't. Having free will is not dependent on circumstances... that is, it's not dependent on whether something outside you is forcing you... and this distinction blows everything up. If you can be forced but still have free will, then what does it mean? It's interesting to note that sometimes people are said to lose their free will by being mentally incompetent, which brings me to my next point.
Having free will is said to be having self control, though people would probably say that they sometimes do and don't have self control, whereas free will is something more permanent. But even if you draw a distinction between self control and free will, they have the same basic premise, which is that you can control yourself. She told me that I must be of the opinion that we are like computers in carbon form, that we don't really have a choice. I didn't and often don't get much chance to explain that this is not at all what I think, because I don't believe that computers have no choices, and also because I don't think that free will has a meaning, which means that I will disagree with someone who says that people don't have free will just as much as I will disagree with someone who says we do. I'm using "disagree" liberally here, because you don't really disagree with someone when you think that their statement has no meaning, or maybe more specifically, you don't disagree with what they're saying, you disagree with their implied premise that what they're saying means something.
Self control, or freedom of choice, or free will as an attribute of a thing, rather than as a state of a system, both implies an inside and an outside, and also rejects it. If I have free will, there must be a "me" that controls or chooses and an "everything else" which I have some control or freedom from. But since the control is over myself, as in I am not a "machine" and therefore don't have to do whatever I'm programmed to do, it makes me the inside and the outside. If I have control over myself, then I can do whatever I want... but how can I want anything unless there is some part of me that has that want to begin with, and then I must either have control over that part, over what I want or how I try to get it, or I am ultimately powerless. If I have control over that part of me that wants something, then what is the basis of how I control it? Some other wants or habits that are even deeper that are more me? Or the same wants and habits as the ones I'm controlling? It's a paradox.
People don't seem to take time into account. What I decide isn't instantaneously implemented. I may be able to change everything about me, but that change takes some amount of time, even if it's just a decision to change my mind and it only takes microseconds. There is still a "me" making up my mind, and then a different "me" microseconds later whose mind has been made up. This isn't self control, it is control over what you will become. Again, how can you say that you have control if your decisions are made by you, and you did not decide to be the way you were when you made the decision? Or maybe you did, but it took time, which means you decided it in the past, and when you did your decision was based on who you were then, and perhaps who you were then was your decision, but it was a decision you made before that, which took time... eventually you must get to the point where something outside you made the decision about who you were, either because you let go of control for a few seconds, or because you were a fetus and your brain just now started working.
I think I'm realizing that I explained this before. But to summarize: You only have control over anything to the extent that there is something about you, some particulars about the way you are that decide what to do with those things. Without those particulars, you're just random, and not many people would consider a random thing to be in control. And when you have those particulars, and something must have control over what those particulars are. And that may be the other you that existed just fraction of a second before that, but that you had it's own particulars, and so on. Unless you have been alive forever, and always exercising control over what you will be, you are ultimately not in control... of anything. Ultimately you are not in control, but just like pretty much everything there is, you have proximate control over many things... but only the fate of the future of those things.
It's interesting to think what it would mean if you had lived forever and always controlled who you were. I'm inclined to think that that isn't really control either.
Actually, what's even more interesting is to get back to the idea of being forced. There are definitely things, like computers, that can be isolated from the outside world in such a way that nothing outside of them influences them at all, and they'll just keep on calculating whatever it is they are calculating forever, and you can't really say that anything is forcing them to do something because nothing is affecting them. But wouldn't you say that a thing that ignores everything outside of it is a sort of trivial example of free will? Free will should be able to make a decision based on observations, even if those observations don't determine what that thing with free will decides. But how do you draw the line between influence and forcing?
Consider this: If you make a decision based on false information, and because of that end up with a result that you didn't intend, and somebody fed you that false information, who is in control? You can argue that you are in control still, because your decision only took that information into account, there was some internal deliberation that could have gone one way or the other. But again, whatever makes you you is what makes that deliberation either come to a certain result, or makes the result a roll of the dice (if you're in some way random). What makes you you doesn't really free you from being forced, as someone may know enough about you to know how to get you to make the decision they want. If you are random, being random does prevent you from being forced in the sense that it prevents you from arriving at any given decision, but being random is it's own kind of forcing, because then you are at the whim of a dice roll.
Let's take this a step further and suppose that no one manipulated you at all. Does removing that manipulation suddenly mean that you're more free? Or does it just mean that what you are forced to do is was not somebody else's idea? If you get what you want does that mean you weren't forced? If you stand under a falling rock to kill yourself, and change your mind at the last second but can't get out of the way, who is forcing you to die, you, or the falling rock? How can you draw a line between force and influence?
This is all fine and dandy in the abstract, but courts really do have reasons to want to know whether you were forced, and therefore have their own distinction between force and influence, however arbitrary it might be. Mainly, what they really want to know is, what state were you in when you did something, and therefore should they acquit you and go after somebody else, or commit you to an insane asylum, or incarcerate you? Their rather crude distinction helps them determine how to "treat" the problem. Even though incarceration is a stupid treatment, it is still applied to certain people for certain reasons. It is applied to people who were operating under some kind of "normal" state of influence, where it is supposed that the best way to prevent the same thing from happening again is to do something about you instead of something about someone or something else (e.g. the guy that was a holding a gun to your head, or the pothole that threw your car off course and caused you to hit a pedestrian), and that that particular part of you isn't imbalanced in some way changeable by psychiatric methods. (Oddly, to me it seems that "committing the crime" defines a non-normal state of mind (or at least it better!) and therefore means that you must be changeable by psychiatric methods. Arguably, one possible method is just simply punishing you by putting you in jail for a while, which isn't very arguable because it's well known that it doesn't work very well.)
In other words, free will only exists when you define an inside that is making the decision and an outside that it is free from, and define a line between influence and force. There can be a real purpose to defining these things, but to simply say that something has or doesn't have free will, is like saying that something has or doesn't have centimeters, rather than saying that a certain number of centimeters fit between one part of that thing and another part. And that's me crossing that threshold between stating my opinion as an opinion and stating it as a fact. I think I justified it pretty well, but I invite you to tell me how you disagree.
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