Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

before we can make any further progress. There’s the need to tackle the thorny issue of whether we’re actually free to make choices of any kind.

From the scientific perspective — or so it is usually supposed — since subjectivity is really an illusion, then so too is free will. What appears to be the free agency of subjects is actually derived from the ‘materialism’ (or ‘physicalism’) of the universe and, as such, is completely restrained — determined — thus ‘determinism’. Free will versus determinism is usually therefore the core of the free will debate.

Determinism is the theory that all our mental states and acts, and all our choices and decisions, are effects determined by preceding causes. As we’ve seen above, this is usually as a result of a reductive materialism, meaning just that it was the arrangement of matter at the start of the universe that determined all future events. So the relationship of matter in cause and effect suggests a very deterministic view of reality. If matter were indeed to be related in this way then it would suggest that all our actions would be strictly determined by the behaviour of physical matter. There would thus be no room for free will. All this is despite Einstein, and the idea that causes and effects may not follow in the same order for different observers.

Quantum theory, in some respects, undermines the strict cause and effect relationship between events in the universe. Famously, of course, quantum physics has introduced a substantial element of uncertainty into the universe. There’s

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