Choosing between Free Will and Nihilism:

The implicit message in the title is not lost on me, it represents a fundamental problem I continuously run into. Many of the arguments against free will explain why you should not believe in it, ironically enough as if it’s a choice. Perhaps this is just a remark on our language’s limitations, but I think this contradiction connects to a deeper problem. I have yet to determine whether I logically should believe in free will, yet I feel an unbearable need to. Other than the crushing despair I feel upon finding a reasonable argument against free will, I find that I am incapable of living my life without believing it, and I wonder if others feel the same. Choice is a fundamental part of my experience and I believe that this is the reason:

The lack of free will necessitates meaninglessness—our existence serves no purpose, our experience is worthless, our interpretations are figments of the universe’s own imaginings.

Please note that I do not mean to discuss the validity of free will nor it’s moral implications in this post—in fact I think the exercise may be rife with fallacies and biases until we figure out how to fully comprehend or speak of a world without it, something I fearfully hope to move towards with this post.

To further elaborate with examples, my relationship with another person is not the result of our choices, but a result of the past. The future does not depend on whether I choose to keep my values, but on whether the laws of nature determine that I will. In fact, the future may already exist and my experience of my life’s sequence of moments is an accidental and ultimately arbitrary result of matter interacting. In this sense, time lacks any meaning other than the current location of our consciousness—according to the material universe, none of it is changeable, it has all already happened. Deterministic fate seems to offer no meaning, it’s simply what is, was, and will be. Our experience is an accident and our interpretation of it has no consequence on it; in fact, our apparent “interpretation” is just another accidental consequence of it, it doesn’t even come from our experience.

In the “present moment” as I designate it, the post I am making doesn’t mean what I think it does. Rather than starting a discussion or introducing others to my opinions and new information, I am simply experiencing something I was always going to do. Without my agency, this post effectively has the same meaning as something I’ve already done. My experience of this writing won’t affect what is being written—even writing this I find it hard to remove myself from the picture completely. Surely feeling a need to write that last sentence was caused by my conscious experience of these feelings. Yet, then again, here I am describing a cause and effect relationship. My experience didn’t actually have anything to do with writing, I was just experiencing the bit of cognitive dissonance my neurons went through when my body was writing.

To put it more clearly/succinctly, nothing my consciousness “does,” in that it is something that experiences a sequence of feelings and thoughts, can ever affect itself or it’s surroundings. I feel it necessary to note here that I have not (nor have I tried to) disprove either free will or nihilism. As far as I can tell upon rereading this, I don’t see any contradictions or arguments against either side. I think this discussion may have rather lead to a nihilistic definition of identity: we are not the script writers, I neglect to say we are even the actors; rather, we are a captive audience without even hands to applaud or tears to cry. The audience does not have their own opinions, nor are the actors aware of their existence. The actors may believe in free will or not, but the audience simply just watches their reasonings unfold. Even Camus’s Sisyphus is actually just an actor, with his audience just feeling it’s predetermined scorn against fate. Perhaps “my” actor just happened to look at its audience and was influenced to believe that it was one and the same with itself… As far as I can tell, this seems to be a perfectly valid view of the experiential self.

Personally, I much prefer the identity given by free will. Even a restrained free will, influenced by biology and the intricate web of causality, allows much more meaning than existence in a superdeterminate block universe. This utter lack of meaning is the reason that I am more willing to accept an illusion if that is the truth, even though such an act goes against nearly all of my values. Furthermore, I find myself simply incapable of separating my experience from the world’s happenings even in the language I use, though I made an attempt through metaphor.