The Mute Chess Player

It's the time of year that compels people to start revising, reading over work that has taken them nine months to begin to understand, and prepare to blurt it all out over a couple of hours, in order to get some recognition. In other words, it's exam season for a lot of people. This means that I come across a lot of things in my Philosophy that I had forgotten about. It's odd to think that I let some of it pass by, though, because looking back so much of it seems questionable. It's a difficult subject to study, because it's very easy to disagree with any amount of what you have to learn. Let's take Free Will for the purposes of this post. The 'Free Will debate' is a huge problem for pretty much anyone who wants to believe in god. In particular, modern monotheism - i.e. Christianity - which has many contradictions in its beliefs concerning human freedom. The basic problem arises when you take God knowing everything, and you having free will. Free will, it is held, means that you are able to do other than you actually do. But if God knows for certain what you will do, this implies that you don't have a choice to not do it. Your actions are determined. Are they? Well, before we address that question, we should probably look at another part of the problem. The aforementioned problem only arises beccause of Church doctrine. If you're not a Christian, or not a monotheist, there isn't really a problem. We're free. But lately, thinkers have been coming up with theories that spread a little doubt onto that. Freedom means that we are responsible for our actions. But advances in sociology, psychology and biology suggest that we're really just a series of causes and effects. I'm sitting here now, writing this, without having freely chose it. Your reading this is not a choice - it's a compilation of your upbringing, your society, your genes, your education. You had no say in the matter. But before you start considering ritual suicide, or sit down and wait for Fate to come and kick you along in life, you need to consider carefully what that all really means. The problem, in my opinion, comes when you consider what kind of a system would have to be in place for us to not have Free Will. Let's imagine two situations. The first is Eastenders, and the actors in them. The second is the monsoon season over in South-east Asia. Let's consider that one of the leading actors in Eastenders gets killed off, in the script, by another character. In this case, the actor has been manipulated by another power - in this case, the scriptwriters - and has been controlled into this deadly situation. It's a case of Manipulative Determinism, if you will. However, in the second case we see that a series of events (namely, the birth of a person in SE Asia, the weather systems leading up the monsoon) leads to the drowning of a child in a deluge induced by the monsoon. Is it fair, in this case, to say that the child was manipulated into dying by this system of events? Certainly, the child had no choice over the monsoon, or where she was born, but the system is altogether passive. It just happens, and the effects of it similarly happen. This might seem like a minor distinction, but it's actually crucial to that half of the Free Will debate. The issues with the monotheistic God are hard to solve, but the Causation problems are simple - they can be ignored. We are as good as free because, though there is a system of cause and effect that regulates all of our actions, it is a 'dead' system. It has no purposes, it just happens. And therefore, the healthiest action we can take is to ignore it, and accept responsibility for our own lives. That is not to say that Atheists get off lightly in general. Sartre, for one, would think that accepting responsibility to be quite difficult. But it does show how sometimes, philosophers can worry a little too much.