Is free will deterministic? – Raghava Deepak

Free will is the evaluation or assessment of an incident and assembling an opinion from the residues of past experiences and memory. All memory is the accumulation or leftovers of cause & effect. This evaluation or assessment as it originates from the residue of cause & effect becomes another cause for another effect. 

The effects are dream-like projections because the censor or examiner has interpreted the incident depending on his/her likes and dislikes which themselves are just the remains of accumulated past.

Hence the action of free will can never be wholesome or complete and it is always limited. One must realize that one is never free to interpret or form an opinion within thought (free will) as thought itself is stuck in a cause-and-effect loop. 

If free will is the preparation of oneself for death then can it be free? Can one prepare for death? If death is the wiping away of all those realities that one has acquired as a means of security, can one understand death with an interpretation of it? If one prepares oneself for death with some kind of security, and when death strikes as it is striking every moment, the preparation or the cause must invariably become another effect perpetually stuck in time. 

Fearing to die to truth is fearing to live in truth hence due to this fear, one is everlastingly stuck in sorrow, dejection, and disillusionment. In simple terms, when one expects something to happen in a certain way, that itself is the cause, and that itself is the effect because there is the process of choice involved, that is, the choosing about something as to what to happen or not to happen. 

And if it happens according to the likes then the cause becomes an effect which the personality considers to be “positive” and if it happens according to the dislikes then the cause becomes an effect which the personality considers to be “negative”. 

Both cases are dream-like false projections or abstractions of an entity stuck in time or a cause-and-effect loop. By the action of free will (cause & effect loop is the free will) one has shrunken and limited one’s view with the probabilities and improbabilities of causes & effects without making space for seeing something new. 

The action of choice in free will continuously makes the mind mechanistic by projecting illusory abstractions making the mind insensitive and dull. 

So the ultimate question is what happens to an entity that dies without causes or effects. Any answer to this question from the action of choice or the past background is again limited and hence inadequate. The ever-changing flow of reality is in constant flux bringing in the necessity of dying to every moment. 

But illusory free will is perpetually trying to grapple an elusive future or abstraction by the action of choice always fearing death or unwilling to drop the known or the cause-and-effect loop. Hence free will is always limited and mechanistic as it is always assessing the probabilities and one who is stuck within this delusion can never be vulnerable to life.

About the author

Deepak is a philosophy enthusiast who aims to study the subject academically. In his daily life, he writes down his thoughts as a form of inquiry into the self. A lot of his writings are a form of meditation.