In existentialism free will is taken as a major premise. Without Free Will existentialism is a non-sensical theory. In this paper I will discuss why free will is false, and by extension providing a sufficient reason why existentialism is false.
Fist of all, free will is a dualistic philosophy, in that one’s mind is considered to be separate from one’s body. These two substances are seen as incompatible; not mixing, so not exerting any influence upon one another. Thus if body were to not have a mind, it would behave as causality dictates it to behave, in that for every sensation inputted, a predictable output reaction would ensue. But Free Will states that in the body there does exist a mind, a soul, a consciousness, a ghost in the shell, that dictates what the body does. As such, even though the body is composed of the same substance as everything else, it is still free to will will that is seemingly random thanks to the uninfluencable ghost’s ability to originate will. This ghost inside the machine has the capacity to will from self; will that is original to self; will that does not predate self, because self does not, or rather cannot, predate itself.
Clearly, this notion of free will is erroneous. One’s self–the body, mind, and the mind’s talents- are reactions to a will which is not it’s own; a universal will–creation ex nihilo raises more questions that it does answers. One becomes self-aware because nature makes it possible for man to be man self-aware, and one uses this talent of the mind (self-awareness) to interpret the body’s possibilities post-creation. This means that one is limited to the talents nature has created for them. Thus a person’s amount of choices in any given situation is one, even though to the self which is ignorant of influences being exerted upon it and also ignorance of self’s composition, the choices will seem as having an outcome possibility as more than one. In other words, if a die were tossed and in midair it gained consciousness it would see the outcome as having the possibility of landing one out of six sides, but to an observer having had information such as the force exerted upon the die, gravity’s pull on the die, the surface it lands on, et cetera, the possibility is clear to be one. Similarly, a person ignorant of the immediate forces acting upon him, as well as ignorant of the forces that created what he considers self, will see the possibilities of any given situation as more than one. If one is to assume a monism of the mind, in that the mind is composed of the same substance as the body, then one cannot help but be a determinist in that the mind’s talents, including the notion that one is self-aware, are created by nature. Nature dictates what stimuli the mind receives, and nature determines what actions result. In other words man is an agent of nature.
Free will can also be seen as flawed once one takes into account Einstein’s famous equation E=MC2, in which the universe is made up of one essential substance, energy. Thus the body–all of the body including the mind, is part of the whole—i.e. is the universe. As such, no one’s will can be traced back to one compartmentalized mass in time and space—i.e self. With this conclusion, responsibility for any single action even though that one action might have been seen as having been perpetrated by a single person, does not belong solely to an mass of space arbitrarily inferred to as “self.”
As always, opinoins, criticism, or suggestions are welcomed.
