My Thoughts About Free Will

Free will is something that is very important to society. It is something that humanity have fought for since the beginning of times. Even in the Holy Bible is said that this ‘free will’ is a real thing. That God gave us free will. But what if we are completely miss understanding the term? What if it actually meant the way ‘free will’ is described to us through Negal’s thoughts? The way he describes it is that we are really not independent when it comes to making decisions. People who think like this are driven by ‘determinism’.

The truth is that I like the way it sounds. I know,  it’s weird that sounds good to me the possiblity that I am not really deciding for myself and that my decision were made long before I was born. But if you ask me, I wouldn’t like to live with the regret of knowing that if i had chosen differently about something everything would have been better. Actually I feel some sort of security knowing that I didn’t screw up by deciding wrong. That it was just meant to be. That is what Nagel puts into our heads. I know that a lot of people would not like believing this. But I am pretty sure that in some situations they would wish that this ‘determinism’ would be very real. For example if you were playing in the final game of the Fifa world cup representing your country. The other team makes a foul in their goalkeepers zone and the referee calls it a penalty.

You are the one that is going to make the shot. Your coach, your team, and even your entire country counts on you. So there you are, ‘deciding’ whether to aim to the goalkeeper’s left or to his right. You are really nervous. Everything you have worked for your entire life is finally going to be tested. So finally you decided to choose to go for the left side and guess what happens? The goalkeeper decided to go to the left too and he stops your shot. Thanks to that your team lost. Then comes the important question. Would you like to carry with that level of guilt through your entire life knowing that you actually could have picked to aim to the right? Or would you prefer to know that there was no other way.

That it was meant to be and is actually not your fault? I think that the answer is very simple right? I don’t know, maybe this ideology was made just so people could defend their choices by taking out their responsibility for their acts. So people could take advantage of this way of thinking. The truth is that I don’t really know, And I am not sure if I want to know. Now, wouldn’t this make life so much boring? I mean, when we are making important decisions we really think about it, we give it a lot of importance, because we know that whatever we decide is going to have consequences and we don’t want to live with the guilt of a very bad consequence based on the decision we decided to make.

Personally, I think that I am going to stick with the idea that everything that happens, happens for a reason. That is was meant to be. I am not saying that I am some kind of robot that is wired to follow a series of decisions that were made for me long before I was even born. What I am trying to say is that I don’t have to feel bad for my decisions. I know the kind of person that I am. So if at the time I made a decision I thought it was good and the appropriate one to do. I don’t have the need to feel any kind of guilt with the outcome and consequences of this decision.