Why I believe in Freewill

It seems to me that a thorough going determinism has two choices when it comes to the Good and the Beautiful. The first is to say these are contingent truths that necessarily arise out of prior states going back to the beginning of time. The alternative is that they play no part in a deterministic explanation of how things are. We can construct a complete explanation of the causes of things without any reference to the Good and the Beautiful.

For first argument that the Good is simply what I (or the current majority of mankind) believes at this moment seems to have some flaws or at least be somewhat unattractive to me as does the notion that the Good and the beautiful can have emerged deterministically independent of any human thought. It seems notable to me that when determinism tries to reach for practical social conclusions it reaches for a version of the good that largely relates to being healthy human beings as though these are self evident truths, largely a rehashing of 21st century western moral nostrums like latter day Thomas Jeffersons thinking fine language makes truths eternal.

The argument we could provide an explanation without reference to the good and the beautiful feels more promising. We expect to produce a scientific theory of everything without reference to either. The challenge here is why this might be a better explanation than one than evokes the good and the beautiful. The value of science is usually it produces predictable outcomes. But most determinists recognise this is certainly practically impossible at the moment and quite possibly simply impossible and probably unethical ( The good sneaks in again).

Perhaps it’s a better explanation because it’s got more truthiness. It gets behind the facade of things to how the neurobiology actually functions. The Good and the Beautiful are just in this analysis illusions created by consciousness to explain processes of which consciousness is at best dimly aware. But these illusions are where life is lived and when we strip them away our explanations do not improve in any practical way. In fact they seem to me to risk getting worse, since we believe our truths are deep infallible truths they must be right and everyone else’s wrong. Yet views on the good and the beautiful do differ and those differences surely create something worthwhile, they animate society and discourse encourage us to be cautious about our own certainties, open to alternative ways of seeing and changes in our values.

So I think of freewill, what the determininists might call illusion, as a model. The map is not the territory but in order to traverse the terrain a map is a mighty helpful thing to have.