A Commonsense Resolution to the Issue of Determinism versus Rational Agency (aka, free-will)

Larry Reid

doi:10.32996/jhsss.2021.3.2.4

Abstract

This brief is an essay providing newer perspectives than the traditional (often religiously oriented) and modern scholarship on free-will versus determinism. The essay’s scope is confined to biological life on Earth and does not address how the chaos and randomness of the universe had come to have organized planets and suns. Among the issues raised is that willfulness is not free, rather a cost. The assertion is made that the agency allowing humanity to make changes deviating from what the past had wrought is the evolved linguistic skills to communicate first with words, then signs, then with sentences and then exchanging information in paragraphs allowing discussions about how to modify the way being lived which, in turn, led to actions and feedback on the value of their actions, hence progress.

Highlights

1 Some insight on the issues of determinism vs free-will can be garnered from a cursory study of humans’ abilities and limitations as well as consideration of our evolutionary “family-tree.” I explore whether humans have a special feature called free-will, an ambiguous designation carried over from previous centuries’ discussions on “Determinism versus Free-will.”2
The assertion is made that the agency allowing humanity to make changes deviating from what the past had wrought is the evolved linguistic skills to communicate first with words, signs, with sentences and exchanging information in paragraphs allowing discussions about how to modify the way being lived which, in turn, led to actions and feedback on the value of their actions, progress
Summary The idea of free-will has focused on characteristics of an individual human

Summary

Introduction

The assertion is made that the agency allowing humanity to make changes deviating from what the past had wrought is the evolved linguistic skills to communicate first with words, signs, with sentences and exchanging information in paragraphs allowing discussions about how to modify the way being lived which, in turn, led to actions and feedback on the value of their actions, progress. The demonstrations of the power of various schedules of positive, negative reinforcements and punishments led Skinner to conclude, in his remarkable book Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Skinner, 2002), that behavior was determined by happenings with affective consequences to the extent that there was little left for something akin to free-will.

Results

Conclusion