Do you think there’s a free will? If you had to bet on your opinion, how would your bet look like?

If I was asked to make a bet, I would definitely bet on the existence of a free will, although I can’t be sure whether it exists.

But why is that? Am I some crazy gambler or am I just stupid? Well I’m not sure about those two points but I got some good reasons to bet on the existence of a free will.

What Does Free Will Mean?

First I need to make clear what I mean by free will.

Free does not mean completely free. It’s easy to see why there can’t be such a thing as a completely free will: There are just too many things that influence or choices: Genes and society for example. Plus, there are other restrictions due to our body and environment. (Read my article Limitations of the Free Will for a more detailed explanation of that.)

So free means free within limits. The important thing isn’t that we’re not influenced or not restricted in any way, it’s that we still have a choice to make consciously.

Why I Would Make the Bet

I said I got good reasons to bet on the existence of a free will. So I won’t keep them a secret.

Here’s why I would make the bet:

• What happened if I won my bet: I’d win the stakes. Yeah, and I got a free will to decide what to do with it. Would be great for me, wouldn’t it?
• Now let’s see what happened if I lost my bet: Alright, I’d lose my stakes, whatever this would be. In any normal situation, I would be disappointed because of my loss. But remember, having lost my bet would mean there would be no free will. So what would it actually matter? If there’s absolutely no free will, then there’s no sense. The winner of the stakes could take the stakes but he got no free will to decide what to do with it. Would be great for him, wouldn’t it?

All in all, it’s either win or draw. Because nothing really matters if there’s no free will.

Noone can die.

But people can still get hurt. And they never recover from some diseases. So they collect all possible diseases and injuries during their eternal lifes. Sooner or later they all loose their senses and just live because there’s no way to die. Totally malformed beings as the result of car crashes, brawls, bacteria etc. Unable to walk, speak or see. Human trash labeled as living.

Only young, careful or lucky people look like normal human beings. Sounds horrible, right?

Alright, let’s make some additional assumptions:

Noone can get hurt. And your body doesn’t get older. I mean, you grow until you are an adult but from that point on your body doesn’t change. So you can’t become sick and your senses remain intact forever. (We’ll ignore the fact that the body has to change to form memories and interact with the world…)

There are some funny results of those assumptions. People have no need to eat or drink. They don’t have to use stairs if they don’t mind the pain. There’s no need to breathe. You can finally get real drunk without having to fear the negative consequences alcohol usually has on your body. You can do pretty much anything without having to fear any negative consequences, right?

False. You can still get imprisoned, tortured or buried. You don’t die, but you know what pain is. If you don’t care for your future your life can be like hell. Eternal pain.

But maybe you’re lucky and don’t need to suffer a lot. There’s still one major problem:

Earth happens to be pretty crowded if noone wants to make room for future generations. People are not smart enough to reduce the birth rates to 0. So population is growing. And growing. And growing. You can shoot some people into space but there’s not enough fuel for it to be effective.

Sooner or later some people need to be placed on top of others because of the limited space. You can’t move no more. If you’re unlucky you’re not on top and have to carry other people 24/7.

If you’re not mad already, you’re probably sick of this eternal life. Maybe you even contemplate suicide. No, I was just kidding around, you don’t know what suicide is.

After a while, there are so many people that you could try to jump out of earth’s gravitation field from the top of them. But be careful not to land on a sun.

What can we say about free will? What can we really know about it?

The concept of a completely free will is completely unrealistic. There are just too many influences and restrictions:

• Biological influences: Our genes form the blueprint of our body. Without genes, we would have no body and therefore no brain to make decisions with. You don’t even have to take it to the extreme. Take being tall as an example. It can certainly give you some additional possibilities or at least have an effect on your decisions.
• Social influences: Parents, school, society in general, they all teach you morals which strongly influence the way you make decisions. And they also affect your general attitude.
• Past experiences: Your memories influence your present state of mind. And your present state of mind contributes to the decision making process. Past accidents can also effect your will in a special way, if they happened to hurt your brain for example.
• Environmental influences: Decisions are always related to an outside world with which you interact, so your will needs to be dependent on something external. This is why complete freedom of will would be paradoxical from the very beginning. In fact, it is only because of your environment that you have decisions to make.

This list might even be incomplete, so you see, an independent will doesn’t exist for some good reasons.

But can we still have a free will?

I say yes. It can still be free within borders. The important thing is that you can make a conscious choice. You might not have all the choices that you can think of, but you have choices. Of course, I can’t really prove that. But it wouldn’t matter anyway if I was wrong, would it?

Could I possibly be a brain, wired to another brain, the “antibrain”?

Like two computers. Linked together. Think of it as two computers sending information to each other. The antibrain and me, both of us are computers. I play the role of the user and send data to the antibrain, which runs a world simulation. The user interface could be something like synapses of my brain. It doesn’t even need to be something like synapses, as the antibrain creates everything I consider to be real and I can’t perceive anything else. I could be a mere sophisticated computer as well, still thinking that I’m a human being. God is the allmighty programmer who hopefully pays the bills for my power supply.

Pretty sick, right? But why should you believe in such a silly stuff? The strange thing is that the only way our brains interact with the outside world is by synapses. They receive patterns and interpret them. They send some patterns and then they receive some again. That’s how things really work. Our brains process data in different areas so it might happen that some signals are perceived as a smell for example. But basically it’s all the same kind of neuronal activity. Our brains create the model of a certain smell. We create our own reality.

So how can we know that the outside world is more than a mere simulation created by an antibrain and sent to our synapses (or the like)? I don’t think we can know it at all. We can only process information we receive. But there could be a whole universe sitting next to us and we wouldn’t notice it if we had no senses to perceive it.

This should provoke some thoughts! Think about reality for example. Is a simulation real enough to be named reality? Is there some higher level of reality? Think about the world. Try to go new ways. Speculate. I don’t want to tell you that the brain antibrain theory is the only possible truth, it might even be disprovable, but I want you to think.