Discussion Post: On Free Will, Determinism, and Pushing the Boulder Anyway

The question of who authors our destiny is, to put it plainly, a difficult one. If I’m being honest, I don’t think I can resolve the determinism debate with any certainty—I’m a data analyst, not a physicist or a professional philosopher. But I can share where my thinking has landed and why.

Logically, I can follow a chain of causes. I can observe that my choices emerge from prior states—my upbringing, my neurochemistry, the coffee I had this morning. Extrapolate that out to a ten-thousand-foot view, and the troubling implication is that everything I think and do might be bound by determinism. The currently accepted scientific line seems to be that consciousness is an “emergent property” of the brain, which, while true, doesn’t feel particularly helpful for answering the question of agency.

I’ll admit I like the idea that this emergent consciousness somehow allows for something resembling libertarian free will—that we are more than sophisticated meat-machines running predetermined code. But I hold that loosely. My inability to conceive of how genuine freedom could arise from physical processes is not evidence for any particular conclusion.

What I am more confident about is that invoking a deity does not help resolve this problem. If we’re speaking of the typical “triple-omni” Christian God—omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent—the problem becomes worse, not better. If God is truly omniscient, He knows exactly how everything will unfold, past, present, and future. This means He created people He knew would become child murderers. He designed a world “just for us” while riddling it with diseases He knew we would contract and suffer from. The doctrine of divine omniscience, to my mind, leads directly to a form of theological determinism that is far more troubling than any materialist version.

So where does that leave me? Closest to Humanism and Compatibilism, though with an Absurdist inflection.

Dr. Furedi argues that humans are the authors of their own destiny (Furedi, 2013a), and this resonates deeply with my secular worldview. I reject the idea that the gods, fate, or any cosmic plan writes my story. The American Humanist Association captures this well: Humanism is “a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism or other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity” (American Humanist Association, n.d.). But I also want to complicate the Humanist answer slightly, because I’ve spent considerable time in this program arguing that “flourishing is a luxury.” A child born into poverty, lacking access to healthcare and quality education, is operating within constraints I do not face. Are they the “author” of their destiny in the same sense I am? Formally, yes. Practically, no. The authorship is shared—sometimes dominated—by systemic forces beyond their control.

This is where the Stoic framework remains indispensable for me. The Stoics distinguished between what is “up to us” (eph’ hēmin)—our judgments, our responses, our character—and what is not: the external world, other people, the circumstances of our birth (Aurelius, 2002). We may not control the hand we’re dealt, but we always retain the freedom to choose how we respond to it. This is, perhaps, the only thing we truly control.

And this is where my Absurdism slots in. Camus wasn’t particularly interested in resolving the metaphysical puzzle of determinism. He was interested in how we act in the face of an indifferent universe (Camus, 1991). The answer, for me, is the same regardless of whether my choices are “truly” free in some ultimate sense: I push the boulder. I try to be a good father. I try to build something more just. And when I encounter a fellow struggler, I pause to help them with their boulder too.

Is this a satisfying philosophical resolution? Probably not. But I’m skeptical that the free will question has a practically meaningful answer. Knowing definitively whether we’re determined wouldn’t change how I parent my daughter or how I show up at work. What it could do is justify horrible acts (“I had no choice”) or suck the joy out of life. So I’ll leave the 3 a.m. metaphysics to the professional metaphysicians and focus on the struggle itself—which, as Camus reminds us, is enough to fill a heart.

References

American Humanist Association. (n.d.). Definition of humanism. https://americanhumanist.org/what-is-humanism/definition-of-humanism/

Aurelius, M. (2002). Meditations (G. Hays, Trans.). Modern Library. (Original work published ca. 180 C.E.)

Camus, A. (1991). The myth of Sisyphus and other essays (J. O’Brien, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1942)

Furedi, F. (2013a). Alternative lectures: What is humanism (Part 1) [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGs_Q2mfb0E