Sözler ve Alıntılar
Yapmayı seçtiğiniz şeyleri yapabilirsiniz; ama ne yapmayı seçeceğinizi seçemezsiniz.
Imagine that a person claims to have no need to eat food of any kind—rather, he can live on light.From time to time, an Indian yogi will make such a boast, much to the merriment of skeptics. Need-less to say, there is no reason to take such claim sseriously, no matter how thin the yogi. However, a compatibilist like Dennett could come to the charlatan’s defense: The man does live onlight—we all do—because when you trace the origin of any food, you arrive at something that depends on photosynthesis. By eating beef, we consume the grass the cow ate, and the grass ate sunlight. So the yogi is no liar after all. But that’s not the ability the yogi was advertising, and his actual claim remains dishonest (or delusional). This is the trouble with compatibilism. It solves the problem of “free will” by ignoring it.
Her halükârda etkin olarak istediklerimi yapmaya meyilliyim. Ve neyin etkin olacağına karar veremediğim gibi, isteklerimi de önceden belirleyemem. Benim zihni dünyam çok basit bir şekilde bana kozmos tarafından sağlanmıştır. Neden su yerine meyve suyu içmeye karar vermedim? Hiç aklıma gelmedi. Peki yapabileceğim ama aklıma gelmeyen şeyleri yapmakta özgür müyüm? Kesinlikle hayır.
Even if the human mind were made of soul-stuff, nothing about my argument would change. The unconscious operations of a soul would grant you no more freedom than the unconscious physiology of your brain does.
If you pay attention to your inner life, you will see that the emergence of choices, efforts, and intentions is a fundamentally mysterious process.
Martin Heisenberg
The biologist Martin Heisenberg has observed that certain processes in the brain, such as the opening and closing of ion channels and the release of synaptic vesicles, occur at random, and cannot therefore be determined by environmental stimuli. Thus, much of our behavior can be considered truly “self-generated”—and therein, he imagines, lies a basis for human freedom. But how do events of this kind justify the feeling of free will? “Self-generated” in this sense means only that certain events originate in the brain.
How can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t. To say that “my brain” decided to think or act in aparticular way, whether consciously or not, and that this is the basis for my freedom, is to ignore the very source of our belief in free will: the feel-ing of conscious agency. People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about.