Is Freedom So Important? Part 1

"Natural selecton is an explosion of evitability"

So said Daniel Dennett in trying to explain that free will may not necessarily be diametrically opposed to determinism. As a 'compatibilist' he asserts that the possibility of free will evolves, in itself, over time. His explanation being that natural selection may have favoured those who were able to make choices in favour of longevity; illustrated by the example of the person who can decide to duck, to avoid being hit by a flying spear.

The problem is that if you decide on a course of action whereby you remain alive and have avoided the option that could have left you for dead, then surely you're just following nature's programmed, deterministic inclination towards survival. Put simply, because of your programming, you never had the choice to ignore instinctive reflexes and allow yourself to be killed by the spear.

Evitability in this case, Dennett explains, is synonymous with avoidability. If something is 'inevitable' then it is 'unavoidable'. Thus further problems arise when you talk about the future as being inevitable... rather it should be individual events that should be assessed as avoidable or unavoidable.

An interesting rationale for support of Dennett's propsal is given in A Case for Free Will AND Determinism, where the author helps to qualify the concept, as follows:

"Causality provides constraints, not unfreedom. Gravity limits the conditions under which a person can fly, but it does not prevent flying."

Still though there are holes here... you can't pick and choose what ares of existence are governed by causality. Picking up from the above comment, the very idea that you might be able to fly in the first place is the result of any number of preceding phenomena. In essence, the Big Bang happened... and everything since has occurred as a direct result. The development of consciousness is as bound to this as anything else.

And so to the multitude of scenarios that have been envisaged for the technologically enhanced future. Singularitarians declare 'inevitability', transhumanists engage immanentisation... the willed bringing about of the apocalypse, the eschaton, the point where all predictive theory breaks down.

No matter how it all pans out though, no matter whether our meagre brains are able to imagine the futurist's future or not, nothing is guaranteed and nothing is out of the question. But just because certain aspects of our future can or can not be avoided, there is no reason to start looking at the results as anything other than the most recent events in a chain of cause and effect that has been extrapolating for the last 14 billion years.

To be continued...