Jim asked:

If, as many claim, we are not free, where do you suppose we even get the idea of "freedom" from? (I
asked a former philosophy teacher this, and he just said he didn't know.)

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This is a harder question than it looks. When asked by a philosopher, "What makes you think you
have free will?", we are tempted to stage a demonstration: "See? I moved my arm. No-one made me
do it. I did it all by myself!"

Let's look at this. First, it's not clear what is meant by 'the idea of freedom'. You could be asking, Why
is it that we believethat we have free will? Or you could be asking, Why is it that when we act it
appearsto us that we have free will? On the face of it, those are two different questions.

When someone makes a claim about the way things appear, one has to ask, How would things
appear otherwise? Consider the following thought experiment. Alice is looking at her reflection in the
looking glass.

"Did you know," we say to Alice, "that there is really another world on the other side of the glass,
where everything is topsy-turvy and back to front?"

"No, really? Can I go through?"

"Just try. Push the glass as hard as you can."

"When I push, Alice in the Looking Glass world pushes just as hard against me!"

"Exactly. But have you thought of this. When moved your hand, it was becauseLooking Glass Alice
moved her hand. When you had the thought, 'I'll try to move my hand,' it was becauseLooking Glass
Alice had the thought, 'I'll try to move my hand'."

"I don't believe you! You've got it all wrong! When I move my hand, that causesAlice in the Looking
Glass world to move her hand. When I have the thought, 'I'll try to move my hand' that causesAlice in
the Looking Glass world to have the thought, 'I'll try to move my hand'...."

We know what to say to Alice:

"How wouldit appear to you if Looking Glass Alice's actions were the cause of your actions, or if
Looking Glass Alice's thoughts were the cause of your thoughts?"

There is no answer to that, because there isno difference in the appearances. In other words, it does
not appearto us that we have free will. But surely, even if it does not appear to us that we have free
will, we believethat we have free will?

If I believe that there are fairies at the bottom of my garden, then even if it is part of my belief that the
fairies will never appear — let's say that they are invisible fairies — then at any rate I must be able to
point to something in the world that would not have been there, had there not been any fairies. (Say,
the fairies help with little gardening chores, deftly picking out weeds, protecting the roses from green
fly.)

But there is nothing in the world that I can point to, that would be different, depending on whether or
not I had free will. That is the force of the classic, Humean dilemma posed by opponents of free will:
'If determinism holds, then your actions are not free because they are determined. If determinism fails
to hold, then your actions are not free because they are not determined.' In the light of this, one
doesn't know what it would mean to say that we believethat we have free will.

That's not the end of the argument. But I would venture the speculation that if we could give a
coherent account of 'where the idea of free will comes from', that would go a long way towards
resisting the classical argument against freedom of the will.

Geoffrey Klempner