People have little choice over the circumstances they are born into- even less do we have a choice about being born in the first place. Life and its trials are unceremoniously thrust upon us.
Most people, if asked, would not want to end their lives. Sure enough, time inevitably breeds vanity as a survival mechanism in all of us.
It is a very different question to ask if someone would’ve preferred not to have been born at all. Many people who are not suicidal would still, if they had the power to turn back time, wish to prevent their birth.
To me this speaks of a fundamental lack of freedom. If we continue to amble along the path of life, we are sure to meet our fate at the hands of the world which forced us into it.
My question: is it feasible to commit suicide, not as an act of despair, not as an expression of depravity, but as the celebration and exercise of our one and only true freedom?
25 comments
Amen-preach it brethren. Yes you have some great points there. Suicide boils down to freedom. The right to end it if they dont want to go on. I support that freedom fully and I have issues with anything that stands in the way of that freedom.
“Many people who are not suicidal would still, if they had the power to turn back time, wish to prevent their birth.”
First of all there is no empirical evidence to support this claim. And secondly from my personal experience I can assure you that the majority of non-suicidal people would NOT prevent their birth if they had a chance to do so somehow.
About your question: You totally have the right to suicide out of your personal freedom as much as you have the right to continue living. Nevertheless I don’t think the best motivation for suicide is just to portray one’s ultimate freedom. Suicide in itself may be an act of freedom, but the reasons why you are suicidal are related to situations and aspects of your life where you weren’t and aren’t completely free to choose whatever you like.
Being born is a lack of freedom? What if you weren’t born? Would you be free then? Could you even experience something as freedom if you wouldn’t exist? Obviously not, freedom is something only living beings can experience (if “you” don’t exist there is nothing to attribute the property of freedom to). So saying “Being born is a lack of freedom” is pretty paradox, since only through birth are you given the possibility to experience freedom. Whether you are more or less free in this world or not is a totally different question.
People have thought about it, made the choice not to live of their own free will and volition. Seemingly content with the lives they had lived up until that point they decided it was in their best interest to go out on top and in full contemplation of the effect that would have on the people in their life taking into consideration the topic of suicide in a wider context. We know this because they explained it verbally or in writing before they died.
Generally, in the context of freedom people can see sense in the argument that
1) Nobody can own another
2) People tend to value their own lives
Suicidal people are a minority group and most people tend to sympathise with the family members because that’s a position they would relate to and as a result suicide is not an accepted way of going about things or solving ones problems unless you are going to end up in a situation a reasonable person would consider worse than death had they not taken their own life. Even then, you will notice euthanasia isn’t legal in a lot of countries and I suppose that goes back to the first part which is that people empathise but their are limits to their empathy, most religions oppose suicide and it’s also difficult to implement ethically.
I just don’t believe in freedom at all, to be honest. Maybe suicide is as close to freedom as one can get, but one is still restricted to a physical body. We are all atoms basically, and if you look back far enough, how organisms got here can be strange. Was it all chance? If so, then are we free? What if it was not chance, but divine intention? Are we free then?
I will also argue that we cannot control our brains. Consciousness comes after existence, therefore, when we kill ourselves, we are basically being slaves to our suicidal particles. Bleh.
You have no control or choice when it comes to being born. You cannot choose who your parents will be or what sort of environment you’re born into. You have very limited “freedom” for the first part of your life. You are dependent on the people who brought you into this world (without asking for your permission first).
You could be born into slavery without any reasonable chance of being liberated. Most people (in my opinion) are born into slavery but they convince themselves that they’re “free”. – Go to school, get a job, find a mate, procreate. –
I suppose there are people who opt out because they’re disinclined to participate. Not everyone wants to get married, have kids, buy a house, get into debt, keep up with the Jones’, etc. There are people who don’t share the same motivational drivers are the majority of humanity. These people must be “insane” because they don’t want to live a life that the bulk of the population pursues.
To answer your question, yeah, but it’s like casting a protest vote. You’re giving up what’s arguably the most precious thing you’ll ever own (your life) just to establish your own sovereign autonomy. (I can’t really fault anyone for doing that). It is your choice.
depressednihilist is going with hard determinism which means the circumstantial level that everyone else is talking about is moot. I’m a firm believer in hard determinism as well, so I can understand this viewpoint.
Basically, there is no such thing as “free will”. Science / logic / cause-and-effect are the things that control us. Often free will is abscribed to the concept of the “self” and its ability to exert control over its circumstances, but hard determinism dictates that what makes up the self is outside of our control, and therefore everything is outside of our control (no freedom).
To put it simply, we don’t get to decide who or what we are, so we don’t have free will.
I didn’t get to choose to be human, or to choose my personality, or to choose NOT to have a mental disorder. It’s not even possible to do so, since making those choices would require me to exist before I existed. It’s a paradox to choose who you are.
You can’t control the waves in the sea, but you can control your ship as you navigate your way through.
I don’t believe that we’re automatons who are subject to the whim of circumstance. We’re not corks bobbing around in the ocean. We have consciousness, awareness, and an ability to decide how we react to whatever comes our way.
(Unless hard determinism is true – if so, then I was programmed to write the above passage because I have no control over what I think, say or do).
I’m not sure if you were making a counter argument or just stating your beliefs. I’ve yet to hear anything that convincingly proposes the possibility that it isn’t true. I am open-minded, however, and love it when an idea challenges the logic of my beliefs.
Consciousness, awareness and decision-making are all processes that can be explained by determinism.
There is one thing that bothers me, but it isn’t necessarily incompatible with hard determinism. We are the sum of our biological processes. This mishmash of crap going on in our heads and the resulting actions we take create an abstraction that we identify as our personality or “self”. The mystery is that, for me at least (can’t tell about anyone else), I exist – the abstraction exists – as a real experience of the world. We don’t seem to have a specific word for this. Douglas Hofstadter called it “feelium”. We call people who don’t have this attribute “philosophical zombies”. If we made an android that imitated human behavior, we would assume it doesn’t have this, and if we were able to clone ourselves on the atomic level – wholesale, we don’t know who the “real” person would be.
I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure how the hell it happens. Most books I’ve read choose to say it doesn’t exist, but it feels like some kind of cop-out. No one really seems to have any idea, and I suspect it will remain a deep mystery of life, right up there with “how the hell does the universe and all its rules exist?”
You can roll the dice, it lands on a number and people would sooner argue that was chance rather than choosing a card from a deck of cards because we can understand how it came to be where it was. A quantum physicist probably has a better understanding of fate and choice than I do but as long as nobody brings God into this I think we should all be ok. We are all ok aren’t we?
God does not play dice. 😉
^
Apparently he throws them in places we can’t see
@DFF; I just read the Wikipedia entry on hard determinism. It’s an interesting theory, but I reject the notion that everything happens in a predictable, ordered, seemingly immutable way. I believe in cause and effect, but the problem with hard determinism is it fails to take into account the role humans play in altering an outcome via free will. There are no certainties in life; life does not follow a pre-ordained script. We’re not a bunch of dominos that have been lined up and are ready to get knocked down by the falling domino behind us, only to knock down the one in front of us.
I do believe we have some (albeit limited) control in deciding our own fate. HD suggests that we’re pre-programmed biological machines that react predictably to external stimuli; we have no control, we’re just knee jerk reactionaries. I can’t get on board with that. 🙂 I choose free will.
People say a choice is a choice because you had the option of doing something else. When people contemplate suicide they can make a choice that they may consider better than living but it wouldn’t necessarily be their ideal choice. That’s usually why they commit suicide in the first place. A choice nonetheless but circumstances no ordinary person would want to find themselves in. It’s a cruel world isn’t it
But how do you know you’re actually making a choice and not simply reacting in a predictable manner? What if your “choice” was written into the script and you’re merely an actor playing his part?
(I don’t actually believe that).
@C4, I like how you are playing the hard determinist. I don’t need to say anything!
It does make it sound like someone committing suicide is nothing more than a character in a tragic story. It’s like art. Brings a tear to my eye.
There are three types of people in this world. The ones who believe in destiny, those who like to be in control of their lives and those who don’t really care. The beginning of the universe set in motion a series of events which resulted in what we are experiencing now. A theoretical physicist might say that wasn’t the moment that resulted in the current state of affairs but a series of events which occurred independently.
Determinism may be correct although in my opinion that’s not the case. Science even suggests that our universe is not purely deterministic since according to quantum mechanics at the very lowest level events are random and just have a probability of happening.
So scientifically speaking free will is very well possible, as much as (hard) determinism is. I just hate seeing people who believe in determinism act like science supported their view – it very certainly doesn’t, at least not if you live in the 21st century. Determinism is a belief as much as other religions are.
You are correct. The “random” element was supposedly proven with the double slit experiment. Light is apparently a wave that collapses when observed, though there are still some questions around what the experiment really means.
My question to you is, even with a random factor, how does that impact determinism? Would you say that free will involves spontaneity? That our choices could quite possibly be completely random?
To me, determinism is not so much a belief as it is a perspective. That is the difference between it and religion. One could easily say that free will is nothing more than the ability to choose, regardless of *why* we made a choice. Free will is a poorly defined concept.
“though there are still some questions around what the experiment really means.”
What questions are you talking about?
Determinism says that if you knew the exact locations and momenta of every particle in the universe and you had enough computing power you could precisely predict the future. Quantum mechanics says that this is non-sense since you cannot know the location and momentum of a particle at the same time to infinite precision.
If something like a “soul” exists, defining what free will is will be rather easy (that’s what I believe in as well). If we didn’t have souls (determinism’s point of view) free will can’t have the same definition. Instead you could for example say that free will is the possibility that in two identical environments two identical agents may make two different choices – that’s what quantum mechanics allows (what you described as random factor). In 19th century science this isn’t possible since if the environments and agents are identical the choice has to be identical as well. But like you said; without the existence of souls every definition of free will will be somewhat poor.
“To me, determinism is not so much a belief as it is a perspective.”
I could say the same about being a Christian. What both of us have in common is that we claim something not because of scientific evidence but because of experience, beliefs etc. I don’t see how the concept of your belief is different from mine.
Physicists aren’t agreeing as to what the experiments mean and there are a few theories going around. It gets complicated and very difficult to figure out who is on track. The Bohm Interpretation is one theory that maintains that quantum mechanics isn’t really probablistic at the expense of locality. We also have the multiverse theory.
Actually, I’m getting myself confused now because we are mixing two concepts together. Strictly speaking about free will and souls, what kind of attribute are we gaining from a soul? All we’ve done is shift what needs defining.
About your analogy with the two identical agents – assuming the agents and the environment are perfectly identical, what causes the outcome to be different? The only conceivable thing would be a random factor, but that isn’t really a choice by the agent, but rather determined by some arbitrary rule. Ultimately, your choice is determined by everything else – Genetics, circumstance, god(s), experience, etc.
On determinism – I had to recheck the specifics. Determinism is too specific, and I made the mistake of running with that through this entire thread. I think I was aiming more along the lines of rationalism.
A drug addict chooses to consume drugs, yet they are controlled by their addiction. If it wasn’t for the addiction they probably wouldn’t take the drugs. Are they really exercising free will? Similarly people say they don’t have any control over their lives because their choices are restricted by their circumstances. They might have several options but are forced by the situation they are in to select one of those options; they might have wanted to do something else. This what people here usually mean when they say they don’t have free will.
First of all we have to differentiate between freedom (of action) and free will. A slave for example isn’t free, but he still has free will (if something like that exists).
What is free will? The process of making a decision with free will is a non-deterministic, non-random one not governed by the laws of science. It is something that somehow happens in your soul. What is your soul? “The soul is the incorporeal (and immortal) essence of a person, living thing.” (Wikipedia). Also you can only be held morally responsible for those actions you made with free will.
So overall of free will, soul and morality there can only exist all three simultaneously or none. If they don’t exist then an intrinsic meaning to our lives is very improbable as well. This is probably the strongest definition of free will I could imagine.
I cannot definitely tell you whether this kind of free will exists, it’s just what I and many others believe. Why? Partly because of what you wrote in your second post and partly because of the following: If I imagine I was a warden in a concentration camp 70 years ago, why should I not harass and kill inmates? (This is just the strongest example of acting criminally without having to fear any personal consequences.) Everyone agrees that doing so would be wrong, but why? If the world actually IS random and we humans and the whole universe are just atoms and atoms’ interactions I cannot think of a reason not to do what Nazis did at that time.
I asked this same question someone on SP earlier and he answered: “I don’t treat others like I wouldn’t want to be treated myself.” But he wouldn’t tell me why. Like I found out later he didn’t like what Nazis did in the concentration camps, but he couldn’t find a reason why, so he made up this rule to justify his point of view – claiming that it is only rational and logical to have this rule.
Obviously if we’re only atoms then there is no reason to have such a rule because there would be no “right” or “wrong”. The only criterion to evaluate if you should make a decision is whether you would benefit from doing so. And acting according to this rule will not always result in your profit: The Nazi who harassed his inmates broke this rule but still had a profit from his decision to do so.
Anyhow, neural sciences will maybe be able to answer the question of free will and souls sometime in the future and I am curious if they can. At least they will not prove the existence of a soul but rather rule out such a possibility.
And yes, like you said with two identical agents and environments the outcome will only be determined by a random factor (if free will like I described it above doesn’t exist). Some people still define this as free will, since there is at least the possibility that the agents make different choices, but I don’t think this what we usually mean by free will.
Btw, not many people say this (“I am open-minded, however, and love it when an idea challenges the logic of my beliefs.”), and I am glad you do, because not many people on SP actually allow criticism and challenges to their points of view. To me you seem pretty rational.
Wow that was actually more text than I thought^^
While I agree with Duke, I was not referring to being restricted by our options in any given circumstance. My point was closer to his first sentence in that we are presented false choices because we can only ever choose the one that works with who we are. If you are “this person” and presented with “this” or “that”, then you will do “this”.
You are referring to something irrational when referring to free will, in which case I can’t really argue a point against, nor expect an explanation that makes sense. That’s fine.
My only problem with believing free will exists is that our observations show statistical correlations between the existence of personality types, including mental disorders/illnesses, and certain outcomes. Aspies are more likely to commit suicide, for example. The interactions in the world are extremely complex though so at best we can see a trend and assign a probability. We also know that genetics and parenting style can drastically affect the outcome of the individual.
To truly feel like you don’t have free will though, you need to have a mental disorder. You can bitterly fight it and lose. I went to CBT where the whole thing was basically trying to “rewire” your subconscious to learn new habits and forget the old ones. You can’t just do that “at will”. Some of those behaviors are extremely hard to unlearn.
I don’t know if I truly consider being a “rational agent” a bad thing with the exception that you can be dealt a bad hand and have to deal with it. You are still a real thing. Your thoughts and actions are still real. I don’t think there can be any intrinsic meaning in anything, and I don’t consider that to be a bad thing either. “Meaning” or purpose are things that an agent assigns to something. A human can assign a machine a purpose. God can assign a human a purpose. The human could possibly reject that purpose on the high-level, but more than likely it would end up fulfilling its purpose anyway. Especially since no one would know what their purpose was.
The golden rule is really just a high level concept describing an aspect of how we handle certain situations. We are a social animal and have a natural tendency towards compassion and cooperation. Harming other people can be “bad for business”. You may quickly find yourself alone or around other predators and that could affect chances of survival. This is especially bad if you piss a group of people off and they come after you. Look what we do to troublemakers. We execute them or exile them. Not very good for reproducing those genes. Note that we suddenly lose all of our compassion when it comes to these people. How often do you hear about people wanting to show compassion to a serial killer, thief or pedophile? As for nazis, fear overrides compassion for most people, and they will suddenly sell out their friends and commit atrocities so that they aren’t harmed themselves.
I recommend reading The User Illusion for how our brains interpret reality. It’s a rather fascinating read that brings up more questions.
Another good read is Evidence of the Afterlife, because I’m well rounded like that. The book disappoints me a little bit because it leaves room for doubt, and I’m personally looking forward to the research results of the AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study. They are trying to confirm OBEs using images on the ceilings of hospitals around the world. It is the first study that seems like it might give decent results.
I used to not be open-minded years ago. My first bout of suicidal thoughts happened in my early twenties and I had a dream where someone whispered “You did what you needed to do” loud and clear with no visuals; it was just audio. I bolted awake like never before. I don’t like admitting that it happened because it sounds crazy. I have doubts about it myself for the obvious reasons. Since then, though, I’ve been paying much more closer attention to things and analyzing the possibilities. The message though… I guess I don’t need to be here anymore, and I’m torturing myself needlessly, haha.
I’ve enjoyed talking with you. It is refreshing to hear something different than the usual canned arguments.
I win the wall of text award. Can’t beat me! 😉
No seriously, don’t try.