Human Free Will and Causality

Near the end of the February 20 class the discussion centered around the materialist idea that living organisms are nothing more than “inanimate mechanisms” (page 192 of OPAR). Jon pointed out that “atomism” was a type of materialism and determinism both of which (perhaps in an attempt to be scientific) denied human free will.Objectivism holds that human volition is “a self-evident fact, available to any act of introspection” (pg 70), a “philosophical axiom” (same page) and “is not an independent philosophical principle, but a corollary of the axiom of consciousness” (page 71). I need to think more about this but what I have found to be a compelling argument against determinism is the Objectivist view of the law of causality as “the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act: a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature” (page 15). This contrasts with what Peikoff says has been a misinterpretation of causality – “Since the time of the Renaissance, it has been common for philosophers to speak as though actions directly cause other actions, bypassing entities altogether.” (page 16). In other words, just as Einstein discovered that Newtonian physics was a narrow subset (applicable only under certain conditions) of a more generalized physics, Objectivism has discovered that the common (mis)understanding of causality is incorrect in that it is too narrow – it considers only motions of entities and not the entities themselves. With the Objectivist view of causality, the human brain (entity) has evolved such that human consciousness is capable of causing conceptual thought.