In 2003 I was a philosophy student and I dreamed of having an academic career, so in my second year of college I published my first text in a student magazine called Čemu. It was called Determinism and Free Will.
The problem of free will still haunts me from time to time throughout my life, as a curse and as an unsolved personal issue.
Last night, after a long time, I got an urge to read a text on free will. Among the books from my student years I found John Searle’s lecture The Freedom of the Will in his book Minds, Brains and Science.
He writes:
“We can’t act otherwise than on the assumption of freedom, no matter how much we learn about how the world works as a determined physical system. (...) For reasons I don’t really understand, evolution has given us a form of experience of voluntary action where the experience of freedom, that is to say, the experience of the sense of alternative possibilities, is built into the very structure of conscious, voluntary, intentional human behaviour. For that reason, I believe, neither this discussion nor any other will ever convince us that our behaviour is unfree.”
It was comforting to read such a powerful statement, that nothing will convince us that our behaviour is unfree.
The rest of the night I spent reading how John Searle sexually harassed, assaulted, and retaliated against female students at UC Berkeley.
Merry Christmas!
Zagreb, 25 December 2021
