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The Case Against Self-Determinism
By Raeden Michelle
April 6, 2008

First, let me define self-determinism. I will use Klemke, Kline, and Hollinger’s definition from their book, Philosophy: Contemporary Perspectives on Perennial Issues:

“All events are caused. But for some events, some human acts, there is no set of antecedent conditions sufficient to produce a given act to the exclusion of all others. In such cases, I act out of free will (110).”

I find issues with this statement from a learning psychologist point of view. To say this would be to deny that in humans, and humans alone, learning and ancestral survival techniques do not exist.

When venturing out to find food, rats will stick to the same pathway every time, even if the food supply dwindles. After an extended period of time without food supply, some rats may venture out and attempt to find a new path to a new source of food. This is a common survival technique in rats, but according to self-determinism, this technique does not exist in humans.

Take, for example, someone new to a large city. Once they find directions to a particular place, that person will generally follow that same path each time. Now let’s assume that this place is their work place and each time they travel this same route, they are late to work. They notice on their map that there are three different ways to reach their workplace. Unless they are comfortable with the city, this person will generally just try to leave their home earlier in order to get to work on time; they will use the same path. After a while, though, they finally decide to branch out and see if one of the other two pathways is safe and quicker. Is this not the same reaction as the rat?

Everything we do has some sort of cause, generally having to do with furthering our survival. Take this next example from Dr. Ken Carter’s Psychology of Learning course. Suppose a student going to college says that he has the free will to choose to continue college or quit. Sure he’s got the freedom to choose to quit, but he won’t. He won’t choose to quit college for a number of reasons, the reason closest to survival being that he needs his college degree to get a better job so that he can afford to live properly.

Even our intuition is wired to pull us towards the choice more likely to further our survival. In David S. Myers’ book Intuition: Its Powers and Perils, Myers explains our body’s way of choosing choices geared toward our survival with a couple of experiments. In one experiment:

“When shown subliminal pictures of spiders and then subjected to electric shocks, some students-those good at guessing their heart rates-could predict the impending shock. Although they never consciously saw the spider, these in-tune-with-their-body students had a gut feeling (28 ).”

And in another passage:

“When meeting a stranger in the forest, one had to instantly assess whether that person was friend or foe. Those who could read a person accurately were more likely to survive and leave descendants…(33).”

In both of these passages, Myers shows how humans learn to adapt to their surroundings and their intuition guides them to the best way of survival. This, is not a show of free will. In fact, this is very much caused by an event, and will, given proper circumstances, continue to turn out in the same fashion as these studies. These studies have been done repeatedly and they repeatedly convey the same interpretations: that humans’ actions are very much linked to underlying processes that will continue to react in the same way given similar instances.

Self-determinism, as it is defined by Klemke et al, does not give room for these phenomena. Therefore, one must alter this definition to include human events as well. Sure, we have the free will to choose between one action or another, but we will very nearly always choose that which is most beneficial to our own survival, in that case, we do not have pure free will.