Systems of thought arise from individual wills to create what Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduced, and named the “General Will”. In the last 150 years or so, it has become increasingly clear that the notion of “Free Will” was in turn highly dependent upon other notions, including “General Will”.
I prefer the expression “Meta Will” (which is even more general).
A philosophical site managed by professional academic philosophers ran an essay entitled Free Will Skepticism and its Implications an Argument for Optimism (part-1). My comment below was repeatedly censored, supposedly for making “grating” anti-German, or anti-Nazi declarations. (I think the truth is even more sinister: professional philosophers fear me; I will reproduce the exchange in the comments.)
Free Will Ought To Give Way To Meta Will
Whenever an action is taken, it turns out to be dependent of some context, often cultural, or some preparation, often neurological, or some ulterior motives, often self-aggrandizing. In other words, free will is never free of contingence.
So what? This just show that the expression “Free Will” depicts the wrong semantics. After all, we are not free to stop breathing. In theory, yes. In practice, it is impossible, except if we carefully prepare a mechanism that will take over (a lot of sleeping pills, or a noose).
The problem of suffocation suggests that, if we want to be more free (for example free to stop breathing), we have to make the environment take over. Thus Free Will has to operate not just on “us”, but on the environment which controls us.
This is why philosophers’ Free Will have led them to the desert, since times immemorial. In the desert, they are more free to think.
Quantum Physics helps here. It is non-local. Actually some physicists are in the process to make really sure of that, by running entanglement experiments with haphazard impulses coming from the opposite sides of the universe.
Intriguingly, if the experiment turns out as expected, this variant of the famed Einstein-Podolski-Rosen Thought Experiment will show that local Free Will cannot exist. But, once again, so what? Free Will is obsolete, Meta Will is what one can help to free, by controlling more the contexts we think in.
The soul is most probably some sort of large scale Quantum effect. How do Quantum processes work? They extract solutions from geometry, or, more generally, form. Non-local geometry, and non-local form.
Thus, if we want to achieve soul control, we need to achieve geometrical and topological control on our environment. And this starts by being conscious that those control our outcomes.
Thus, instead of just talking about our morality, we have to start talking about the environment in which it is supposed to blossom, as the later will control the former. Thus individual responsibility shifts more to social contexts.
And therefore, the systems of thoughts which support social structures are the agents most responsible. This is where much of Free Will is hiding.
Let me give an example: Germans behaved deplorably for generations, more than people of other nations (that is more than the Italians, French, British, American, etc.). This nasty robotic aspect of German mentality allowed dictators to make the German armies behave in atrocious ways for generations (differently from the armies of the nations quoted above, which did not engage in systematic war crimes).
That unfortunate character of the German soul killed 22 million in extermination camps alone, due to the fascist, robotic nature of the dictatorships (the Second Reich, and then the Third Reich) in Germany, and the education it provided with (as Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Einstein pointed out, deplored and condemned stridently, among others).
German genetics did not change that much. Yet, present day German souls are completely different. They have become French souls, so to speak. They are sister souls for Republican France against old German fascism.
German Free Will has become gentle. This shows that Free Will depends crucially of the universe it evolves in.
Patrice Ayme
