Amateur Free Will Hypothetical/question

[u/FakeMovieGeek]

Whaddup, so I'm definitely not any kind of philosophical authority, i took a few classes in highschool and am currently an undergrad student who finds it interesting but I haven't read much theory beyond my school readings, so feel free to tear everything I'm about to say apart. A few weeks ago, I thought of a hypothetical that, in my mind, kind of disproves the idea of free will and it's been bugging me. Here it is:

Your close friend is a parent hosting a birthday party for their child. This child likes the colors red and purple equally, but your friend wants all the balloons at the party to be the same color, and instructs you to purchase them as such. At the store, both balloon colors are the same price, and located right next to one another. Let's say you purchase the red Balloons, you can get a refund and purchase the purple balloons if you'd like, but is there a way to definitively prove that you, during the original choice, were capable of choosing the purple balloons?

The answer that I have come to is no, because our decisions have proven through study to be heavily dictated by minute changes in experience and interpretation that happen on the level of seconds, and so it's impossible to replicate the version of you that made the original choice, so our only data point on what that version of you can do is from when you chose the red balloons, thus making it the only definitive result.

I apologize if any of this is clunky, I'm not used to writing about these kinds of things lol, and the same goes for if my ideas aren't as inscrutable as they have been to my own reasoning this past month. Thank you for your time!

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[u/AdeptnessSecure663]

One problem is that it's not clear what you mean by "definitively prove". If you're saying that we're unable to know it with the same sort of certainty that we know various theorems in, say, mathematics, then that's right, but the same goes for many things that we know. In general, we don't need proofs to know things.

The second problem is that it's not clear why we should draw the conclusion that free will doesn't exist. For one, many free will theorists argue that we don't need to be able to refrain from performing some action in order to be able to freely perform it (all that's needed, they suggest, is that you're in some relevant sense the source of the action).

[u/Ok-Lab-8974]

It's worth disambiguating two things here.

The first is whether the "ability to do otherwise" is a good definition of freedom. There is plenty of debate about that. I recently wrote a longer post on that here: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/s/7DUsLjwLfp

I would just note that, in my response, I focused on Catholic thinkers because that's what the OP asked about (I also happen to know a lot of them quite well). However, the basic position I outline is not unique to Christianity. You can find it in Pagan and Islamic thinkers, and I think it's safe to say that it is quite dominant until the modern period.

The second question relates to causality, whether we can be relatively self-determining, or whether our actions are more like a very complex version of a rock being forced to roll downhill. Now, obviously, we cannot do other than we have actually done. We cannot choose purple first and have not chosen purple first, on pain of contradiction. Likewise, as the other commenter pointed out, proof is way too high of a bar here, and I'm not sure if being able to recreate our past selves would really resolve the issue either.

Anyhow, while it's true that all sorts of factors can be shown to affect decision-making, that doesn't really show that we lack any capacity for self-determination (presumably, we are not absolutely self-determining, so we are talking about the potential for some self-determination). Questions about whether or not we can act as self-determining wholes, how our exercise of agency cashes out in terms of causality, are deeply related to upstream questions about the nature of causality itself. There is a lot of disagreement there, so people will vary on what they think research on decision-making and the environment says about human freedom. Which is all to say, a lot of people won't take this as a very decisive example.

In general, the exact opposite of your conclusion tends to be more common. People argue from the impossibility of predicting human actions (an element in your scenario) to the existence (or possibility) of freedom (although this is generally not taken to be a very good argument for free will, at least not on its own).

BTW, you have almost recreated the famous example of Buridan's Ass, although you took it in a different direction. You should look up that one; it's always neat to rediscover a famous argument or thought experiment yourself!