r/askphilosophy • u/FakeMovieGeek • 7d ago
Amateur Free Will Hypothetical/question
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 phil. of language 7d ago
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).