Three possibilities come to mind:
Is there an evolutionary purpose?
Does it arise as a consequence of our mental activities, a sort of side effect of our thinking?
Is it given a priori (something we have to think in order to think at all)?
EDIT: Thanks for all the responses! Just one thing I saw come up a few times I’d like to address: a lot of people are asking ‘Why assume this?’ The answer is: it’s purely rhetorical! That said, I’m happy with a well thought-out ‘I dispute the premiss’ answer.
We don’t have a free will.
We do have a free won’t.
Because determinism is too depressing for small minds.
Really making a strong argument by calling people dumb. If you were as smart as you think you are, you would realize the value of empathy.
Your response was an emotional one, which does not mean my argument is incorrect. However, it does reveal your insecurities.
If you think you can accurately diagnose my insecurities from one comment, I don’t know what to tell you. My response evoking an emotional response in you does not make it in itself emotional. I wrote it sitting on the toilet because I was bored at work, not because I felt that it was especially important.
“No u” lol ok
Careful, your response quality is slipping. You don’t want to put even a little effort in?
I forget which philosopher said this but he said something along the lines of if you have the desire and the capacity for an action you do, then deterministic or not, you chose that action. If the tide pulls me where I was already swimming, I still chose to swim there, even if some other force took me half of the way.
But where does your desire and capacity to do that thing come from? It arises from the physical arrangement of neurons/hormones/etc. in your brain and body
Why are you separating “you” from the choices your physical self is making?
I’m not. Did you reply to the correct comment?
I can’t think of any good reason why we would have such an illusion.
Perhaps I’m looking for less of a reason, more of an explanation?
The Matrix deals with the exact question.
Simple: We cannot predict the future. If you don’t know what’s going to happen nor whether it is being controlled, you do not know whether your actions are predetermined. Every movement you make might be the result of universal programming. What I’m typing, have sent, and you are reading might be the sequence of events that was always supposed to happen.
Free will is, IMO, as unknowable as whether an almighty being exists. That “almighty being” might have created this existence, but might also exist in its own realm that was created by another “almighty being”. The chain might be infinite and it might not be. Asking these questions is like asking “can we reach infinity”.
I personally think the debate over the existence of Free Will is simply an extraordinary debate over semantics.
If you look at a human being from its basic biological and cellular makeup, a human being is a walking bundle of competing desires that appears to present itself as a single cohesive corporate entity.
The people who are against the concept of free will say that because you have innate desires for food sex and entertainment, that you have no choice to not act upon those in a desires and therefore any delusion that you carry about the choices that you make being done of an entirely unencumbered and Free Will are false.
Then there are people who say that Free Will doesn’t exist for religious purposes, that God is an all-knowing creature who knows the beginning and the end and everything in between and so you cannot make a choice that he or she or it does not already know that you will make and therefore your choices are not free.
The people who say Free Will does exist on a biological level will point to people who choose to self-immolate or to starve themselves to death in protest of a spiritual or psychological issue, valuing the ideals that life has imprinted upon them over the biological necessities of continuing to live.
The people who say Free Will does exist on a spiritual level say many things, such as we carry a spark of the Divine in us and therefore we are as little gods ourselves, capable of creating and destroying in roughly the same proportional magnitude as the greater gods above are, or they say that since we have the ability to make choices and we are judged by those choices than our choices must be free otherwise judgment is meaningless.
I personally tend to lean into the Free Will side, while understanding simultaneously that sometimes there are exigencies that induce us to choose one option over another on a more likely than not basis, or to phrase it another way, our will is as free as we choose it to be.
I think you’ve mischaracterized the arguments of the “no free will” camp, or at least omitted a major argument. You may find this interesting https://youtu.be/eELfSwqJNKU
The people who are against the concept of free will say that because you have innate desires for food sex and entertainment, that you have no choice to not act upon those in a desires and therefore any delusion that you carry about the choices that you make being done of an entirely unencumbered and Free Will are false.
That’s not the argument against free will. The argument is just that there’s a physical process to every thought in your head. When you think of a tree, inside your brain a specific pattern of neurons and chemical messengers activate which is what creates the thought of a tree.
When you’re consciously deciding whether to eat a donut or a salad, a specific pattern of neurons and chemical messengers are the mechanism by which that decision process is occurring. The pattern of neurons and chemical messengers happening in your brain is the physical mechanism that is performing the decision making process.
There are no thoughts outside of the ones generated by your neurons and chemical messengers. The pattern of neurons and chemical messengers IS the thought that you’re thinking. Your brain (and the thoughts that occur within it) is a physical object that obeys the laws of nature, the same as all physical objects do.
Roger Penrose is pretty much the only dude looking into consciousness from the perspective of a physicist
He thinks consciousness has to do with “quantum bubble collapse” happening inside our brains at a very very tiny level.
That’s the only way free will could exist.
If consciousness is anything else, then everything is predetermined.
Like, imagine dropping a million bouncy balls off the hoover dam. You’ll never get the same results twice.
However, that’s because you’ll never get the same conditions twice.
If the conditions are exactly the same down to an atomic level… You’ll get the same results every time
What would give humans free will would be the inherent randomness if the whole “quantum bubble collapse” was a fundamental part of consciousness.
That still wouldn’t guarantee free will, but it would make it possible.
There’s also the whole thing where what we think of as our consciousness isn’t actually running the show. It’s just a narrator that’s summarizing everything up immediately after it happened. What’s actually calling the shot is other parts of our brains, neurons in our gut, and what controls our hormones.
We don’t know if that’s not true either. But if it was, each person as a thing would have free will, it’s just what we think of as that person does not have free will.
Sounds batshit crazy and impossible, until you read up on the studies on people who had their brains split in half at different stages of mental development.
There’s a scary amount of shit we don’t know about “us”. And an even scarier amount we don’t know about how much variation there is with all that
Roger Penrose is pretty much the only dude looking into consciousness from the perspective of a physicist
I would recommend reading the philosophers Jocelyn Benoist and Francois-Igor Pris who argue very convincingly that both the “hard problem of consciousness” and the “measurement problem” stem from the same logical fallacies of conflating subjectivity (or sometimes called phenomenality) with contextuality, and that both disappear when you make this distinction, and so neither are actually problems for physics to solve but are caused by fallacious reasoning in some of our a priori assumptions about the properties of reality.
Benoist’s book Toward a Contextual Realism and Pris’ book Contextual Realism and Quantum Mechanics both cover this really well. They are based in late Wittgensteinian philosophy, so maybe reading Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language is a good primer.
That’s the only way free will could exist…What would give humans free will would be the inherent randomness if the whole “quantum bubble collapse” was a fundamental part of consciousness.
Even if they discover quantum phenomena in the brain, all that would show is our brain is like a quantum computer. But nobody would argue quantum computers have free will, do they? People often like to conflate the determinism/free will debate with the debate over Laplacian determinism specifically, which should not be conflated, as randomness clearly has nothing to do with the question of free will.
If the state forced everyone into a job for life the moment they turned 18, but they chose that job using a quantum random number generator, would it be “free”? Obviously not. But we can also look at it in the reverse sense. If there was a God that knew every decision you were going to make, would that negate free will? Not necessarily. Just because something knows your decision ahead of time doesn’t necessarily mean you did not make that decision yourself.
The determinism/free will debate is ultimately about whether or not human decisions are reducible to the laws of physics or not. Even if there is quantum phenomena in the brain that plays a real role in decision making, our decisions would still be reducible to the laws of physics and thus determined by them. Quantum mechanics is still deterministic in the nomological sense of the word, meaning, determinism according to the laws of physics. It is just not deterministic in the absolute Laplacian sense of the word that says you can predict the future with certainty if you knew all properties of all systems in the present.
If the conditions are exactly the same down to an atomic level… You’ll get the same results every time
I think a distinction should be made between Laplacian determinism and fatalism (not sure if there’s a better word for the latter category). The difference here is that both claim there is only one future, but only the former claims the future is perfectly predictable from the states of things at present. So fatalism is less strict: even in quantum mechanics that is random, there is a single outcome that is “fated to be,” but you could never predict it ahead of time.
Unless you ascribe to the Many Worlds Interpretation, I think you kind of have to accept a fatalistic position in regards to quantum mechanics, mainly due not to quantum mechanics itself but special relativity. In special relativity, different observers see time passing at different rates. You can thus build a time machine that can take you into the future just by traveling really fast, near the speed of light, then turning around and coming back home.
The only way for this to even be possible for there to be different reference frames that see time pass differently is if the future already, in some sense, pre-exists. This is sometimes known as the “block universe” which suggests that the future, present, and past are all equally “real” in some sense. For the future to be real, then, there has to be an outcome of each of the quantum random events already “decided” so to speak. Quantum mechanics is nomologically deterministic in the sense that it does describe nature as reducible to the laws of physics, but not deterministic in the Laplacian sense that you can predict the future with certainty knowing even in principle. It is more comparable to fatalism, that there is a single outcome fated to be (that is, again, unless you ascribe to MWI), but it’s impossible to know ahead of time.
Even if they discover quantum phenomena in the brain
There 100% are…
Penrose thinks they’re responsible for consciousness.
Because we also don’t know what makes anesthesia stop consciousness. And anesthesia stops consciousness and stops the quantum process.
Now, the math isn’t clean. I forget which way it leans, but I think it’s that consciousness kicks out a little before the quantum action is fully inhibited?
It’s been a minute, and this shit isn’t simple.
Unless you ascribe to the Many Worlds Interpretation
This is incompatible with that.
It’s the quantum wave function collapse that’s important. There’s no spinning out where multiple things happen, there is only one thing. After wave collapse, is when you look in the box and see if the cats dead.
In a sense it’s the literal “observer effect” happening our head.
And that is probably what consciousness is.
It’ll just take a while till we can prove it. And Penrose will probably be dead by then. But so was Einstein before Penrose proved most of his shit was true
That’s how science works. Most won’t know who Penrose is till he’s dead.
There 100% are…
If you choose to believe so, like I said I don’t really care. Is a quantum computer conscious? I think it’s a bit irrelevant whether or not they exist. I will concede they do for the sake of discussion.
Penrose thinks they’re responsible for consciousness.
Yeah, and as I said, Penrose was wrong, not because the measurement problem isn’t the cause for consciousness, but that there is no measurement problem nor a “hard problem.” Penrose plays on the same logical fallacies I pointed out to come to believe there are two problems where none actually exist and then, because both problems originate from the same logical fallacies. He then notices they are similar and thinks “solving” one is necessary for “solving” the other, when neither problems actually existed in the first place.
Because we also don’t know what makes anesthesia stop consciousness. And anesthesia stops consciousness and stops the quantum process.
You’d need to define what you mean more specifically about “consciousness” and “quantum process.” We don’t remember things that occur when we’re under anesthesia, so are we saying memory is consciousness?
Now, the math isn’t clean. I forget which way it leans, but I think it’s that consciousness kicks out a little before the quantum action is fully inhibited? It’s been a minute, and this shit isn’t simple.
Sure, it’s not simple, because the notion of “consciousness” as used in philosophy is a very vague and slippery word with hundreds of different meanings depending on the context, and this makes it seem “mysterious” as its meaning is slippery and can change from context to context, making it difficult to pin down what is even being talked about.
Yet, if you pin it down, if you are actually specific about what you mean, then you don’t run into any confusion. The “hard problem of consciousness” is not even a “problem” as a “problem” implies you want to solve it, and most philosophers who advocate for it like David Chalmers, well, advocate for it. They spend their whole career arguing in favor of its existence and then using it as a basis for their own dualistic philosophy. It is thus a hard axiom of consciousness and not a hard problem. I simply disagree with the axioms.
Penrose is an odd case because he accepts the axioms and then carries that same thinking into QM where the same contradiction re-emerges but actually thinks it is somehow solvable. What is a “measurement” if not an “observation,” and what is an “observation” if not an “experience”? The same “measurement problem” is just a reflection of the very same “hard problem” about the supposed “phenomenality” of experience and the explanatory gap between what we actually experience and what supposedly exists beyond it.
It’s the quantum wave function collapse that’s important.
Why should I believe there is a physical collapse? This requires you to, again, posit that there physically exists something that lies beyond all possibilities of us ever observing it (paralleling Kant’s “noumenon”) which suddenly transforms itself into something we can actually observe the moment we try to look at it (paralleling Kant’s “phenomenon”). This clearly introduces an explanatory gap as to how this process occurs, which is the basis of the measurement problem in the first place.
There is no reason to posit a physical “collapse” or even that there exists at all a realm of waves floating about in Hilbert space. These are unnecessary metaphysical assumptions that are purely philosophical and contribute nothing but confusion to an understanding of the mathematics of the theory. Again, just like Chalmers’ so-called “hard problem,” Penrose is inventing a problem to solve which we have no reason to believe is even a problem in the first place: nothing about quantum theory demands that you believe particles really turn into invisible waves in Hilbert space when you aren’t looking at them and suddenly turn back into visible particles in spacetime when you do look at them.
That’s entirely metaphysical and arbitrary to believe in.
There’s no spinning out where multiple things happen, there is only one thing. After wave collapse, is when you look in the box and see if the cats dead. In a sense it’s the literal “observer effect” happening our head. And that is probably what consciousness is.
There is only an “observer effect” if you believe the cat literally did turn into a wave and you perturbed that wave by looking at it and caused it to “collapse” like a house of cards. What did the cat see in its perspective? How did it feel for the cat to turn into a wave? The whole point of Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment was that Schrodinger was trying to argue against believing particles really turn into waves because then you’d have to believe unreasonable things like cats turning into waves.
All of this is entirely metaphysical, there is no observations that can confirm this interpretation. You can only justify the claim that cats literally turn into waves when you don’t look at them and there is a physical collapse of that wave when you do look at them on purely philosophical grounds. It is not demanded by the theory at all. You choose to believe it purely on philosophical grounds which then leads you to think there is some “problem” with the theory that needs to be “solved,” but it is purely metaphysical.
There is no actual contradiction between theory and evidence/observation, only contradiction between people’s metaphysical assumptions that they refuse to question for some reason and what they a priori think the theory should be, rather than just rethinking their assumptions.
That’s how science works. Most won’t know who Penrose is till he’s dead.
I’d hardly consider what Penrose is doing to be “science” at all. All these physical “theories of consciousness” that purport not to just be explaining intelligence or self-awareness or things like that, but more specifically claim to be solving Chalmers’ hard axiom of consciousness (that humans possess some immaterial invisible substance that is somehow attached to the brain but is not the brain itself), are all pseudoscience, because they are beginning with an unreasonable axiom which we have no scientific reason at all to take seriously and then trying to use science to “solve” it.
It is no different then claiming to use science to try and answer the question as to why humans have souls. Any “scientific” approach you use to try and answer that question is inherently pseudoscience because the axiomatic premise itself is flawed: it would be trying to solve a problem it never established is even a problem to be solved in the first place.
If you choose to believe so, like I said I don’t really care
What?
We literally and scientifically know that it does…
I just want to thank you for typing that ahead of all that other shit you pulled out of your ass.
No one’s reading it anyways, but at least they won’t feel bad for skipping it
No, we don’t know the brain is making use of any quantum phenomena. At best if there is any quantum phenomena in the brain it would just contribute noise. The idea that interference phenomena is actually made use of in the brain for computation is just not backed by anything.
I agree with some of what you’re saying, but can you explain (in simple terms please) how the hard problem doesn’t exist? I’m not quite following. The subjective experience of consciousness is directly observable, and definitely real, no?
(I don’t think adding some metaphysical element does much of anything, and Penrose still doesn’t really explain it, just provides a potential mechanism for it in the brain. It’s still a real “thing”, unexplained by current physics though.)
Also, to your other point, my I believe everything is just an evolving wave function. All waves all the time, and we only perceive a slice of it. (Which has something to do with consciousness, but nobody really knows exactly how). The Copenhagen interpretation is just how the many worlds universe appears to behave to a conscious observer.
The subjective experience of consciousness is directly observable, and definitely real, no?
Experience is definitely real, but there is no such thing as “subjective experience.” It is not logically possible to say there is “subjective experience” without inherently entailing that there is some sort of “objective experience,” in the same way that saying something is “inside of” something makes no sense unless there is an “outside of” it. Without implicitly entailing some sort of “objective experience” then the qualifier “subjective” would become meaningless.
If you associate “experience” with “minds,” then you’d be implying there is some sort of objective mind, i.e. a cosmic consciousness of some sorts. Which, you can believe that, but at that point you’ve just embraced objective idealism. The very usage of the term “subjective experience” that is supposedly inherently irreducible to non-minds inherently entails objective idealism, there is no way out of it once you’ve accepted that premise.
The conflation between experience with “subjectivity” is largely done because we all experience the world in a way unique to us, so we conclude experience is “subjective.” But a lot of things can be experienced differently between different observers. Two observers, for example, can measure the same object to be different velocities, not because velocity is subjective, but because they occupy different frames of reference. In other words, the notion that something being unique to us proves it is “subjective” is a non sequitur, there can be other reasons for it to be unique to us, which is just that nature is context-dependent.
Reality itself depends upon where you are standing in it, how you are looking at it, everything in your surroundings, etc, how everything relates to everything else from a particular reference frame. So, naturally, two observers occupying different contexts will perceive the world differently, not because their perception is “subjective,” but in spite of it. We experience the world as it exists independent of our observation of it, but not independent of the context of our observation. Experience itself is not subjective, although what we take experience to be might be subjective.
We can misinterpret things for example, we can come to falsely believe we experienced some particular thing and later it turns out we actually perceived something else, and thus were mistaken in our initial interpretation which we later replaced with a new interpretation. However, at no point did it become false that there was experience. Reality can never be true or false, it always just is what it is. The notion that there is some sort of “explanatory gap” between what humans experience and some sort of cosmic experience is just an invented problem. There is no gap because what we experience is indeed reality independent of conscious observers being there to interpret it, but absolutely dependent upon the context under which it is observed.
Again, I’d recommend reading Jocelyn Benoist’s Toward a Contextual Realism. All this is explained in detail and any possible rebuttal you’re thinking of has already been addressed. People are often afraid of treating experience as real because they operate on this Kantian “phenomenal-noumenal” paradigm (inherently implied by the usage of “subjective experience”) and then think if they admit that this unobservable “noumenon” is a meaningless construct then they have to default to only accepting the “phenomenon,” i.e. that there’s only “subjective experience” and we’re all “trapped in our minds” so to speak. But the whole point of contextual realism is to point out this fear is unfounded because both the phenomenal and noumenal categories are problematic and both have to be discarded: experience is not “phenomenal” as a “phenomenal” means “appearance of reality” but it is not the appearance of reality but is reality.
You only enter into subjectivity, again, when you take reality to be something, when you begin assigning labels to it, when you begin to invent abstract categories and names to try and categorize what you are experiencing. (Although the overwhelming majority of abstract categories you use were not created by you but are social constructs, part of what Wittgenstein called the “language game.”)
(I don’t think adding some metaphysical element does much of anything, and Penrose still doesn’t really explain it, just provides a potential mechanism for it in the brain. It’s still a real “thing”, unexplained by current physics though.)
We don’t need more metaphysical elements, we need less. We need to stop presuming things that have no reason to be presumed, then presuming other things to fix contradictions created by those false presumptions. We need to discard those bad assumptions that led to the contradiction in the first place (discard then phenomenal-noumenal distinction entirely, not just one or the other).
Also, to your other point, my I believe everything is just an evolving wave function.
This is basically the Many Worlds Interpretation. I don’t really buy it because we can’t observe wave functions, so if the entire universe is made of wave functions… how does that explain what we observe? You end up with an explanatory gap between what we observe and the mathematical description.
The whole point of science is to explain the reality which we observe, which is synonymous with experience, which again experience just is reality. That’s what science is supposed to do: explain experiential reality, so we have to tie it back to experience, what Bell called “local beables,” things we can actually point to identify in our observations.
The biggest issue with MWI is that there is simply no way to tie it back to what we actually observe because it contains nothing observable. There is an explanatory gap between the world of waves in Hilbert space and what we actually observe in reality.
The Copenhagen interpretation is just how the many worlds universe appears to behave to a conscious observer.
What you’ve basically done is just wrapped up the difficult question of how the invisible world of waves in Hilbert space converts itself to the visible world of particles in spacetime by just saying “oh it has something to do with our consciousness.” I mean, sure, if you find that to be satisfactory, I personally don’t.
Inception helped to bring the Penrose Stairs back into popularity and Penrose tiles are still a popular example of aperiodic tiling, so I suspect enough of the public has a connection to who he is.
There are quantum phenomenon in a piece of bread. That doesn’t mean bread is conscious.
Penrose has never proved that the quantum effects affect neurons macroscopically.
Quantum computers run at near absolute zero temperature and isolated from all vibrations in order to maintain superposition. The brain is a horrible environment for a quantum computer.
Anesthesia is a chemical signal blocker. If consciousness was quantum, it couldn’t affect it.
Penrose’s work is “God in the gaps” or in his case “quantum in the gaps” explanation of consciousness. His claims were made before we had functional quantum computers and precise categorization of neurotransmitters that anesthesia chemicals bind to to block your natural neurotransmitters.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-does-anesthesia-work/
I don’t think it’s incompatible with many worlds, unless I’m misunderstanding something. The many worlds interpretation means that the observer doesn’t collapse the wave function, but rather becomes entangled with it. It only apparently collapses because we only perceive a “slice” of the wave function. (For whatever reason).
I think this is still compatible with Penrose’s ideas, just not in the way he presents it. Anyway, I think he’s not really explaining consciousness, but rather a piece of how it could be facilitated in the brain.
Even if the brain is a quantum computer, it’s quantum dice rolls controlling your neurons. So quantum consciousness doesn’t enable the possibility free will.
Because maintaining the illusion keeps us going as normal and won’t break the simulation. /s
Maybe look up “compatibilism”. It’s a philosophy proposing that both exist.
TIL!
I just made up my own term for it in another post :)
Here’s my take: the answer is emergent phenomena. We live in a very complex system and in complex systems there are interactions that can only be predicted using systems of equal or higher complexity. So even in case everything is predetermined, it would still be unpredictable and therefore your decisions are basically still up to you and the complex interactions in your brain.
exactly. that for me is in fact the definition of free will
actually this is the definition that first came up on a search
“the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one’s own discretion”
so yeah we do have free will. the rest is philosophical masturbation
You can also find the definition of magic or telekinesis, but that doesn’t mean we have them, and not all philosophical question are just “masturbation”. It is an interesting question. It is worth taking free will at least axiomatically as our perception of that freedom even if it is truly deterministic.
I think this is probably it. I think this argument is strongly related to the idea of consciousness as an emergent property of sensory experience. I find it simple to imagine the idea of a body with no will or no consciousness (i.e., a philosophical zombie). But I find it very difficult, almost impossible, in fact, to imagine a consciousness with no will, even if it’s only the will to think a given thought.
Do we have free will to think a given thought? All of my thoughts just suddenly appear in my mind or are connected to previous thoughts that suddenly appeared in my mind.
I mean, if I said to you, ‘Calculate 13x16’ (or some other sum you don’t know off the top of your head) you could either do it or not do it. That would be a willed choice, whether or not you knew the answer.
My thoughts would be presented based the fact that you’ve asked me to calculate something. At that point, past experiences would guide my path forward. If I felt like doing math, I may do it, if I had poor childhood experiences in math class, I probably wouldn’t. At the end of the day, it’s all based on history or current questions/feelings. In every scenario my thoughts are presented to me. To prove it, ask yourself what your next thought will be. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll see you can’t answer that question and when you try and force a thought direction, that direction itself is based on your knowledge from the past and that thought was also presented to you.
It’s wild because it absolutely feels like we have free will, but it sure doesn’t look like it. 🤷♂️
This is the problem of original intentionality. There are studies on it, for instance they found that with an mri they can detect when you have come to a decision before your conscious mind realizes you have. Some processes in our brain are outside of our control, because the brain is not just the neocortex but also includes tens of other structures that evolved separately with specific hard-coded purposes, but that doesn’t mean they are not working as a team. I think in any case you are still reaponsible for the decisions you take.
For the same reason that I feel like I’m still right now, while I’m actually spinning and hurtling through space at incredible speed.
ludicrous speed
Why are we assuming we don’t have free will? We do. Its not total freedom, our freedom is contingent on existing circumstances, but hard determinism is easily disprovable.
The idea that there is no free will is a mind fuck that keeps you from questioning your reality. You might as well ask, “assuming the earth is flat, why does the stick disappear on the horizon?”
This is a nice and brief video that I’ve found persuasive. https://youtu.be/eELfSwqJNKU
Noone believes that people have full freedom with no context, no extenuating circumstances. What makes arguments like this seem convincing is how uncommon it is for people to think dialectically.
Here’s a very good essay that steps through all of the different parts of the problem, and looks at different views historically. https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html
To the hard deterministic explanation that “something always came before,” it asks “what is the role of the individual in history?”
This excerpt isn’t a substitute for reading the whole essay but it makes a point pretty concisely:
But let us return to our subject. A great man is great not because his personal qualities give individual features to great historical events, but because he possesses qualities which make him most capable of serving the great social needs of his time, needs which arose as a result of general and particular causes. Carlyle, in his well-known book on heroes and hero-worship, calls great men beginners. This is a very apt description. A great man is precisely a beginner because he sees further than others, and desires things more strongly than others. He solves the scientific problems brought up by the preceding process of intellectual development of society; he points to the new social needs created by the preceding development of social relationships; he takes the initiative in satisfying these needs. He is a hero. But he is not a hero in the sense that he can stop, or change, the natural course of things, but in the sense that his activities are the conscious and free expression of this inevitable and unconscious course. Herein lies all his significance; herein lies his whole power. But this significance is colossal, and the power is terrible.
Honorary mention, Kurtzgesagt/In a Nutshell https://youtu.be/UebSfjmQNvs?feature=shared
Yes, there’s an evolutionary purpose for the concept of purpose. If you believe you can do something and show some initiative then you’re more likely to get it. The early bird gets the worm, and the bird that anticipated the worm is the early bird. This is true both for humans and cells in a petri dish.
