My obsessions with free will, free won’t and freeing Willy Johnson from captivity began in earnest when an associate whom I’ll call Baroness Sharon Von Datsun (or 120Y for short) was arrested for believing she was both Tess Ocean and Julia Roberts from the movie Oceans Twelve. None of us thought she had the brains of Brainiac and the brawn of Eva Braun to pull off something so audacious. 120Y somehow managed to steal all the K's from all the Kmarts around town and fence them to the Ku Klux Klunges, Kath’s Krazy Kooches and Krusty Kyle’s Kitties. And she would have got away with it too if it wasn’t for some pesky kids and a mentally defective talking dog.
At first I was incensed at her complete lack of remorse and absence of empathy toward her victims. The sentient Kmart self-service checkout machines are emotionally sensitive and have been irreparably traumatised by her malfeasance. They are currently receiving treatment for post-troubleshooting software disorder (PTSD) and I wish them the best.
Now that my anger has subsided, I’m left with the lofty-leftie philosophical question of what ability the Baroness had to do otherwise. Could she have willed herself to beg, borrow and steal her boyfriend’s hallucinogenic pain medication and tripped balls while she gripped balls instead of becoming a Dickensian gonoph?
Many people despise philosophers and believe that free thinkers like me are Satan’s Saddam buddies. They just want vengeance and a brown eye for a pink eye for a straight guy. But the problem of feral middle-aged women wasn’t solved back in the day with all the burning and dunking entertainment. They are still around and causing trouble with their sex-repulsion sprays extracted from their cats. I don’t think we’ll be able to ‘cure’ any of them unless we deeply probe the Baroness and others of her ilk and explore what it’s like to put on sunglasses at night, steal a motorbike, be an Austrian cyborg and have John Connor riding behind us carrying the K’s through the darkness yelling, “easy money!”
So let’s do it like they do on the Crime Channel and find some unconvincing actors to recreate this whole mess and get some middle-aged divorced criminal psychologists to pretend they know why she turned to crime and why she went to a pet psychic to agree on a suicide pact with her cats if the law tried to dump her into Cell Block H with Queen Bea and Steamy the affectionate ironing press.
Free Will: who is he and why should he be paroled?
But just wait a cotton-pickin’ enslaved-will minute. What is free will anyway? And why have you ‘chosen’ to read this article when you don’t care if you have no free will and are a contraceptive automaton like the anti-evolutionist Ben Stein from the movie Ferris Bueller? The term ‘free will’ can mean almost anything anyway depending on which nonce philosopher is talking; whether they’re a compatibilist, an impossibilist or a Blank Space Swift-ologist. So who cares, right? Well, I’m not going to even try to convince you if that’s the way you feel. Besides, you are too busy trying to be the next cheerleading Nicole Arbour-style celebrity-whore fat-shamer who unfunny-satire rants that we can all choose to be skinny if we just fondle our boobs in cock-flopster movies like Silent But Deadly about lesbian Russian step-mother mail-order brides. |
| Ben Stein |
“God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal - there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.” Orson Scott Card, author of the novel Ender’s Game and an anti-gay extremist Mormon.
“I am an artist, and I have the ability and the free will to choose the way the world will envision me.” When Lady Gaga speaks, this is the kind of milky substance that comes out of her second hole.
This is where I put my money-shot where your mouth is and have a go at doing a better job than Googoo Gaga Rahrah and make some sense of the term in a way that even my pet Brain Gremlin can understand. I define free will as the ability to break with classical deterministic cause-and-effect and consciously choose on a course of action. Tyler Durden in the movie Fight Club implied that he had free will when he asked: “Now, a question of etiquette. As I pass do I give you the ass or the crotch?” To give an equally delicious example, let’s say you believe that you like chocolate and strawberry ice-cream equally. You go to the convenience store at 3am to try and quell your loneliness and they have both of these flavours in the brand that you like. How do you choose which to buy?
Classical determinists would say that this decision was locked in from the Big Bang when the Universe was created from the void between God’s ears and the long chain of cause-and-effect has brought you to the Happy Holdup convenience store on this night. You might think you are making a decision, but this is an illusion to help you cope with the bleakness of fecundity. Your brain can come up with some fanciful explanation for why you think you chose chocolate, but it was never going to be strawberry because of an unconscious memory of mother calling you a raspberry twat-shake when you were four. If, on the other hand, you can break determinism through some weird 11th-dimensional quantum-string-bubble effect, then perhaps you really do have the ability to consciously choose chocolate, then go home, smear it all over your face, innocently post your photo on Instagram with an ironically racist comment, then promptly get fired from your job for doing black-face.
Classical determinists would say that this decision was locked in from the Big Bang when the Universe was created from the void between God’s ears and the long chain of cause-and-effect has brought you to the Happy Holdup convenience store on this night. You might think you are making a decision, but this is an illusion to help you cope with the bleakness of fecundity. Your brain can come up with some fanciful explanation for why you think you chose chocolate, but it was never going to be strawberry because of an unconscious memory of mother calling you a raspberry twat-shake when you were four. If, on the other hand, you can break determinism through some weird 11th-dimensional quantum-string-bubble effect, then perhaps you really do have the ability to consciously choose chocolate, then go home, smear it all over your face, innocently post your photo on Instagram with an ironically racist comment, then promptly get fired from your job for doing black-face.
To be continued in Part 2
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