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depends what you mean by free will really. if you want to follow spinoza, the entire idea is a fiction in any event. he says that folk imagine themselves to be free because they're ignorant of what conditions their actions and believe in this quaint fiction called "will"--which he characterizes as an "idea without a referent" or something like that. i think he's right--this is a metaphysical question and not a terribly interesting one at that.
but let's move to a slightly less dismissive place. how do you characterise the situation of those of us who are mired in the social-historical? at the least you'd have to say that we're thoroughly inside history and can only imagine being outside because we have this noun "history" that shapes it's referent as a discrete object of some kind, so following from the notion of discreteness there's an inside and an outside--but we're playing with noun effects, not history here. if being historical means in part that situations are temporally spread out--and they are--and that information is almost inevitably partial and that there's a problem because of time of variables moving around, then it follows that we're in a position of partial information, stuck in a moving threshold space we call the present, conditioning this horizon we call the future based on expectations correlated from the past refracted through whatever mental configuration we drag through this threshold space of the present....so we don't know and cannot know all outcomes of any given action and so, to wax existentialist for a sec (ew...) we gamble, we play the probabilities--and that's the best we can do. "free will" is a quaint way of denoting playing probabilities.
so were situations transparent, there'd be no question about playing probabilities as to outcomes--there'd be a manifold presumably, and you, the god-spectator could theoretically choose between them. the choice is an aesthetic affair i suppose.
either way, it seems pretty obvious that if there is an equivalence between being conditioned by the social-historical and playing probabilities as to outcomes of actions and "free will" and choosing between possibilities present in a manifold, that the equivalence relies on the fact that we call them the same thing.
but really, i'm more with spinoza on this.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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