Free Will is a constant topic that is continuously debated, stretching through ordinary acts to renowned political and social systems. “Free Will” is a philosophical term for a particular sort of capacity of rational authors to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. Having freedom of will allows us to say, “I could have chosen (and done) otherwise.”
This philosophical issue is displayed various times in Richard Bach’s Illusions. The plot travels through the adventure of the protagonist, Richard, and his acquaintance with Donald Shimoda as they scour through the Midwest. Their story unfolds through each chapter with excerpts from a nonlinear text called “Messiah’s Handbook, Reminders for the Advanced Soul”, given to Richard by Donald. The concept of free will is mentioned closely with confrontations of false reality and the dismissal of ethical ambiguities, that there is in fact an existence of parallel universes, as reiterated in Shimoda’s view with movies, outlining the parallel between fact and fiction and the perception that it is our choice that satisfies us: there are people who choose to stay with the illusions and their lifetime in space-time, and there are people who refuse to experience illusions and choose get their learnings in different ways. Through Illusions, Bach raised the idea that there exists a reality behind the reality that we experience, one of which being the visual reality that comes alive in our dreams, reflections of our waking life and what they stand for, making it an equally logical state of mind. This means that the real world we live in however, is pliable to our will, and if we believe in it so thoroughly, we could breath water, swim in land and vaporise clouds, just like Richard did.
One of the philosophers that was particularly interested in free will was St. Augustine of Hippo. He believed that benevolent God did not create evil, because evil is a lack or deficiency of something. But still, in a world where evilness is in fact a natural and moral deficiency, he argued that God still created humans as rational beings, and as stated in Book 2 of his On Free Choice of the Will, “there can be no good thing, however great or small, that is not from God”. This obliges him to give humans freedom of will. This is because the process of rational reasoning is only possible when there is freedom of choice. Having freedom of will then means being able to choose, including choosing between good and evil. This further concludes that a world without humans, rational beings capable of making choices, is a world without evil, and that the possibility of evil only arises on human’s moral choices. Augustine’s argument for the problem of evil can be put into Shimoda’s perspective, if its presence isn’t addressed, but dismissed as illusory. His view parallels but also contrasts Shimoda’s view in Illusions, quoting, “There is no good and there is no evil, outside of what makes us happy and unhappy.”
So much of a human life seems to depend on our viewing of one another as conscious authors, capable of free choice. A quote from Illusions expresses my personal view on Free Will, “A cloud does not know why it moves in such a direction and at such a speed. It feels an impulsion…this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons.” Subjectively speaking, the cloud represents us, rational human beings that are capable of moral reasoning yet have no clue why we “move in such a direction and at such a speed” but feel morally impelled and drawn to a place. There is a possibility that is because of the benevolent sky’s knowledge of one’s patterns and reasons, but there is also a possibility that is because of a determined causal chain of events in your brain that you are not responsible for. If this is the case, and if you are impelled to go to a place, the opinion that we for sure have Free Will would need to be questioned. If we do in fact have Free Will, could we have resisted or declined the impulse altogether, not on the base of random influences on which we have no conscious control of? We have the freedom to make and carry out our decisions, but the question is what drives us to make those choices. Maybe we can do as we wish, but can we wish as we wish? Even then, whether free will is present or not present, beliefs have consequences, and part of living in an examined life is putting one’s beliefs in order, and one’s beliefs about free will is no exception. After all, the answers lie, “when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons.”
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