Freedom and Determinism

As I am one who has faith in the theory of determinism, the philosophical and scientific idea that chemical and physical reactions govern the choices we make and create the illusion of free will, I have normally given little deep thought to questions of agency and choice that seem to be a mainstay of popular philosophy, noticing that few other theories concerning free will lack the amount of evidence that determinism has in its favor. Considering the confidence I have in determinism, typically questions and monologues concerning free will tend to leave me relatively uninterested. However, Feodor Dostoevsky, in a select reading from Notes From Underground, seemingly uses determinism as a jumping off point to analyze the deeper meanings of freedom itself. Dostoevsky claims that determinism and freedom are incompatible, that in order to have freedom, one cannot have their choices dictated by natural laws. Natural laws, according to Dostoevsky, always lead a person to choose what is in their best interest through logic and reason. However, if we follow what our instincts and rationality tell us to do to meet our best interest, we lose our freedom. We become robots executing the programs coded in our DNA. However, Dostoevsky claims that through our knowledge of these natural laws, we can choose to disobey them and gain true freedom. Although many of the different ‘flavors’ of determinism, so to speak, claim that it is impossible to do anything contrary to natural laws, these theories tend to fall apart when attempting to explain the illusion of choice that we experience through consciousness. It is the theories of determinism of this variety that seem to most closely match some of the new evidence humanity has gathered in the last 200 hundred years or so, yet if one were to converted by Dostoevsky’s very convincing argument, these two different ideas would cause one to either reject the idea of free will, or refuse to act in self interest in defiance.