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The subjective experience of choice, particularly deliberative choice, is based upon two conditions: A belief that the consequences of the alternatives are important to the chooser, and a realization that the chooser's knowledge is too incomplete to clearly specify which alternative is preferable. Someone with nearly complete knowledge would seldom be aware of a choice, since in most cases he would know immediately which alternatives were relevant to his purposes, and which of the alternatives was preferable. I am not ordinarily aware of “choosing” where to put my feet when walking, since my knowledge is usually complete enough to leave the placement of my feet to non-conscious computation. A near-omniscient man would only be aware of choice in cases where his knowledge was incomplete or inconsistent. And in this case he would wish that his knowledge could be increased so that this choice too would vanish and be replaced by behavior that was fully determined by its known preferable consequences!
Thus choice diminishes as freedom increases, which seems contrary to most discussions of freedom in which choice plays a fundamental role. The more usual definition of choice may be paraphrased as “the existence of many alternatives, any of which the person could realistically select.” However, if we assume the hypothesis of universal strict determinism, all of these “alternatives” but one are fictitious, since every choice is actually completely determined by the person's purposes, his knowledge of the characteristics of the alternatives, accidents, past conditioning, etc. It is thus unrealistic to say that the person “could” have selected one of the other alternatives, unless we hypothesize that a change “could” have been made in the determinants of the person's decision. In order to do this, still earlier determinants would have to be changed, so this clearly leads to infinite regress.
Even though we assert that a particular one of a given set of “alternatives” will be chosen by a particular person in a particular situation, it is meaningful to say that a wider range of alternatives provides a basis for freedom. A narrow range of alternatives may prevent the person from being able to make a favorable choice which a wider range would permit. In both cases the choice would be fully determined, but in one case the determinants are so restrictive that none of the person's repertoire of behavior is effective. “Freedom of choice” only means that the situation was such that the individual himself was a significant determinant of the choice, not that he could have chosen otherwise than he did. This confusion is the basis for many misguided and self-contradictory attempts to establish freedom based on indeterminism.
We are not inevitably led to an infinite regress if we postulate that we actively intervene in future events that concern us, through our actions in the present. Because of our deterministic knowledge, we extrapolate into the future and sometimes predict undesirable consequences. When we understand these processes fully enough, we often see points where we can intervene as an added determinant to modify these undesirable consequences, and since this result is congruent with our determined desires we intervene. There is no contradiction in asserting that this kind of process is also strictly determined, and it is perfectly consistent with the definition of freedom as an organism's ability to achieve goals. Other than the inherent limitations of the knowledge upon which this freedom is based, there are no apparent limits to this power to achieve goals. Even with our limited knowledge, we continue to find surprisingly effective ways of accomplishing what previously seemed to be “forbidden by the laws of nature.”
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