A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Touted as one of Kubrick's best work, A Clockwork Orange plays with the notion of free will as a human right.

Personally, I found the movie less entertaining and without any explicit directions. A mere cinematic rendering of the novel by Anthony Burgess .. What the movie does do, is to provoke thought about the existence of free will and the right to exercise it within the bounds of the world that we perceive.

So, does free will exist? The ability to make a choice when presented with a decision problem is what we call as free will. Randomness and determinism get naturally involved when we discuss free will. Determinism essentially means that events occur as they are 'supposed to' - predetermined - there is no other way. Therefore, free will cannot co-exist with determinism. Randomness is the notion of probabilistic occurence of events, a choice is naturally presented but with no explicit control. Randomness undermines free will, where choice occur by chance. Co-existence is possible but in a mutually exclusive, disjoint space.

So, lets assume a favourable environment for further discussion. We constraint determinism so that given a set of choices, the outcome after a choice is made is deterministic at any given decision node. That is to say that, given the same initial state, if we make the same choices at respective decision points, we would end up at the same final state. We still cannot accomodate randomness, because it cannot contribute to free will in any way, it is way too random!

Free will then allows us to make these choices when we are confronted by a decision. It allows us to evaluate/estimate outcomes for each choice, and optimize some cost function. Lets call this 'logic' for now, drawn out of past association between cause and effect. Our decisions are mostly mere calculations based on our collective 'logic' together with some randomness at points where the scales do not dip at either end.

What was so safely ignored unto this point is the existence of causal interference. We would turn up the same each time (with some tolerance offcourse) but for varied external influences from everything that surrrounds us. So, decision process is now a cost function of our own present state (memory, preferences, senses .. ) together with external variables ( recommendations, reviews, etc.). That hardly leaves any room for free will ...

For me free will does not exist in its truest sense, free will merely abstracts all that is unknown! Moral responsibility as a consequence of free will, therefore debatable, still forms an inseparable foundation of social existence.