A short introduction
Dr. Pethiyagoda holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Melbourne (Australia), a Masters in International Human Rights Law from Oxford University (UK), a Masters in Business Systems and a Bachelors in Sociology from Monash University (Australia), and a Graduate Diploma in Law from the University of London (UK). He is presently an Academic Advisor at the University of Oxford, St Antony's College, and an Honorary Fellow/Foreign Policy Expert at the University of Melbourne's Australia-India Institute. Previously, he has been a Fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy and the Brookings Institution, Doha. He has also been the Research Director, Global Governance, at the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute of International Relations in Sri Lanka.Publications:
Freedom from free will: Good riddance to the self
As any essay on free will, the present one is bound to be polemic. We believe the debate on free will is important and the present essay meaningfully contributes to it. Nonetheless, we feel bound to clarify our editorial position here: as a foundation dedicated to promoting objective formulations of metaphysical idealism, we endorse the existence of a reality beyond the seemingly personal self, which behaves in a predictable, lawful manner. An implication of this view is the impossibility of libertarian free will: we do make our own choices, but our choices are determined by that which we, and the universe around us, are. Yet we believe that there is a very important sense in which free will does exist: under idealism, the universe is constituted by the excitations of one, universal field of subjectivity. The impetus towards self-excitation that characterizes this field of subjectivity is free will, for it depends on nothing else. The entire dance of universal unfolding is a dance of universal free will. This is the sense in which, for example, Federico Faggin and our own Bernardo Kastrup defend the fundamental existence of free will in nature. This understanding of free will is entirely compatible with the understanding that our choices are determined but that which we truly are. Finally, objective formulations of metaphysical idealism deny, just as the author of the present essay does, the fundamental existence of a personal self. Instead, the latter is regarded as a transient, reducible configuration of the underlying field of subjectivity. As such, there cannot be such a thing as personal, egoic free will, for the personal self itself isn’t a fundamental construct.
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