Does free thinking exist?

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I have been engaged in thoughts about freedom of thought, original thinking, whether individual thinking really does exist.

Nobody can control our thoughts - apart from anything else, there's too much nonlinear processes involved - but none of us are uninfluenced by our surroundings, our background and our community.

One of the things one learns in counselling is that many things we believe are our own spontaneous decisions are actually forced on us by old habits or beliefs. Some counsellors say that the primary purpose of therapy is to set the client free to think for hirself.

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It seems to me that so many many people elect not to use their heads. Maybe they have been taught not to? Maybe they find it scary or bothersome? But many seem to - choose? - to close their heads and feel instead, or they focus on daily chores, or on entertainment instead.

Some of it is certainly choice. It's easier to go with the flow than ask questions and think things out. There's the influences I mentioned above, and then there's the knowledge that expressing controversial opinions can be unpopular.

But there's another force which I have recently been considering, having been pointed at it by the excellent blogger "Slacktivist." (slacktivist - if you're not interested in Xian issues you'll have to skip a lot, but give him a chance, he has some enlightening thoughts.) He observed that sometimes people cling to indefensible beliefs because the alternative hurts. To take a current example, if you admit to yourself that refugees are desperate victims in terrible need, then you either have to accept a lot of inconvenience - at least, higher taxes - to help them, or feel like a very bad person for refusing to. But if you stick to the belief that they're all benefit tourists or terrorist infiltrators, then you can refuse them shelter and still feel good about yourself. Behaviour that's rewarded is repeated.

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However, if no one could think freely -whatever that means - would anything ever change?

So who does, and why? Who do not, and why?

It's often argued that change only comes from some small handful of neophiles who eventually get the lumpen mass of the population to change their views. I think that's an elitist attitude, and not supported by the evidence: often, a new idea bubbles up everywhere with no identifiable origin.

To take a random example, the death of Princess Diana was, so far as I know, the first time British people expressed their feelings by piling flowers and love tokens in public places. It was later said that the media had created the idea, but I happened to be travelling down the country that day, and I know it wasn't so: it happened all over the place before it was ever reported. The reports certainly spread the idea, but they didn't start it.

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How do you define freedom of thinking?

Very cautiously!

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And is freedom of thought a necessity for free will? If I am right and many people do not think, does that mean that they do not have much freedom of choice??

No, I'd say they are exercising their freedom of choice by not thinking, probably because they can feel that it would lead in ways they don't want to go. It's not just negative: as "Slacktivist" points out, beliefs can also bring rewards, like believing you are a hero resisting evil, when too much thought might tell you you were one of the bad guys.