By Tim Mountain and Kevin O’Malley

Welcome to the fifth edition of “Is It Better Than Good Will Hunting?,” the weekly culture review column where Kevin O’Malley and Tim Mountain compare food, media, experiences and more against the world of art that produced Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting.

Good Will Hunting (GWH) is a 1997 coming-of-age drama starring Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Minnie Driver and Robin Williams. It was directed by Gus Van Sant and written by Damon and Affleck. It currently holds a 97 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

This week, we compare GWH to free will, the idea that human beings have agency over their actions.

Tim: So, Kevin–let me get this straight. We’re comparing GWH to free will this week?

Kevin: It looks like it has been decided so. Or at least, we decided to do so. See what I did there?

Tim: Yes I did.

Kevin: Okay I’ll be honest, that pretty much exhausted my knowledge of it there. I know a lot about GWH but not a ton about free-will.

Tim: No problem, Kevin. Basically, the debate goes like this: most people who oppose free-will are self-identified “determinists.” They don’t necessarily believe that what’s happening now was written down on a scroll and called into reality millions of years ago, but they do believe that we exist at the end of a long chain of causation that started when the universe was created in the big bang. It’s actually something that became popular after Newton discovered his physical laws of the universe. People thought, well, if there are these universal, unbreakable laws that affect all of us, how do we have any agency at all?

Kevin: Well that sounds good to me, I believe in that. What’s the difference then between that and free will?

Tim: The belief in free-will has always had an enduring role in the history of philosophy: even when times were tough and it looked like Newton was going to convince everybody that, in an ideal world where we could know everything about everything, we could apply these laws and predict the future based on them. Neuroscience, of course, would have to develop enough so that we could understand every single facet of the behavior of the human brain. (I’m giving you an abridged history, of course. It’s far more nuanced than this, and I don’t mean to imply that this debate started right at the beginning of the scientific revolution. But we only have 750 words, here). So, anyway, have you ever heard of a little German man named Werner Heisenberg?

Kevin: Heisenberg?? Like from Breaking Bad!! XD (Just kidding. Of course.)

Tim: I sure hope you’re kidding, because Heisenberg was huge. Probably bigger than Bryan Cranston will ever be. He discovered the uncertainty principle, one of the key principles in quantum physics. Basically, it says that the more you know about an electron’s position in space, the less you can know about where it’s going. This principle holds true for things on a macroscopic scale, too, although this is less apparent in everyday life.

Kevin: So what did Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle do for the argument for free will?

Tim: The short answer: a lot. Probably. This is just my take, but there’s so much scholarship on the philosophical revolution that occurred around the turn of the 20th century (based on Einstein’s and various other scientists’ work on quantum mechanics) that I’m sure a lot of other people agree. But, the way I see it, we can’t know everything. Heisenberg proved it. Therefore, we can’t ever possibly chart out the future, causation and the laws of the universe are more fickle than Newton thought, and free-will, to some degree, must be a reality.

Kevin: Cool. Well, do you have any questions for me about GWH?

Tim: Why is watching Stellan Skarsgard try to act in that movie so unsettling? It’s an otherwise perfect movie.

Kevin: Probably because he’s Swedish and thinks he’s better than Gus Van Sant.

Tim: So, we’ve established that humans (might) have free will. But is it better than Good Will Hunting?

Kevin: Well from what you’ve told me, I can suffice that Free Will is important to the amount of direct control we feel as human, but has an undetermined amount of control over the outcome. It’s sort of a human participation trophy.

Tim: I totally agree. More important than having free will is believing that you do. There are people who have tried to justify horrible things by claiming that, since free will doesn’t exist, neither does moral responsibility.

Kevin: Exactly. GWH covers a similar theme. Knowing that you’re smart is more valuable than applying it.

Tim: Hmm. This is an interesting take.

Kevin: A true battle. I guess what it boils down to is would we rather have Free Will or have GWH? It seems like we’ll never

Tim: For me, it’s gotta be GWH. Let’s do a little thought experiment: if you could be strapped into a chair with GWH playing on a loop, and you couldn’t leave, would you do it? It takes away free will, but you get GWH all the time.

Kevin: Doesn’t sound too bad, but I don’t see it like that. I think I could still mindlessly walk along the tracks of life with GWH coming along every few months just like it has for me ever since High School.

Tim: I believe in free will, but I never said it was something I valued or wanted. For me, free will isn’t valuable at all. It gives me too much agency to make bad choices. It is comforting to know that there’s potentially a life out there for me that involves no free-will, no moral responsibility and a whole lot of my favorite flick.

Kevin: I’m at a standstill here, and I’ll tell you why. I love GWH. Probably more than free will– definitely more than free will. But as a believer in free will, I have to recognize that GWH itself is a product of free will. So, therefore, I’m going to have to make an editorial sacrifice here and pick my preference as free will. Not because it’s better, but because I still want GWH to exist.

Tim: Wow, Kevin, it’s your first time picking something over GWH. This is huge.

Kevin: I’m not happy about it, but I need to do this for GWH. The universe is far too cruel to have spawned this alone. Without free will our favorite movie just wouldn’t exist. The universe is cruel, but Robin Williams is too good to be a product of causation alone.