The attacks on one of the fundamental essences of being human — free will — continue apace. The latest example can be found in the BBC’s Science Focus feature, in which Stanford biology professor Robert Sapolsky — a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant for his work on the physiological effects of stress — redefines us as merely robotic biological machines incapable of making truly free decisions.
We only think we “could have done otherwise” than what we did, claims Sapolsky. From the BBC interview:
Acting on something and knowing you could have done otherwise is often necessary and sufficient to decide that free has just happened.
Where I come in pulling my hair out is that doing that misses the key question: how did you turn out to be the sort of person who would tend to do that at that moment? It’s like asking about what happened in a book having only read the final sentence of it. You’ve missed everything that has gone before. . . .
Victims of an Illusion
Sapolsky claims that we are victims of an illusion that we control our own behavior. Why does the good professor think this (besides having no choice)? Biological determinism:
How did it turn out that you had a job that you needed to put on a sweatshirt for? How did it turn out that you’ve been successful enough to have more than one sweatshirt to choose from?
Essentially, how did you wind up being you at this moment?
It comes down to the fact that all we are is biology, over which we have no control, interacting with the environment, over which we have no control. There’s nothing else there. . . .
In the biological machines that constitute us, you pile up 100 billion of these levers on top of each other. It’s like billions of levers of causality of the stuff that went before that brought you to this moment. We just don’t understand most of those levers at the moment.
Still, when you put all of the levers together in a kind of spider web, they form a steel arc that is just as deterministic as one on its own.
Sapolsky is an atheist. I am not, and that impacts our respective behaviors. For example, I go to church regularly and I suspect he does not. According to him, neither of us has a choice in that matter.
Can We Predict?
Does that mean we can predict what each of us will do if we know enough about our experiences and biological makeup? Paradoxically, no:
The Universe throws random events at you and your behavioural outcome then occurs. Given that bit of randomness in the Universe at that point, you behave in a certain way because you turned out to be the sort of person whose neurons would respond in that way.
The future is not already determined, but how you will respond to that indeterministic future has already been determined by how you wound up being who you are in this instant.
This is all potentially catastrophic balderdash. Why? Accepting that we are merely flesh marionettes dancing to the strings pulled by our various biological processes would doom human decency. For example, it would:
- Eradicate intrinsic human value. If we are mere automatons, we would have no greater value than amoebas. If all we are is carbon molecules, what difference does it make, in the end, how we treat each other? If we are just like any other animal in the forest, why not treat each other that way?
- Obliterate moral agency. Denying free will would be a means of allowing anything and judging nothing. Consider: The definition of insanity in a criminal case allows a perpetrator to escape legal responsibility if the person has a mental illness that prevented him or her from understanding the wrongfulness of their actions. But if we have no free will, none of us truly can act wrongfully, much less form the subjective intent necessary to be culpable. Or to put it more broadly, Hitler couldn’t not be Hitler, and the millions of Germans who followed him couldn’t not do that either. Moral judgments about good and evil would be irrelevant because lacking true moral agency, there could be no such things.
- Shatter belief in human creativity. Beethoven couldn’t not write the Ninth Symphony. Van Gogh just followed the predetermined strokes of his brush. Your little boy’s charming crayon drawing of a house is nothing but neurons firing that he had to obey and certainly not worth melting over emotionally.
- Enable radical nihilism. If we believe we are not the captains of our own ship, where would we find life’s meaning?
The Devil Made Me
Denying free will is just a more sophisticated way of saying the devil made me do it. If that’s crackers, so is this. Good grief. We don’t even know what consciousness is. If there is no free will, are we even really conscious?
Yes, we are! We know free will exists because we each experience it every day. Claiming that is merely an illusion is the true illusion.
(I interviewed my Discovery Institute colleague, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, about why he believes in free will — and “free won’t,” the ability to inhibit instinctive reactions — on my Humanize podcast. Here’s a link to the transcript. Whether you hit it is completely up to you. You do have a choice.)
Cross-posted at National Review.