“The gods made me do it.”
“It’s my destiny.”
“I couldn’t avoid the accident.”
“Circumstances were beyond my control.”
Or, consider this one by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow:
“Since people live in the universe and interact with the other objects in it, scientific determinism must hold for people as well. Many, however…make an exception for human behavior because they believe we have free will.”*
And they go on to say:
“Recent experiments in neuroscience support the view that it is our physical brain, following the known laws of science, that determines our actions, and not some agency that exists outside those laws” (32).
Hmnnnn!? You buyin’ that? Maybe. Anyway, the two authors argue further for an “effective theory” (I’d say, hypothesis). Their argument is based on the lack of a mathematical framework to predict human behavior precisely the way we can predict that a collision of two masses with a certain velocity will result in an identifiable spread of debris and final resting places. Newton didn’t seem to have any answers for why people do what they do. So, according to Hawking and Mlodinow, “we use the effective theory that people have free will ”[ltalics mine]. I suppose you might want to argue that as we learn more about the brain and accumulate more information for further refinement of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders –5, we’ll approach a Newtonian-type of analysis for humans.
The problem, of course, is that we do stuff just because we can. All of us have the potential to be James Dean playing our own role in a personal remake of the movie Rebel without a Cause. Or, we might all play Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s protagonist in Crime and Punishment, deciding to do something like murder just because we can. However useful the DSM—5 is for counselors, psychotherapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, its focus is “disorders,” and not on “orders,” not on what might be called “normal” behavior. If we assume with Hawking and Mlodinow that determinism rules, then we can easily look for that set of formulae that describe and predict abnormal “disordered” behavior. And maybe we’re close with DSM—5, though the numbering system indicates that we’re still refining. What will be the number for DSM in two decades, in a century, in a millennium? Will we be at DSM—1,033? And will that refinement some thousand years hence be mathematical? Will we finally have pinned down the brain’s inner workings and tied it to its outward behavioral manifestations?
If the time comes when DSM—1,033 fulfills the goals of a deterministic science, will we finally acknowledge that we have no free will? Or, even in the distant future will we struggle in arguments between behavioral scientists and neuroscientists on one hand and theologians and philosophers on the other. Hawking and Mlodinow argue that philosophy is “dead.” Are they correct? Has an objective science overtaken the roles of theology and philosophy? Are we, for example, on the verge of declaring as a corollary that there is no “sin” because no one is responsible beyond mere obedience to neurons, neurotransmitters, the molecules that make them, the subatomic particles that make the molecules, and the quantum effects on quarks in the head?
I guess the nature of the quantum world prohibits us from ultimately resolving the question of free will since we cannot know both place and momentum simultaneously, cannot know what is and is not entangled deep within our brains, and cannot keep track, regardless of our developments in super computing, of a potential quadrillion synaptic connections among a hundred billion neurons each with 10,000 connections. Is the effective theory of free will the best we can hope for until we get a super computer that can not only mimic the human brain but also explain in real time to those neurons the nature of their interactions?
Probably not. As any computer is in the process of keeping track of the brain, those neurons keep firing or pulsing. It’s an unending job until death parts brain from behavior.
Hawking and Mlodinow are good physicists, but can they explain “scientifically” (deterministically) why they like physics or why they pursued careers in physics? Maybe they are just reincarnations of David Hume, the philosopher. He wrote, “Though our thought seems to possess [an] unbounded liberty, [we find] upon a nearer examination that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience.”**
Wow! Now there are three guys who doubt you have free will, and they are all well respected thinkers. Wait! Thinkers? Thinking? Does that presuppose “mind.” Do they believe they have “minds”? Would they argue that “mind” is simply a definition of “working brain”? What do you think?
Are you merely a working brain?
Is one of the costs of free will a relinquishing of observation and determinsm in favor of an effective theory? Does accepting the concept of free will come at the price of science? Or are we in an endless cycle of circularity in an unprovable argument? Are we like Descartes arguing for the existence of God saying in effect, “I am finite. God is infinite. I can’t have an infinite thought. The thought of God must have been put in me by God. God, therefore, exists”? Thus, I have free will because I can choose to explore whether or not I have free will. I have the free will to question my free will. It must be free will that enables me to question or affirm its existence.”
Are you free to think about free will? Or does your brain demand it at the cost of true freedom?
*Hawking, Stephen and Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design. New York. Bantam Books, 2010., p. 30.
**Hume, David. Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748.
“It’s my destiny.”
“I couldn’t avoid the accident.”
“Circumstances were beyond my control.”
Or, consider this one by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow:
“Since people live in the universe and interact with the other objects in it, scientific determinism must hold for people as well. Many, however…make an exception for human behavior because they believe we have free will.”*
And they go on to say:
“Recent experiments in neuroscience support the view that it is our physical brain, following the known laws of science, that determines our actions, and not some agency that exists outside those laws” (32).
Hmnnnn!? You buyin’ that? Maybe. Anyway, the two authors argue further for an “effective theory” (I’d say, hypothesis). Their argument is based on the lack of a mathematical framework to predict human behavior precisely the way we can predict that a collision of two masses with a certain velocity will result in an identifiable spread of debris and final resting places. Newton didn’t seem to have any answers for why people do what they do. So, according to Hawking and Mlodinow, “we use the effective theory that people have free will ”[ltalics mine]. I suppose you might want to argue that as we learn more about the brain and accumulate more information for further refinement of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders –5, we’ll approach a Newtonian-type of analysis for humans.
The problem, of course, is that we do stuff just because we can. All of us have the potential to be James Dean playing our own role in a personal remake of the movie Rebel without a Cause. Or, we might all play Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s protagonist in Crime and Punishment, deciding to do something like murder just because we can. However useful the DSM—5 is for counselors, psychotherapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, its focus is “disorders,” and not on “orders,” not on what might be called “normal” behavior. If we assume with Hawking and Mlodinow that determinism rules, then we can easily look for that set of formulae that describe and predict abnormal “disordered” behavior. And maybe we’re close with DSM—5, though the numbering system indicates that we’re still refining. What will be the number for DSM in two decades, in a century, in a millennium? Will we be at DSM—1,033? And will that refinement some thousand years hence be mathematical? Will we finally have pinned down the brain’s inner workings and tied it to its outward behavioral manifestations?
If the time comes when DSM—1,033 fulfills the goals of a deterministic science, will we finally acknowledge that we have no free will? Or, even in the distant future will we struggle in arguments between behavioral scientists and neuroscientists on one hand and theologians and philosophers on the other. Hawking and Mlodinow argue that philosophy is “dead.” Are they correct? Has an objective science overtaken the roles of theology and philosophy? Are we, for example, on the verge of declaring as a corollary that there is no “sin” because no one is responsible beyond mere obedience to neurons, neurotransmitters, the molecules that make them, the subatomic particles that make the molecules, and the quantum effects on quarks in the head?
I guess the nature of the quantum world prohibits us from ultimately resolving the question of free will since we cannot know both place and momentum simultaneously, cannot know what is and is not entangled deep within our brains, and cannot keep track, regardless of our developments in super computing, of a potential quadrillion synaptic connections among a hundred billion neurons each with 10,000 connections. Is the effective theory of free will the best we can hope for until we get a super computer that can not only mimic the human brain but also explain in real time to those neurons the nature of their interactions?
Probably not. As any computer is in the process of keeping track of the brain, those neurons keep firing or pulsing. It’s an unending job until death parts brain from behavior.
Hawking and Mlodinow are good physicists, but can they explain “scientifically” (deterministically) why they like physics or why they pursued careers in physics? Maybe they are just reincarnations of David Hume, the philosopher. He wrote, “Though our thought seems to possess [an] unbounded liberty, [we find] upon a nearer examination that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience.”**
Wow! Now there are three guys who doubt you have free will, and they are all well respected thinkers. Wait! Thinkers? Thinking? Does that presuppose “mind.” Do they believe they have “minds”? Would they argue that “mind” is simply a definition of “working brain”? What do you think?
Are you merely a working brain?
Is one of the costs of free will a relinquishing of observation and determinsm in favor of an effective theory? Does accepting the concept of free will come at the price of science? Or are we in an endless cycle of circularity in an unprovable argument? Are we like Descartes arguing for the existence of God saying in effect, “I am finite. God is infinite. I can’t have an infinite thought. The thought of God must have been put in me by God. God, therefore, exists”? Thus, I have free will because I can choose to explore whether or not I have free will. I have the free will to question my free will. It must be free will that enables me to question or affirm its existence.”
Are you free to think about free will? Or does your brain demand it at the cost of true freedom?
*Hawking, Stephen and Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design. New York. Bantam Books, 2010., p. 30.
**Hume, David. Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748.
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