New York Times Tries to Understand Free Will

Yesterday the NY Times decided to report, "Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don't."

"A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control."

In other words, there is no such thing as genuine freedom of the will. And the NY Times didn't actually decide anything yesterday.

These studies are not terribly new. The thrust of one version is that when we think we have decided to make some voluntary action, that decision has actually been made a half-second or so previously in an unconscious portion of the brain. In terms of the free will issue, that's a real split-brain approach. It assumes that the unconscious is determined, just because it is not controlled by the conscious. But is that necessarily the case? I admit not having thought this through completely, but it seems likely that the conclusion is hasty. The unconscious is part of self, and the question is whether self is free. If the unconscious acts, it is still the self acting; and these experiments do not address whether the unconscious is free; they just show that it is earlier than the conscious.

Michael Silberstein, a "science philosopher," wrote in an email to the Times,

"If people freak at evolution, etc, how much more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell them they are nothing more than sophisticated meat machines, and is that conclusion now clearly warranted or is it premature?"

. . . .

"every physical system that has been investigated has turned out to be either deterministic or random. “Both are bad news for free will,” [Silberstein] said. So if human actions can’t be caused and aren’t random, he said, “It must be — what — some weird magical power?'"

As the article goes on it explores a number of possible explanations for our sense of free will, all of them based on materialist assumptions--leaving God and soul out of the picture, not worthy of discussion, in other words. But there's a problem:

"The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility. According to those who believe that free will and determinism are incompatible, Dr. Silberstein said in an e-mail message, it would mean that 'people are no more responsible for their actions than asteroids or planets.' Anything would go."

This does seem to be a logical outcome of philosophical materialism. But it's not just an uncomfortable conclusion; it's an incoherent one. If we have no free will--if all of our actions are either determined or random--how could a person come to a reliable, rational conclusion (and write it down for others to read) that we have no free will? Why would we assign any more meaning to that than to asteroids or planets?

Posted: Wed - January 3, 2007 at 10:03 PM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

New York Times Tries to Understand Free Will

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson