Free Will
It’s something that I’ve been ruminating about since high school: just how much control do we have over our lives? That got me to the more general conversation about what is Truth, because you have to have some idea about what’s true before you get into specifics. And free will, and will, and being a person, are things that can be fiercely debated.
Here’s (an extreme, and not necessarily universal in the scientific comunity) argument against, free will, and possibly even will and being a person, from a scientific approach as I understand it: we are biological beings, made up of atoms, which scale up to molecules, which make up cells. Cells organize into our bones, muscles, and organs. Each living out there little mechanical lives, not thinking about the body that they live in or the world around them.
Our body has a complex nervous system that is a sort of supervisor of sorts of some, but not most, of the body’s functions. It has higher order processes, but those are all still strictly mechanical. The brain wiring of one person who is a loving parent may be totally different than the wiring of someone who is a serial killer. But in both cases, it comes down, exclusively to the internal wiring. Test have been conducted where electrical stimulation was applied to nerves that caused a person to open and close their hand, but when asked to report what they thought happened, test subjects said it was themselves who had given that order. We are, as one book described us, Strangers to Ourselves, slaves to a chain of biomechanical events, and not the true author of anything.
I’ll be coming back to critique this view tomorrow.
