Human beings shape their lives by making choices. We choose to get out of bed every day, instead of sleeping in. We may choose to drink coffee instead of tea, eat an apple instead of an orange and so on. In all of the choices we make, we implicitly believe that we could have chosen otherwise. We believe that we make our choices freely, or in other words, we make choices out of “our own free will.”

We live our lives based upon the assumption of free will, our ability to freely choose our futures based on the choices in front of us. We believe we have free will because we experience it every day. I stand up, go outside and look at the stars, because I want to. I eat an apple instead of an orange, because I want to. We do not feel forced into the decisions, or see any inevitability in our choosing this or that.

While we believe that our decisions are made freely, we are also aware that some of our actions are influenced by our instincts, desires, impulses, reflexes, habits, behaviors and predispositions. In fact, if we were to categorize them, we would find that we do not have to exert our conscious free will for the vast majority of our actions, we do them pretty automatically. We duck under low hanging tree branches, without consciously debating whether we should or not. We drive from one place to another, all without even being consciously aware of many of the decisions we made in the process. The fact that we make many of our decisions instinctively is rather useful, as we often have to respond quickly to many situations, where we may not have the time to deliberate and make conscious choices.

Free will is hence the process of curbing or choosing from our natural instinctive desires when there is a need to choose, which is rarely necessary.

While the majority of our actions are instinctive in nature, sometimes we have to reign in those instincts using our free will. Even though we are hungry we may not eat the food in front of us, because it is someone else’s food, we are controlling our diet or fasting. We use our free will to sanitize our instinctive desires through filters based on morality, societal rules and obligations or perhaps based on a prediction of some long-term benefit.

Free will is hence the process of curbing or choosing from our natural instinctive desires when there is a need to choose, which is rarely necessary. Most of the time our instincts and desires take over and we do what comes naturally. In our every day life we may experience free will as self-control, decision making and planning.

Our society draws a direct line from free will to moral responsibility. We believe that free will is a necessary precondition for moral responsibility. A person who ran over a pedestrian intentionally, is held to a different standard than someone who did it accidentally. We hold the person who intentionally killed the pedestrian, morally and legally responsible, because we believe that he should have, and implicitly that he could have, chosen not to do so.

In order to hold someone morally responsible, we also believe that besides free will, the person also needs to be consciously aware of their actions and choices. We would not normally hold an insane person or a person whose consciousness was otherwise compromised, morally responsible. Since moral responsibility is closely tied to free will, generally when we talk about “free will” we actually mean “conscious free will.” Our definition of what we consider to be freely willed actions and choices, does not include decisions made by someone whose consciousness is impaired, say for example, someone who is under hypnosis or sleep-walking.

The problem of free will

This everyday experience and understanding of free will might seem quite straight-forward, but it has as much of a bearing on the scientific and philosophical understanding of free will, as the everyday concept of gravity before Isaac Newton. From a scientific, philosophical and theological perspective, free will remains one of the biggest mysteries known to man.

French philosopher and mathematician, René Descartes, categorized our world into two kinds of stuff, the mind stuff and the material stuff. This was in keeping with a long tradition of a dualistic viewpoint, which proposes that an immaterial mind is different from, and can act upon, a material brain. But as the properties of matter started becoming clearer, a mystery arose about how an immaterial mind could act upon a material brain. This mystery, which remains unanswered to this day, is usually referred to as the mind-body problem.

In determinism all events in the universe could be thought of as dominos. A domino falls because of the previous one and in turn becomes a cause for the next one to fall.

Sir Isaac Newton gave us the laws of motion and universal gravitation, which led to the broader acceptance of the mechanistic world view as the foundation of physics. The principle was so successful, that the mechanistic model gained even wider acceptance for all natural systems, including human decisions and actions, giving rise to determinism, the idea that every event (effect) is necessitated by antecedent (material) events and conditions (causes). The causes themselves are made necessary by even prior causes and so on. The proposal was that deterministic material causes explained not just the motion of rocks, planets and stars, but all natural phenomenon, including the workings of the human mind. Every event and substance in the universe is causally complete, with all causes being material causes. Cartesian dualism thus started to lose traction, in favor of mechanistic and materialistic determinism.

There are many variants of determinism. For the purposes of this article, I will use the term, ‘materialistic determinism,’ to represent physical, causal and mechanistic determinism.

“Once you start with the premise that classical mechanics is right, you are forced to the conclusion that there is no free will.” — Henry Stapp, Quantum Physicist

If the universe is causally complete, that does not seem to leave much room for anything like conscious free will. If the brain is a deterministic physical system, all changes and events in the brain, which are of necessity neurobiological in nature, must occur due to prior neurobiological causes and conditions of the brain. There was no reason to presume that these causes, and subsequently the human cognitive properties of sensory perception, memory, attention, awareness, sense of agency, free will, and even consciousness, could not be understood in their entirety by exploring the physical conditions of the brain in light of principles of biology, chemistry and physics. This did not seem to leave any room for an immaterial mind, even if it existed, to have much of an influence. Quantum Physicist Henry Stapp summarized it thus, “Once you start with the premise that classical mechanics is right, you are forced to the conclusion that there is no free will.”

What this meant was that based on the deterministic point of view, what we think of as our free choices, e.g., eating an apple instead of an orange, are not really free. If you chose to eat an apple, you could have only chosen to eat the apple. There was no possibility whatsoever that you would have chosen to eat the orange. Even if we were to, somehow, rewind the universe and allow you to make the same decision a million times, you would choose the apple every single time. This because the material conditions, or the physical state, within your brain and beyond would be exactly the same and would always lead you to the same decision.

An apple or an orange? No really, feel free to choose!

Notwithstanding the growing acceptance of determinism, our incontrovertible experience of ourselves, our decisions and choices, as uncaused causes, led many philosophers and scientists to persist with an alternate view on the free will debate. Some like David Hume and recently Daniel Dennett, proposed that while determinism was true, we still have free will, in that we get to make a choice, even though the choice we actually make may have been determined. This approach to free will, termed as compatibilism (since it asserts that free will is compatible with determinism), is based on a very lenient, almost a legalistic definition of free will. “Was there a gun to your head? No. Well then it was your free will.” Compatibilists have no problem with the fact that determinism dictated and necessitated your exact choice.

Conversely, many others took the position that compatibilism was not enough, that if our choices were determined they cannot be called free. That for true free will, you need to have an open situation where the options are truly available for our conscious free will to choose from. Which means that with same exact material conditions within your brain and beyond, you could have chosen to eat an orange instead. This is known as the Libertarian (not to be confused with the political libertarianism) free will and it essentially requires that determinism is false, or at least false in so far as it applies to conscious free will in human beings.

In early to mid twentieth century, as the deterministic foundation of classical physics started getting challenged by quantum mechanics, the libertarian view started to gather support. Quantum mechanics gave rise to a new probabilistic and indeterministic foundation to physics, which for many opened the door for libertarian free will. But there were no libertarian celebrations yet, as concerns were raised about what free will was like if it arose from quantum probability and indeterminism. i.e. if probabilistic and indeterministic processes at the subatomic level amplified to the point where we experienced them as our conscious decisions, does that really qualify as being free? If you chose the apple, because of some random sub-atomic events, is that really enough to meet our definition of conscious free will?

Columbian neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás summarized the argument of determinism against free will:

“Free Will is an illusion we have. It is our ability to follow the tyranny of our own neurons. We don’t have a choice, we do what the neurons tell us to do. There are different tyrannies at different levels, some could be of social laws, which you have accepted and adopted. There is conflict and an internal negotiation between these different tyrannies and that could be perceived as free will by us.”

Free will is intimately tied up with consciousness, that quality you lose when you go to sleep and which flickers back when you wake up. Consciousness is your awareness of being aware, the subjective experience of the world that is your own and cannot be shared or recreated precisely. While it is a very large topic in of itself, here it will suffice to say that consciousness plays a critical role in the free will debate. From a libertarian perspective consciousness is essential because you need to consciously generate reasonable options, apple or orange. You also need to be consciously aware of, not just the fact that an apple and an orange are reasonable options, but everything about what an apple or orange is, in relationship to yourself and everything else you are aware of. You then need to consciously evaluate the options based on reasons and then make a conscious decision.

From a deterministic point of view consciousness, like free will, is epiphenomenal, an incidental and unnecessary by-product, like heat from a computer processor. Determinists propose that, just like the software algorithm based decision making in computers does not need consciousness, it is not needed in humans either.

“We do what we do because of the way we are. To be truly responsible for the way we act, we need to be truly responsible for the way we are. But we cannot be responsible for the way we are, hence we cannot be free.” — British philosopher, Galen Strawson

British philosopher, Galen Strawson, succinctly encapsulates a key philosophical argument against free will, “We do what we do, because of the way we are. To be truly responsible for the way we act, we need to be truly responsible for the way we are. But we cannot be responsible for the way we are, hence we cannot be free.”

The Libet experiment and the case against Free Will

As Electroencephalography (EEG) and sophisticated neuroimaging became possible, some of the aspects being debated could be brought into the laboratory and put through the rigors of neuropsychological and cognitive experiments.

In early 1980s, in a now famous experiment, neurologist Benjamin Libet, while monitoring his subjects brain activity with an EEG, asked them to flex their finger at a time of their own choosing. The subjects were asked to look at a specialized clock and report the exact time (W), when they themselves were first aware of their decision to flex. Libet also captured the actual time of the movement of the finger(T) using an electromyogram (recording actual muscle movement) and the test was conducted several times. When the averaged data for W and T was correlated with the data from the EEG, Libet found that the electrical activity (aka Readiness Potential) in the motor cortex, the part of the brain controlling voluntary motion, began on average around 350 milliseconds before the W, the time subjects reported the conscious awareness of the urge to flex their finger. And the W came only around 200 ms, on average, before the actual movement of the finger at time T.

Libet experiment results showing onset of the readiness potential forming well before the moment of the subjects awareness of the decision.

What this meant was that the brain had already started preparing for the motion of the finger, long (relatively speaking) before the subjects were consciously aware of “their decision” to move. This was a profound result which seemed to go against the libertarian view of free will.

The experiment has since been repeated and confirmed by many other scientists. More recent versions of the experiment have been conducted using fMRI brain imaging, which have recorded the formation of readiness potential, as early as, 2 whole seconds before W, the conscious awareness of the decision reported by the subject.

These findings were not only troubling if you believed in the libertarian free will but also challenged the entire premise of cartesian dualism. What we would have expected from a libertarian perspective, is to find conscious decision(W) followed by readiness potential in the motor cortex, culminating in muscle movement causing the flexing of the finger. But the order was completely backwards for free will causation to hold.

The brain had already started preparing for the motion of the finger, long before the subjects were consciously aware of “their decision” to move.

Since the Libet experiment, neuroscientists have conducted many other experiments including ones in which the researchers could predict in realtime (500 ms in advance), with around 70% accuracy, the hand that the subject was about to raise in a game similar to rock-paper-scissors.

What was emerging hence with these experiments, was the potential experimental confirmation of the long-held position of the determinists, that human decision making process, just like other natural processes, is a deterministic process, with the causes being material causes, completely describable within the domains of neurobiology, chemistry and eventually physics.

Neuroscientist and the Deputy Director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, Patrick Haggard, puts it thus:

“If the experience of volition is completely retrospective, then that really is quite a challenge, because it suggests that conscious experience of our action can never have anything to do with controlling the action in any circumstances.”

What then of our perception of free will and decision making? In light of these experiments it seemed to be some retroactive stitch-up, like a story we tell ourselves to explain our own actions which otherwise would be completely surprising or even shocking. “My brain activity prepares my action and once action takes place, my arm goes up. Retrospectively I make up the story, don’t be frightened by that, I planned to move the arm,” explains Haggard.

Neuroscientist Sam Harris in his book, “Free Will” concluded, “Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are not aware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom, we think we have.”

“Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are not aware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.” — Neuroscientist Sam Harris

Based on these interpretations, the mind-body problem was seemingly solved, in that an immaterial mind does not exist, nor does free will. Both subjective conscious experience and perception of free will are epiphenomenal, by-products of the natural processes. Human beings thus are deterministic biological machines, which can be understood entirely using reductive reasoning and materialistic determinism.

Problems with the Libet Experiment

In recent years, the preceding interpretation of the Libet experiment has had many, primarily determinists and compatibilists, takers. Many others however have pointed to flaws in the experiment and in the interpretations thereof.

The first problem many scientists and philosophers cite with the Libet experiment is with the type of decision the subjects are asked to make, namely flexing a finger or wrist, lifting an arm, etc. The problem is that these decisions were never really our paradigm of what we consider to be freely willed decisions, but were rather in category of those instinctive actions. Even without the experiment, if someone proposed that the conscious awareness of the decision, will come after readiness potential build up in the motor cortex of a subject ducking under a low hanging tree branch or catching a ball which was thrown to her suddenly, no one really would have thought that to be shocking. The problem, they said, was with the generalization from these instinctive actions to reason responsive decisions.

“Free will is more closely associated with our conscious weighing of pros and cons in order to make a good decision about a complicated issue, than with consciously detecting the exact moment when we made a particular trivial decision.” — Alfred Mele, Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University

The generalization, it was proposed, does not apply to any decisions that needs conscious analysis, deliberation and planning. They do not touch upon important decisions like, which college you should attend, or even something simple but with meaningful implications for the subject. For example, a contestant pressing one of two buttons on a quiz show, with monetary gains at stake. Alfred Mele, Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University, explains, “Free will is more closely associated with our conscious weighing of pros and cons in order to make a good decision about a complicated issue, than with consciously detecting the exact moment when we made a particular trivial decision.” For reason responsive decisions, we must use conscious processing to freely generate alternate possibilities, evaluate them based on reason and finally make a decision.

Patrick Haggard is quick to acknowledge the limitations of these experiments, “One criticism of these experiments is that, they do not really capture what we mean by our free will and our free decisions. I agree with that, what we study in the laboratory situation is a very simplified and a very reduced version of human action.” He goes on, “In philosophy we think of free will as decisions based on reasons, reason responsive decisions. I might choose left button for a particular reason, because it is better, I make more money, etc. In the work that we are doing, I would be the first one to say, that we are actually removing the reason, the person is making an arbitrary decision. It does not matter whether they go left or right, nothing rides on it.”

“Picking (inconsequential) from similar options is different from choosing (consequential).” — Neuroscientist Patrick Haggard

Haggard goes on to distinguish between the two types of decisions, “Picking (inconsequential) from similar options is different from choosing (consequential).” In other words, picking the time of an arbitrary inconsequential action like flexing a finger, is not the same as choosing from options that have consequences, say for example, which college you should attend.

Peter Tse, Professor of Psychology and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College, goes further:

“Libet paradigm, while useful, is a very weak basis for talking about free will. Especially since free will, seems to be not so much occurring in the domain of semi-automatic actions that don’t require any deliberation.”

Another problem with the interpretation of the Libet experiment is that they do not account for motor anticipation, motor cortex activity that happens in anticipation of a decision to act. Many of our actions are preceded by our self-prediction that we are going to act. And in preparation for any probable action we use the same motor cortex that would perform the action to simulate how we would do it. Michael Graziano, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University, explains, “Suppose your self model includes the self prediction that you might reach out and pick up a cup of juice. To enrich that model through simulation, the machinery that constructs the model contacts and uses your motor machinery to simulate the action, thereby priming the action and making you more likely to actually do it.”

So if the subjects of the experiment are thinking, “I am going to flex my finger, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, now.” They would report the time of conscious awareness of their decision (W) as the time of “now,” but there would be neuronal activity in the motor cortex, simulating the flexing of the finger all through the “waits”, which would show up as the rising deflection on the EEG or fMRI, we call readiness potential.

Yet another problem with the interpretations of the Libet experiment is from the findings of experiments that test simple go-signal reaction times. In these experiments the researchers were trying to ascertain how long it takes subjects to respond to a signal with a predesignated action, say an audible beep upon which the subject immediately has to click a mouse button. The mean time between the audible beep and muscle movement was found to be 231 ms. Which matches almost exactly (when you allow approximately 30ms for the processing of the go signal), the time from conscious intention (W) to muscle movement, in the main Libet experiment. This means that in the Libet experiment, the decision to flex could not have been made 550 ms before muscle movement because it takes much shorter time from a decision to action. Alfred Mele, in his recent book, Free: Why science hasn’t disproved free will, concludes:

“When the rise starts about half a second before the muscle burst in the main experiment, the beginning of the EEG reading or the first half of it, is correlated with something that precedes an intention, rather with an intention itself.”

One more flaw cited in the main Libet experiment has to do with the data collection methodology. The problem was that the EEG data was only saved for seconds preceding actual muscle movement. Which meant that, if there was a rise in the readiness potential, that did not result in muscle movement, it was completely ignored. Hence missing an opportunity to disprove a causal connection between the rise of the readiness potential and the decision to act.

These concern started to challenge the central premise that readiness potential is correlated with willing or formation of an intention. The concerns and additional experiments lead Peter Tse to confirm,

“We are finding the readiness potential probably has little to do with willing at all, it is just leading up to some action. Willing just does not seem to be causally related to readiness potential, it is not related.”

If the readiness potential is not correlated with willing, then what does it signify? I would theorize, that it is strongly correlated with the motor anticipation, the simulation of the predicted action in the motor cortex, initiated by a prediction of an impending decision (not the decision itself but the prediction of a decision).

Another problem cited with the Libet experiment is one of introspection. The subjects are asked to “report the time they were aware of their own decision to flex their finger.” This introduces a variable into the experiment which cannot be ignored. Adina Roskies, Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth College, explains, “Seems like Libet was asking subjects to introspect their own cognitive states and indicate when you are aware of being aware, which is not the same thing as when you are aware. And in reporting you own awareness you are in a meta-cognitive state, which is not the state which we are usually in when we act. It is a second order of awareness. Which of-course will be a later time.”

“Conscious intention and consciousness of intentions are two different things.” — Adina Roskies, Professor of philosophy at Dartmouth College

Uri Maoz, Adjunct Professor at the Department of Psychology at UCLA, who is researching computational neuroscience, decision making and free will, recently conducted experiments based on more meaningful reason based decisions. He found evidence supporting that meaningful decisions are made at the time when the subject was aware of the decision. Uri’s most reliable predictions happen at a certain point, which coincides with the subjects awareness of the decision. He confirms:

“So these kinds of arguments that say that you have made up your mind unconsciously and then only much later does consciousness get involved, we do not so far see that in these more meaningful reasoning based decisions.”

Interestingly, unlike many people like Sam Harris, who have jumped on the “Libet experiment debunks free will” bandwagon, Benjamin Libet himself went on to do follow-up work to establish the existence of the non-deterministic conscious free will as a veto mechanism often termed as “free won’t.” His later work focused on a very interesting aspect of these experiments, that of backwards time referral, leading to his theory of consciousness called Conscious Mental Fields.

Some of these concerns and more led Peter Tse to conclude:

“We think the field took a wrong turn with Libet [experiment and the interpretations thereof], and it is time to stop and reassess.”

Underlying problems with Materialistic Determinism

What we are learning is that many neuroscientists and philosophers may have jumped the gun on the Libet experiment and are misinterpreting a narrow experiment too broadly. So perhaps the debate is still not resolved. Be that as it may, even if we do not have experimental proof yet, couldn’t it be just round the corner? Isn’t materialistic determinism a foundational aspect of science? While we cannot limit what rapidly improving technology allows us to probe, nevertheless there are some fundamental problems with materialistic determinism which can no longer be ignored.

Materialistic determinism suggests that every single event in the universe, including our thoughts, our choices, formation of stars, etc., was predetermined going back all the way to the moment preceding the big bang, when the universe, according to the most widely accepted cosmological model, came into existence. This is because there is an unbroken chain of causes and effects, going back all the way to the beginning of everything. This means that everything you did today, everything else that has ever happened in the past and everything that will ever happen in the future, was all somehow fixed at the moment of the beginning of the universe!

Determinism requires that our lives and all events that occur in the universe are like a prerecorded movie, the frames of which are being played out by us and everything around us. Down to every falling of a leaf, every beating of a heart and every order for a grande nonfat vanilla latte, this movie has but one and only one, invariable and unrelenting plot line. A plot line in which we, the deterministic biological machines, are slavishly playing out our part, by following the biddings of our neurons. Helplessly watching the movie of our lives unfold and yet, thanks to the grand illusion of free will, oblivious to our own helplessness.

Materialistic determinism necessitates that all the acts and endeavors of human beings, including all achievements of greats scientists, mathematicians, poets, etc., are also completely predetermined. However if all human actions and achievements are predetermined, they are by necessity, completely meaningless and devoid of any truths. If neurobiological, chemical and physical processes within Isaac Newton’s brain caused him to propose the laws of motion and similar processes within the brains of other scientists and laymen since caused them to accept these findings, then there is no “truth” to these or any human discoveries. If deterministic principles were the cause of Einstein’s theory of relativity, then we cannot happily assume that his work is proof of the pinnacle of rational human thought, freely choosing between multiple possible theories.

If determinism is true then everything we have labelled as rational human thought and creativity would need to be considered as a mundane biochemical output no different from a burp. American theologian, Gregory Boyd puts it thus:

“If determinism is true, then the statement, ‘determinism is true,’ cannot possibly be true. That is because if determinism is true, then everything I am saying right now is a chemical reaction and chemical reactions cannot be true or false. What I am saying would be the equivalent of a burp.”

Materialistic determinism is eating its own self by the tail. This is not a problem that can really be solved within the confines of the paradigm. It is surprising thus, that many scientists and philosophers have been ignoring this massive elephant in the room. It is as if the determinists were saying, “All human thoughts, ideas and decisions are predetermined biochemical reactions, except for what I am saying.”

The dogmatic persistence with materialistic determinism seems rather strange, almost a century after the British physicist and astronomer Sir Arthur Stanley Edington declared, ”It is a consequence of the advent of the quantum theory that physics is no longer pledged to a scheme of deterministic law,” More recently Robert Kane, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, questioned why this archaic principle is still being tossed around in this day and age:

“One may legitimately wonder why worries about determinism persists at all in the twenty-first century when the physical sciences, once the stronghold of determinist thinking, seem to have turned away from determinism.”

Consequences

The implications of the deterministic viewpoint are not confined to negation of all human achievements, but would also absolve everyone responsible for human suffering. If determinism is true, what choice did Hitler really have? What choice did serial killers like Ted Bundy have? If materialistic determinism is forced into the society, how soon before we start having legal implications from this. Should a murderer be punished if he could never have done otherwise than kill his victim?

Continued insistence on a deterministic foundation to reality and dismissal of conscious free will, could lead the society back towards fatalism which has a long history in both everyday human society as well as, in traditions of theology. At a rudimentary level, if you set aside the differences in the two narratives, scientific materialistic determinism and theological determinism, the problem of free will is essentially the same. That is, whether the universe was created by an all powerful God or arose out of nothingness, the question of whether human beings are free to make real choices and change the future remains essentially the same.

There is a vast tradition of debate in theology about the ability of humans to choose, human free will, within the context of God’s foreknowledge and determination of the future. However unlike scientific determinism, the theological determinists have generally allowed humans the freedom of intention, which eventually they said that God judges people on, and was the basis for morality in humans. This meant that even when the determinists had an upper hand in theology, the worst possible impact was to produce closed fatalistic societies which saw no big reason to push the boundaries of science, medicine and knowledge in general. The moral underpinnings of human behavior however was not impacted since theological determinists linked morality to human intention, which according to them, was free but inert from a causal perspective.

Que sera sera!

The new fatalism to which materialistic determinism, with its insistence that human beings are biological machines, is leading us has no such element which could form the basis of morality in the society. This new fatalism could lead us to a nihilistic existence, which will almost certainly lead to a breakdown of the society at large.

Many studies have shown that when subjects just read, not necessarily agree with, an article which states something like “Scientific experiment finds conscious free will is an illusion,” they were more prone to cheat and steal. Free Will is essential to moral responsibility, and the ability to act morally is a necessary ingredient for a functional society.

Even the determinists seem to think that while free will is an illusion, it is not a good idea to share that finding with the public at large! In his book, Free Will, Sam Harris admits, “If I was teaching a self defense class for women, I would consider it quite counter productive to emphasize that all human behavior, including a woman’s response to a physical attack is determined by the prior state of the universe. That all rapist are, at bottom unlucky, being themselves victims of prior causes they did not create.” But why should telling people the “truth” be counter productive? Is the ‘decision’ to withhold the “truth”, by Sam Harris, a free reason based rational choice or predetermined output no different from occasional bubbling of gases in a swamp. And what about the potential rapist or a murderer, does determinism not entail that if they are able to rape or kill, then that was the only thing that could have happened? Why would a determinist tell someone not to kill? Does the killer have a choice?

Any proposals, consistent with determinism, that attempt to present a basis for morality are doomed to languish in incoherence. This because the moral principles of “good” and “bad” are not meaningful from a deterministic perspective. From the perspective of determinism, saying that one human act is “bad” as opposed to another, is analogous to saying that one way a rock rolls down the hill is “bad” as opposed to another. Therefore, if and when, determinists address the issue of morality, the proposals are usually fraught with confusion and incoherence. The lack of confidence in their assertions may be exemplified by the fact, that even the staunchest defender of determinism, is very unlikely to tell their young kids or grandkids something like, “Do whatever you feel like, don’t get out of bed, don’t go to school, take a stroll on the freeway, steal, kill someone, because if you can do it, that is the only thing that could have happened.”

Conclusion

So where do we go from here?

We have to give up on the idea that matter is the bedrock of reality upon which the ‘epiphenomenal’ rivers of consciousness and free will flow. We have to start looking for something more fundamental, out of which both may arise. The fact that we have to do this, has been getting increasingly obvious for the past 100 years since the development of quantum physics.

The mechanistic clockwork model for the universe has brought us a long way, but it cannot take us any further. Our dogmatic attachment to this paradigm is just an ode to an enduring, albeit now anachronistic, fascination with the workings of the traditional clock.

The mechanistic clockwork model for the universe has brought us a long way, but it cannot take us any further. Our dogmatic attachment to this paradigm is just an ode to an enduring, albeit now anachronistic, fascination with the workings of the traditional clock. We also have to give up on the idea that causality works only in a mechanistic clockwork like manner.

We also have to give up on the idea that the methodology of reductionism is going to be sufficient as we bring in more aspects of reality, like consciousness and free will, into the domain of science. Complex systems may be better understood using both, the methodology of reductionism as well as emergence. The thinking that parts can completely determine the behavior of the whole has to go. In many fields we are finding that in complex systems the whole has reciprocal influence on its parts, leading to the fields of systems chemistry, systems biology, etc. Not all human behavior can be reduced to neurobiology, not all biology can be reduced to chemistry and not all chemistry can be reduced to physics.

In the search for a more fundamental bedrock of reality, we need to let go of the baggage of materialistic determinism and finally accept the implications of quantum physics. The emerging theories about an informational basis of the universe, seem to be promising candidates which could build upon the findings of quantum physics. These new theories have their roots in the computer, the prominent technological device du jour and they could provide a way forward, possibly allowing for the definition of a lower level of existence that unifies not only matter, physical forces, space and time, but also the immaterial aspects of our existence like our minds, consciousness and free will.

© 2015 Aamir Moghal, All Rights Reserved

You can contact the author via email at aamir.moghal@gmail.com