Does The Human Being Have Free Will? {The Answer May Surprise You}

Two decades later, we know an astonishing amount about the brain: Meanwhile, the field of artificial intelligence — which focuses on recreating the abilities of the human brain, rather than on what it feels like to be one — has advanced stupendously. But how come all that was accompanied by an agonising flash of pain?

And what is pain, anyway? Questions like these, which straddle the border between science and philosophy, make some experts openly angry. On the other hand, in recent years, a handful of neuroscientists have come to believe that it may finally be about to be solved — but only if we are willing to accept the profoundly unsettling conclusion that computers or the internet might soon become conscious, too.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Stoppard also clarified a potential misinterpretation of the title. But, he told me in December: I was raised Roman Catholic, and I wanted to find a place where I could say: OK, here, God has intervened. God created souls, and put them into people.

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B y the time Chalmers delivered his speech in Tucson, science had been vigorously attempting to ignore the problem of consciousness for a long time. On the other hand, this most certain and familiar of phenomena obeys none of the usual rules of science. This religious and rather hand-wavy position, known as Cartesian dualism, remained the governing assumption into the 18th century and the early days of modern brain study. But it was always bound to grow unacceptable to an increasingly secular scientific establishment that took physicalism — the position that only physical things exist — as its most basic principle.

And yet, even as neuroscience gathered pace in the 20th century, no convincing alternative explanation was forthcoming. So little by little, the topic became taboo. Few people doubted that the brain and mind were very closely linked: But how they were linked — or if they were somehow exactly the same thing — seemed a mystery best left to philosophers in their armchairs. Nothing worth reading has been written on it. It was only in that Francis Crick , the joint discoverer of the double helix, used his position of eminence to break ranks.

Neuroscience was far enough along by now, he declared in a slightly tetchy paper co-written with Christof Koch, that consciousness could no longer be ignored. Stick to more mainstream science! A s a child, Chalmers was short-sighted in one eye, and he vividly recalls the day he was first fitted with glasses to rectify the problem. Of course, you could tell a simple mechanical story about what was going on in the lens of his glasses, his eyeball, his retina, and his brain. Chalmers, now 48, recently cut his hair in a concession to academic respectability, and he wears less denim, but his ideas remain as heavy-metal as ever.

The zombie scenario goes as follows: This person physically resembles you in every respect, and behaves identically to you; he or she holds conversations, eats and sleeps, looks happy or anxious precisely as you do.

Does The Human Being Have Free Will? {The Answer May Surprise You} by Ramesh S. Balsekar

But the point is that, in principle, it feels as if they could. Evolution might have produced creatures that were atom-for-atom the same as humans, capable of everything humans can do, except with no spark of awareness inside. So consciousness must, somehow, be something extra — an additional ingredient in nature. The withering tone of the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci sums up the thousands of words that have been written attacking the zombie notion: But to accept this as a scientific principle would mean rewriting the laws of physics. Everything we know about the universe tells us that reality consists only of physical things: Nonetheless, just occasionally, science has dropped tantalising hints that this spooky extra ingredient might be real.

Weiskrantz showed him patterns of striped lines, positioned so that they fell on his area of blindness, then asked him to say whether the stripes were vertical or horizontal. There is therefore no reason to clutter up our theory of the universe with talk of free will. Each of us is free to do what we want. But we are not free to want whatever we want. We do, in fact, want certain things as a result of prior causes.

If we want to want something else, we have to move to new environments that will re-program us. That is why some alcoholics, for example, get help from Alcoholics Anonymous. Our minds are governed by the same laws of physics that governed the quasars thirteen billion years ago and will still govern the universe thirteen billion years from now. Our glory is to be a part of this eternal and infinite universe, not something apart from and in contrast to the remainder of creation.

The atoms that make up my brain were forged billions of years ago in the heart of an exploding star. In strict obedience to the laws of physics, these atoms have journeyed across the light-years and across the eons. In strict obedience to the laws of physics, these atoms are now giving you a lecture on free will. But these atoms are no more free now than they were when the supernova went off five billion years ago. I have inserted something that allows you to transcend all prior influences in a manner that is not merely random!

Look to your left: Look to your right: And there are no exceptions to the laws of physics in our immediate neighborhood, either. I would argue that any pile combining causality and blind chance can only be the equivalent of our dice-rolling robot, and that the application of the scientific worldview therefore casts doubt on the reality of free will.

Just as we should not make any serious decision based on the assumption that God exists, or the assumption that we live forever, so we should not make any serious decision on the assumption that people have free will. The obvious and substantial emotional benefits of belief in free will should be junked in deference to the principle of the simplest hypothesis.

One last time, we have to choose between science and a comforting lie — this time, it is the lie of free will — and we must choose science, and forget about free will. This is absolutely self-contradictory. Any other approach smacks of favoritism. Furthermore, as we have already noted, free will is part of a narrative involving God and souls.

If there is no God, passing out souls, how did we get our hands on free will? Why is it that only people are alleged to have free will, and that no one feels the need to busy himself running around wreaking revenge on misbehaving tigers and polar bears? Once we realize that God, immortality, and free will are all part of the same story, we can see that rejecting God and immortality, but holding onto free will, makes as much sense as understanding that Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia are fictional characters, but holding to a belief that there really was someone called Han Solo.

As Spinoza and Lincoln tried to teach us, when we discard free will, we are discarding hatred, anger, envy, malice, guilt, and anxiety. So the next, and very practical question is this: Can you run a society without hatred, anger, envy, malice, guilt, and anxiety? He ran our society much better than the many presidents we have had since who have believed in free will, hatred, anger, envy, malice, guilt, and anxiety. Indeed, in general, the pioneers of liberal democracy — Locke, Voltaire, Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, Lincoln, Darrow, in more recent history, Abe Fortas — are all people with conspicuous doubts about free will.

Many people think that, when you give up God, you have to give up ethics. The whole point of the Ethical Culture movement, of course, is that this is not true. God is a factual claim — an allegation about what is. Ethics is a matter of what should be. We can make our own ethical commitments without God telling us what they should be. I assume we all also agree that we can have ethics with being immortal. We just have to decide that we wish to be good for its own sake, as opposed to being good because we wish to avoid hell. In just the same way, ethics can exist without free will.

We can make ethical commitments even though we are not, in some ultimate sense, free to choose what those commitments will be. In fact, we do make ethical commitments when and only when we are caused to make them. When you consider the matter properly, we are gathered here today, and gather here weekly, to be caused to make ethical commitments. To the extent that religion has any value at all, it is because it sometimes causes people to make ethical commitments. In just the same way that people can be caused by advertising to desire particular products, people are often caused by ethical indoctrination to believe in justice, equality, and kindness.

Once they have been so indoctrinated, they will often go out and practice justice, equality, and kindness, even in the face of howling mobs. There is no conflict between disbelief in free will and belief in ethics. Indeed, for hundreds of years, it has usually been the skeptics on free will who have provided moral leadership for our society and fomented the forces of social reform — people like Jefferson and Lincoln.

Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness?

We can have ethics without free will as long as we are willing to wish to be good for its own sake, as opposed to being good because we hope to take personal credit for it. An ethical nation that had discarded the idea of free will would cease to hold executions. Execution is an act of revenge. It goes beyond what is necessary to incapacitate the offender or deter other people. We have an ethical duty to protect society from bad people, by locking them up.

We have no ethical duty to make people suffer simply because the doctrines of free will and retribution tell us that certain people deserve to suffer. An ethical nation that had discarded the idea of free will could no longer blame crime on criminals. It could no longer hide from itself its responsibility to provide all children with proper homes, food, medicine, schools, economic opportunity, and ethical training.

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Its emphasis would be on preventing crime by justice, as opposed to revenging crime by cruelty. We would start by giving all children a decent chance. We would offer people rehabilitation programs for drug addiction, instead of filling our prisons with drug addicts. And we would never execute people. If we could just give up this idea of holding people responsible for what they do, we could, at long last, start to behave responsibly in what we do.

I am well aware that most of you here probably agree with most of the social program I just outlined. For the last hundred years, the evidence against free will has piled up higher and higher, as we have uncovered more and more about the physical structure and function of the brain. Using positronic emissions or radioactive xenon, we can now map which individual areas of the brain process mathematics, assemble words, or access visual memory. Ironically, during the same period, in our country, the reality of free will has been questioned less and less.

The reviewers of the time had no problem understanding that Twain was criticizing the idea of free will.

They just said that criticizing the idea of free will was not a new idea. During the Leopold and Loeb trial in Chicago eighty years ago, the judge allowed Clarence Darrow to talk for four days about the fact that free will is an illusion. In New Jersey today, it is against the law for a lawyer to make that argument in court.

This is a violation of the constitutional rights of the citizens of New Jersey to free speech and representation by counsel. But no one questions it. Many people here studied Jefferson in high school and college, even graduate school. Did any of your faculty mention this point? Fifty years ago, the courts of the District of Columbia, on the advice of Abe Fortas, established a definition of criminal insanity that did not assume the reality of free will.

Later on, the courts threw out that definition and went back to a definition relying on the assumption of free will. We are now under the rule of a political party that calls itself the party of Lincoln. Darwin agonized over introducing the idea of evolution, because he knew people would realize that Darwin was saying that people were animals, devoid of free will. Nowadays, the latest polls show that only one out of four Americans still believes in evolution; and of those few who do believe in evolution, few realize, as Darwin did, that evolutionary theory casts doubt on free will.

George Orwell warned in that the ultimate way of controlling thought was to train people to realize they were about to think about a forbidden topic, and then stop themselves. The forbidden topic was never to have a specific name — allowing it to have a specific name would prompt forbidden thoughts. Anything off limits was simply to be swallowed up under the name, crimethink. Is free will a tool for self-evolvement? Is it a device for the human being to accept responsibility for his actions? Or is it merely a notional boon which is worthless in daily living?

Balsekar discusses the issue threadbare in his crisp and lucid style and comes up with amazing insights which could forever change the way you perceive your free will. Kindle Edition , 30 pages. Published July 11th by Zen Publications first published July 1st To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Nov 13, James Becker rated it it was amazing.

Free Will: The Last Great Lie

This book comprises the essence of what I love about Ramesh Balsekar. There is a lot of wisdom here—It's not perfect, of course, but it's very difficult to argue with his logic. Essentially, Balsekar admits that the concept of Free Will is necessary to engage in the day-to-day activities of one's life: However, he makes it clear that, in the end, we do not actually have truly free will.

For exampl This book comprises the essence of what I love about Ramesh Balsekar. For example, a person who is never exposed to Aristotle will never become an Aristotle historian. All people, from birth, develop into the person they are mainly due to their surroundings and circumstances, none of which any one of us chooses. It is therefore purely inane to believe that any person is one hundred person responsible for their entire life. So, by relinquishing the burden of feeling as if one is the "doer" or conversely, the recipient of all the actions in one's life, a person can achieve much peace.

Jul 01, Walford rated it really liked it.