All of our declarations of knowledge are more honestly declared to be a declaration of what we choose to believe, no one makes us believe anything starting with what we already believed before we were told one and one are two. If that's not a matter of choice but of material compulsion then there's no more truth value to that than one and one are fifty-six. Neuro-biology is among the most thoroughly ideological of fields of academic activity, it is entirely based on things that aren't demonstrated in reason or physical evidence but in promotion of many extremely tenuous, often entirely unconnectable ideological holdings that are called "science".
In short, he chooses to believe what he believes and, like all fatalists and materialist-causationists, he doesn't much care about the consequences of widespread belief in that. It's certainly among the most destructive of ideas to anything like the popular election of governments and anything better than rule of the strongest and least moral. Is it any wonder we're in such trouble after academia has so thoroughly bought into atheist materialism? It's guys like this who convinced me that some kind of absolute fascist governance is entirely acceptable to them, in theory at least. No doubt they'd be the first to whine that they're liberals when liberalism requires free choice.Continuing the conversation…
“Free will” stopped being a concern of philosophers and theologians a few centuries ago. Rather like the “existence of God,” it was realized it’s an argument chasing an ideological tail. It can’t be proven, it can’t be disproven , and in the end, what’s the point? It greases the wheels of certain theories; but without that grease you go straight to “people are machines,” and that’s a short step to “so treat them accordingly.”
Like I said: what’s the upside? Or, for that matter, the downside? And what harm does the theoretical grease do?
It’s just an argument that nobody needs anymore. It arose in Christian theology to explain traditional soteriology. Its value expired some time ago. Which is why philosophers and theologians moved on, a long time ago.
C.P. Snow, in his essay on “The Two Cultures,” wrote of humanitarian academics who didn’t understand the laws of thermodynamics. He meant there were fundamentals of science which the humanities, then in charge of academia, didn’t deign to understand. Now science is not just ascendant, but triumphant, and begins to cast its eyes on philosophy and theology: the heart of the humanities. A scientist opining on free will and claiming to have studied it for decades is a fundamentalist theologian weighing in on quantum mechanics. Now it’s the scientists who cannot deign to understand.
For one thing, science deals with what is observable and measurable. Even quanta and electrons are known by the traces they leave. How does one know free will? You either accept the concept, or you don’t. Rather like the “existence of God:” you accept the concept, or you don’t. You can find it hard to argue with Socrates (mostly because Plato tilts the field of play), but that doesn’t mean your only option is to agree with him. Socrates, after all, is the reason we are told ghosts linger over “unfinished business.” We may not believe in ghosts, but we all grew up hearing that “explanation” for them. So we accept it in our ghost stories, even though it’s only an argument Socrates made in passing just before he died (and probably why Plato didn’t write anything about anyone seeing Socrates’ ghost later. What? He made up a number of dialogues for Socrates; why not a ghost story, too? Except he foreclosed that with the Phaedo, because the point of that dialogue was to conclude Socrates’ work and let him die in peace. It also established that the later dialogues, like The Republic, weren’t related by Socrates’ ghost.)👻
Free will is a concept. How do you establish it empirically, which is to say, scientifically? If you can’t, does that mean it doesn’t exist? I’m not sure I can prove, empirically, that you exist. I can prove there is a person with your identity; or at least your features. But I’ve seen people in advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, who seem human in form only. I’ve seen people with associative disorder become “other” persons. I’ve seen severe autism combined with mental illness, people who don’t recognize the concept of self, especially for themselves. Do they still exist? Their bodies do. Are they no more than their bodies and their behavior? If they aren’t, we can murder murderers, because they are nothing more than killing machines. Or we can discard dementia patients and victims of mental illness, because “Three generations of imbeciles is enough!”
That, by the way, was the reasoning, based on eugenics, at the time accepted as science, upon which Nazi Germany’s”Final Solution,” was built. Because science, after all, cannot prove that people have existence, or deserve life.
So if science can’t observe it or measure it, even its traces, can science still rule on it?
Science can tell me with absolute authority what the length of a meter is. It’s a scientific concept relatable to an observable and measurable phenomenon (it used to be the length of a certain metal bar of certain composition located at a certain point on the earth’s surface; I believe it is now defined in terms of the output of a certain laser, measured in sub-measurements of the agreed standard for a meter.) Science can neither measure nor observe, much less define without recourse to philosophical and theological vocabularies, what “free will” is, or is even supposed to be. Unlike an electron or even a wavelength of light, free will is pretty much a matter of argument; like “love.” You don’t know what that is until you experience it; but you do know, if you had a fortunate childhood. But love for a non-family member is not the same as love for a family member, nor is it the same as love for a friend, or again, for a child. You have to experience those, to know. We all accept we know what “love” is; but do we all mean the same thing? We certainly don’t all love the same person; or the same people. What is this thing called “love,” then? And can science prove it’s an illusion? Can science even prove it?
Or does science itself become illusory at that point?
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