April 28th, 2022
Physicalism (also called “materialism” in contemporary western philosophy of mind), a philosophical theory which contends that reality consists entirely of physical entities and forces understood exclusively in terms of the natural sciences, wouldn’t, upon initial consideration, seem to play a particularly important role in practical affairs or public policy. After all, it isn’t a common dinner-table or cocktail party topic of conversation, let alone a pressing concern in media, professional, or personal discourse. It is, however, a powerful intellectual influence shaping our cultural paradigm and therefore plays a prominent role in shaping our contemporary way of life. It’s a popular belief with origins in the triumph of Enlightenment science, the Industrial Revolution, modern technology and an increasingly secular civilization— a belief that has also encompassed, in many ways, the entire global community and, as such, it has become the default worldview of modernity
One result of this is that our current intellectual icons who have embraced the physicalist world view –popular science writers, scientists , philosophers, jurists, educators and public intellectuals—have largely come to reject what we’ve traditionally called “free will” in human experience (the belief that people are free, volitional agents whose decisions are authored by them and are under their control). This is because the belief that only entities and forces detectable by the physical sciences exist, simply doesn’t allow for such a thing as free will. If everything that exists is physical, and therefore must be determined via a mechanistic chain of cause and effect through the laws of physics operating on the biochemistry of the brain, then human decisions (as a result of the brain’s operations) are strictly determined by this mechanistic process alone— with no room for anything like a contra-causal, disembodied ego or will (let alone ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’) interrupting the physical world’s causal process to make free, independent decisions on its own. There is no room in the mechanics of the physical world for independent voluntary choices.
The famous ‘Libet Experiments’ conducted by brain scientists in the 1980’s seemed to indicate that unconscious neurological activity precedes conscious mental choices, and this suggested to many philosophers and cognitive scientists that mindless mechanistic brain chemistry determines all the thoughts and actions that we mistakenly believe we’re making deliberately, but are actually not. The psychological implication of this is that we simply don’t make life-decisions and choose our fate each moment. We are, instead, predestined to follow the paths in life that we’ve mistakenly assumed we’ve chosen freely. If, as “block universe theory” (postulated by Albert Einstein, among others) in contemporary cosmology tells us, everything that ‘ever was or will be’ already exists, and the apparently open future has already been determined (regardless of whether we can be aware of this), then we certainly don’t appear to be the ‘masters of our fates and captains of our souls’ in the way that common sense and popular morality assume……and the implication of this would be that free will—so essential for everything from religion to law to personal responsibility– would be, like time itself, an illusion.
Philosopher of mind Christopher List writes:
“human actions aren’t the result of conscious choices but are caused by physical processes in the brain and body over which people have no control. Human beings are just complex physical machines, determined by the laws of nature and prior physical conditions as much as steam engines and the solar system are so determined. The idea of free will, the skeptics say, is a holdover from a naïve worldview that has been refuted by science, just as ghosts and spirits have been refuted. You have as little control over whether to continue to read this article as you have over the date of the next total solar eclipse”
This summarizes the basic problem of free will in our modern era, which basically involves the dilemma of how our thoughts, decisions and actions, that seem obviously volitional (free) —in the sense that they come from an internal decision that we make and that we could have chosen not to make had we wanted— could actually BE free in a universe subject to complete scientific determinism (governed completely by the mechanistic laws of nature/ cause and effect). List discusses the debate between the two traditional theories that are based on this assumption (determinism and compatibilism)— both of which are based on the reductive assumption that free will is impossible in a material universe. Keep in mind though, all the practical implications of this belief either in its determinist or compatibilist form: if we abandon, for all practical purposes, the belief in free will, then all the personal, moral, psychological dimensions of modern life— as well as all the legal, ethical, and political institutions based on it— from personal autonomy, individual Liberty, human rights, criminal responsibility, and self-identity, can be undermined and discarded as well.
Thus, rejecting free will and opting instead for a position called “determinism”, many physicalist thinkers claim that all the practical consequences of acknowledging free will in human affairs (like the idea of personal responsibility for our thoughts and actions, which requires the existence of free will to be authentic) must be jettisoned from our worldview, along with public policies based on this view. In their landmark article “For the Law, Neuroscience Changes Nothing and Everything” Greene and Cohen argue that, since neuroscience recognizes the reality of determinism and the impossibility of free will in an entirely physical world, the criminal justice system must gradually discard the assumption that criminals and convicts are responsible for their thoughts or behavior. More recent commentators like Gregg Caruso and Bruce Waller go even further–claiming that physical determinism essentially negates the possibility of any moral or legal responsibility for anything that anyone does at all.
Recognizing the apparent absurdity of this ‘hard determinist’ position, but still not wanting to renounce the physicalist worldview that leads to it, still other physicalist philosophers and scientists have re-framed and renamed their position “compatibilism” and tried to reason their way out of the determinist trap through increasingly more elaborate metaphysical stratagems. They argue that our physical reality isn’t as strictly mechanistic as hard determinists claim because many of the physical sciences (especially the ‘softer’ ones like psychology and psychiatry) not only allow for an independent autonomous human mind that makes free choices/decisions, but also seem to require such an autonomous mind in order to rationally explain psycho-social-economic phenomena, among other things. While it may be true, they speculate, that at the level of chemistry and physics (and even the neuroscience of the human brain) there is no room for anything except for strictly mechanistic causation (and hence no room for free will), scientific phenomena at the psychological level do not have to be mechanistically determined in the same way. This is because, at the macro-level, many complex systems in science have qualities that the more simple basic elements comprising them at the micro-level may not possess. For instance, although chemicals in the human brain may not themselves have the capacity for free will, the complex cognitive-mental processes that emerge from them can have this capability. Moreover, there is also some evidence at the level of quantum physics for free will via quantum indeterminism at the most basic micro-level of the natural order. Thus, they conclude, free will in human experience is possible (and, considering its rather obvious prominence in our lives) even necessary, while still not requiring any extra-scientific entities like independent ‘souls’ or ‘immaterial minds’, outside the mechanistic causal processes of the physical world, to make them possible.
While I personally find this more enlightened view of science (one that attempts to accommodate free will) preferable in some ways to a rigid, mechanistic materialism that denies free will, I nonetheless think that it remains fundamentally incoherent. This is because once you start down the slippery- slope of physicalism, materialism, or ‘naturalism’, that denies any immaterial, non-scientific aspects of existence, you must inevitably wind up with the rigid mechanism determinism (which makes free will impossible) that List and other compatiblists want to deny. What free-will-compatibilists (and so many other naturalistic- scientistic thinkers) fail to acknowledge is that once you restrict the limits of metaphysical possibility to the physical world described by science, you’ve automatically excluded any logically justifiable possibility for free will (or consciousness, subjective self-awareness, intentional rationality, for that matter), and no amount of linguistic-semantic intellectual qualification (or just wishful thinking) can somehow put these qualities back into a world that has precluded their possibility in the first place.
As I’ve argued in my own research: No matter how complex, subtle, or emergent the intricacies of our neural processing might ultimately be, if (as all physicalists –combatibilist or otherwise—must concede) this processing remains causally embedded in the matrix of entities and events that comprise the physical world, our brain states then have no locus of, or capacity for, any contra-causal, undetermined, volitional free-agency. Such agency (like an immaterial soul) would have to exist outside the mechanistic, measurable, deterministic operations of the physical world, which physicalism cannot countenance. In order for physicalist-compatibilists to countenance the existence of things like free will in a scientific- mechanistic universe they must ignore the inexorable logic (albeit in some superficially clever ways) of their own metaphysics…..the bottom line is: EITHER you accept some sort of “soul”, extra-causal agency, and immaterial consciousness so that free will is a logical possibility, OR you accept only a physical naturalistic universe and have to rule-out the possibility of free will all-together—-you can’t have both.
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