“Free will is defined as the belief that there is a component to biological behavior that is something more than the unavoidable consequences of genetics and environmental history of the individual and the possible stochastic laws of nature” (i.e., the laws of physics and chemistry)
That is, there is something that you can do that violates naturalism and the laws of physics and chemistry. Which is making free decisions, one can not simply obviate the laws that predominate reality, this is the bone of my contention and why I reject the very notion of free will. We live in a universe that is determined at bottom by fundamental particles, so to say you as an individual can intervene and induce the system via your own will is absurd. We are animals constituted of baryonic matter whose actions are determined by the laws of physics and chemistry, our environment and the stochastic nature of reality promulgated by quantum indeterminacy.
Positing anything more is nonsensical and unsupported by any evidence, its also to appeal to the province of superstition, self-deception, wishful thinking, conscious fraud, and or dogmatism. Coming to terms with the apparent fact that we are governed by ubiquitous, blind, and mechanical forces of nature that determine how the inanimate molecules that constitute our bodies function is a necessary fact our society needs to accept, and would indeed call for our legal system to confront this reality and reassess itself. This truth can be more succinctly surveyed in the following quote of Anthony Cashmore’s:
“The reality is, not only do we have no more free will than a fly or a bacterium, in actuality we have no more free will than a bowl of sugar. The laws of nature are uniform throughout, and these laws do not accommodate the concept of free will. Some will argue that once we understand better the mechanistic details that underlie consciousness, then we will understand free will. Whatever the complexities of the molecular details of consciousness are, they are unlikely to involve any new law in physics that would break the causal laws of nature in a nonstochastic way. If I am wrong on this point, then I eagerly await the elucidation of this principle. In the meantime it would be prudent to assume (in keeping with the thoughts of William of Occam, where one always adopts the simplest of competing hypotheses) that any search for some new “Lucretian” law of physics, or some startlingly novel emergent principle, will not be successful.”
Psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley add to the surmounting repository of evidence that refutes our conscious experience and feelings of being the masters of our intentions, thoughts, and actions. These researchers conducted a series of experiments to see how the brain makes decisions. And what they found was that there is a quarter-of-a-second lag between the time we make a choice and when our conscious mind becomes aware of those said decisions. With fMRIs and even implants, which read neurons directly inside the brain, Wegner and Wheatley were able to quantify these findings.
Their conclusion? Our brains make decisions even before we’re consciously aware of them, thoughts and intentions arise from background causes (i.e. molecular brain pathways, genomic DNA, and the environment), over which we have no control. The implications of these series of experiments are vast and far-reaching. In the scenario that we could map a person’s brain out in its entirety and know their complete genetic composition, we’d be able to predict with 100% accuracy all of one’s thoughts, intentions, and behaviors in response to any given stimulus, in theory. Adam Bear notes in his piece on Scientific American an explanation on why, while there seems to be no free will, we take responsibility for decisions that in all likely hood are not of our own making.
“Perhaps in the very moments that we experience a choice, our minds are rewriting history, fooling us into thinking that this choice—that was actually completed after its consequences were subconsciously perceived—was a choice that we had made all along.”
By this convention, Christopher Hitchens classical retort of “I have no other choice” when questioned on his attitude towards free will is quite literal and empirically true.
With these facts being evident, I see no reason to posit any belief in what one would conventionally call free will, the degree of one’s confidence in any particular idea should be proportional to that of the evidence. And seeing the absence of evidence for the free will hypothesis and the abundance of evidence to the contrary, (naturalism) we can say with conviction that free will isn’t in conformity with reality and can’t be mapped on to the world in which we live.
In summation, there are no forces governing the biological world that are distinct from those that determine the macrophysical world, human behavior is determined on a molecular genetic and chemical basis alone. I will bequeath you with a profound quote of Democritus, that precisely recapitulates my thoughts on the matter. And as always, now, what will you think💭?
“By convention sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color, but in truth, there are only atoms and the void.”
-Democritus
Update: While it may be true our degrees of freedom are much more expansive than that of a fly or a bowl of polysaccharides, that does not translate into any sense of free will. Because those very degrees are not of our making and the options they offer are not of our choosing. Behaviors are nothing more than reflections of our experiences and genome mediated through the laws of physics. Positing otherwise is simply inconsistent amidst naturalism and in divergence with reality.
Zedicus Thinks Ⓥ 