In a faraway region of spacetime, I asked the question: Is this evidence against free-will?, where I start by noting:
Over the past decade or more, neuroscientists have found strong evidence that we start to act before we’re consciously aware of our own actions. This is a problem to those who believe in free-will in the sense of a power of an autonomous agent. It isn’t much of a problem to one who accepts the views about moral nature which were taught by St. Thomas Aquinas.
If we think of free-will as being some sort of agent with true freedom from the constraints of our biological selves, our human organisms, then we can reach any absurdity in the same way that we can say: If pigs can fly then true peace can come to men in this mortal realm. This is to say that free-will of that sort is an absurdity, an ill-conception in a manner of speaking. If such a free-will existed, it would be our master and we would not have any freedom at all. We human creatures, biological organisms, would be illusions of a sort.
St. Thomas Aquinas knew better, though he often stated his insights in highly compromised ways — especially in his two Summas, perhaps his great works only in number of pages. I’d advise reading his commentary on St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. (A translation is freely available at the website of Nova et Vetera.) In a word, Aquinas knew our human natures to be embodied and his mistaken idea of a subsistent (not ‘immortal’) soul or mind (organ of thinking under either term) was a result of his fear that an organ of flesh could never be dynamic enough to allow for conceptual thought. A dry-as-dust Mr. Spock of sorts, a ‘soul’ or ‘mind’ had to be pasted on to our human selves to allow us to engage in such acts of forming the concept of ‘species’. Modern brain-scientists and other physical scientists have proven that neurons made of the stuff of neutrons and protons and electrons are easily dynamic enough for such a task.
Modern scientists have also discovered reasons to disbelieve in any disembodied human will, let alone one fully ‘free’ of the states and events of our bodily stuff. This article, Is Free Will an Illusion?, discusses some of the arguments for and against free-will, mostly philosophical arguments of a sort I consider to be somewhat empty and meaningless. Even some of the better insights from modern psychology are presented as minor corrections to an inherited view of moral freedom which was a stretch to start with and seems now to be thoroughly implausible. This might seem strange since Scientific American would be expected to show a bias towards, yes, science. And scientists, as I noted at the beginning of this essay, have made a variety of discoveries involving human brain-activity and motor-activity which throw cold water — deservedly — upon most theories of this ‘free-will’ thingie.
If we were to address the philosophical issues, we should start out with discussions about the nature of a human being, a biological organism. Is it possible for such an entity to have a component corresponding to what philosophers seem to be describing when they talk or write about free-will? I’d say, “no,” with no reservations. If you, the creature of flesh and blood, control that free-will do-hickey, it isn’t free. And, again, if it is free from you as a highly-constrained biological organism, it’s some sort of agent which is free from your control and would be your master for good or ill.
In one of my early essays at a different website, What is Freedom?, I said
In the modern world, we tend to think of freedom in terms of satisfying desires. To be sure, even many who live for that false sort of freedom seem to realize that we then become no more than our desires or, more horribly, the thwarting of those desires — a terrible and humiliating state in either case. Hannibal the Cannibal is the most free of all modern men because he has become his desires and he has gained the power to satisfy them. Hannibal the Cannibal is the role-model for our politicians and our lawyers, our investment bankers and our corporate executives, our athletes and our entertainers. He may even be a role-model for many clergymen.
And then I pointed in a different direction with a quote from Henri Bergson:
[W]e are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work.” [page 172, Time and Free Will, Henri Bergson, Dover Publications, 2001 reprint]
In truth, you the human organism engage in acts of volition, acts of will, which are constrained in a number of ways, most importantly — as I often claim: you often have some substantial but limited freedom to change yourself but yourself in the short-term will almost always act according to the way it has been shaped in the past. In that same essay from an earlier time, I also provided this quote:
An intent is the directing of an action toward some future goal that is defined and chosen by the actor. [page 8, How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Walter J. Freeman]
I then comment on that quote from Professor Freeman:
In Thomistic moral philosophy, ‘intent’ defines human morality and freedom. We don’t freely will to be a good man or a good woman, we choose to struggle towards that state of goodness. We don’t freely will to cut down on our drinking or stop smoking, we choose to move towards a state where we don’t continue our bad habits or bad thoughts because our brains and our bodies and our relationships to others and to our environments have all changed. We should realize that the very process of forming intents can be a bit vague if only because we don’t see the goal clearly until we’re well along the path. I’ve certainly deluded myself often about the goal of becoming a Christ-like man and I’ve also deluded myself about the nature of the path I have to travel. The forming of our moral intentions is an ongoing process and not an action taken once and for all time.
The modern concept of free-will is useful to entrepreneurs, political or commercial, as they go about their task of destroying local community life to draw us all into the gigantic marketplaces of a land where natural cultural and physical boundaries have been dismantled. That concept of free-will leaves most human beings stripped of their defenses against those entrepreneurs and other predators and parasites of a cosmopolitanism and imperialism rendered all the more damaging to human beings by the pretense, in the U.S. and other countries, that we remain dedicated to traditional human values.
Our moral natures are now but our freedom lies in that future we can only dimly see as we intend, that is — plan and act, to develop the proper attitudes and habits, to become the human being we’d like to be. Return to Bergson’s words above, “[W]e are free when our acts spring from our whole personality,” and remember that our whole personality is that of a biological organism, one of flesh and blood, of liver and heart and brain and relationships to other creatures and to the world as physical environments.
Re-read the article, Is Free Will an Illusion?, if you wish. It makes some good points but in such a clumsy way. The author adopts the mainstream understanding of free-will, moral will, and all that, before starting to add and truncate and he points towards the sort of Baroque understanding of man which underlies our therapeutic society and makes it so hard to make sense of our own selves, hard to figure out how to move forward to that better future which can be seen so clearly — as a possibility — once we act according to the insights found in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas and Walter J. Freeman and also found in my writings. That cleaner way of understanding human nature, cleaner in a way that strongly indicates “more truthful”, allows for cleaner discussions and for an “Aha!” moment when you see what’s going on.