Something strange happens in the minds of many men as they go about their work, whether that of research in particle physics or removing cancerous tumors or running a machine milling a component of a jet-engine or, maybe especially, in those who’ve studied the evolution of human beings, individuals and species and cultures. Having established mastery over some material entities or their relationships, at least by creating structured knowledge from messy data, some begin to see life, the universe, and everything as being too well-determined. Knowing some explicit, sometimes algorithmic, rules, they would see the world as rule-centered. Our tools, including our conceptual tools, can allow us to perform prodigies in exploring and analyzing reality, but there is this odd tendency to use our new knowledge to constrain reality to certain schematic ways of thought.
A logician thinks there is something called thoughts which are like the components of a child’s erector set. A workman handles iron and steel and make marvelous products with those and other materials. A psychiatrist or a market-researcher contemplates deeply those feelings centered on things or associated with glands or brain regions.
Obviously, I exaggerate, but there are some who do talk as if the above reductions are truth and there have always been such back to at least the dawn of philosophical thought and probably back to the dawn of human contemplation of the most general sort. Some who are caught up in these exaggerations have had a disproportionate influence on modern thought. But the problem is with our attitudes even more than with our thoughts. It’s also a problem with our actions more than with our thoughts. Some have trouble acting the roles of engineering or genetic research without the proper 9-to-5 materialistic ways of behaving entering into feelings and thoughts. Skeptical feelings and reductionistic acts lead naturally to non-believing thoughts. Draw out the relationships between feeling (heart), behavior (hands), and thoughts (mind), and you can see a small circle which can be a bi-directional flow of infection.
Suddenly, the best of skilled scientists or workmen, those who are loving fathers or dedicated mothers, those who pray, those who give generously even to those in need who are unlikable, begin to stand apart and to view things and men alike as being isolated entities which behave as stimuli would have it. Some react against this sort of a view, still having trouble giving up their god-like heights, and begin to raise other men to their mountaintop, seeing freedom inside of our human selves. Few there are who can truly see freedom as much a property of created being as is determinism.
This is strange to me just because the very effort that scientists and others took on to become highly-skilled experts and the effort they exert to do their work on an ongoing basis isn’t forced, at least not fully. Their freedom, limited as it typically is for creatures of our sort, precedes the facts and knowledge and worldviews which lead them to claim the world is deterministic. At a gut-level, we’re free before we’re in chains. That breast and the mother who offers it are chosen in a way that need forces in a sense, but we choose in a way more free than not, even when we’re a day-old and clueless about our real situation. We choose to suck and bite and struggle to make those things attached to us reach out to help us in that early choice.
I’ll quote a prominent brain-scientist, Walter J. Freeman, from his book How Brains Make Up Their Minds; in these words, he’s advocating a scientific approach to studying human beings which is at odds with the reductionistic approach:
Instead of postulating a universal law of causality and then having to deny the possibility of choice, we start with the premise that freedom of choice exists, and then we seek to explain causality as a property of brains. [page 5]
It’s not freedom according to the theories of political philosophers or quantum physicists, certainly not determinism according to reductionistic materialists or excited computer theorists, but rather a vague freedom to choose which is one of our first and primary experiences. It matters not if this reality meets the standards of political philosophers seeking to avoid the bad choices which led to religious wars nor does it matter if it fits into the mathematical and logical misunderstandings of men who gave Vienna a bad name in some circles. What matters is that choice precedes any particular understanding of freedom and any particular fears of shackles. We choose and therefore we reach out for our mother’s breast or our loved one’s breast. We choose and therefore we walk by choice into the obscurity of the future. We choose and therefore we are moral creatures. Wolves and bears and elephants also choose within the context of a world perceived and understood in much simpler ways and they are simpler moral creatures but moral creatures nonetheless.
We can make choices. We can move left or right, we can plan to divide available resources between educating children and caring for the sick or elderly in such and such a proportion.
We lose our freedom when we don’t consciously make choices or when we act in such a way as to take away our choices tomorrow.
We can see that freedom mostly as one in which we set the goal of being a certain sort of morally well-ordered person, we who are now human animals. To advance toward that goal, we begin to anticipate the forks in the road, to eliminate those which would lead us away from that goal even if they seem headed in the right direction. We might even be able to create our own choices, as individuals. We do play roles in creating choices as members of communities. To make it more explicit: as communities, we lay out those paths ahead of us and form the moral characters which would choose and choose properly by some—perhaps evil—understanding of the world and indeed of all that exists.
We know we can choose. This knowledge is primary. Scientific knowledge as well as political and economic speculation, even regarding the most fundamental matters, comes after a number of generations of men make decisions of a certain sort, following the general intention of understanding the world, of building an understanding of this world in its most interesting and dynamic form: a narrative. We enter that narrative consciously and by our choice. We choose to become certain sorts of human beings, persons in imitation of our Creator, We take on a role and are free when we successfully and gratefully enter into our roles with our hands and hearts and minds.
We choose to explore our world and from what we find, we notice that certain events lead to other certain events. As Professor Freeman wrote, “Instead of postulating a universal law of causality and then having to deny the possibility of choice, we start with the premise that freedom of choice exists, and then we seek to explain causality as a property of brains.” A property of brains but more so of the minds which come as brains and hands and emotions engage the world, the minds which are in a real sense the entirety of us, our individual embodied selves and our communal selves and our selves which are part of Creation.
The enterprise of science itself is an exercise of freedom, of constant choosing. It can tell us that we are free, in some significant sense. Moreover, what it discovers about human beings and about this world can refine our understandings of our freedom, letting us see our freedom to be larger or smaller than we might have thought, maybe even significantly different from what we might have thought. Even this must be set in the context of some greater understanding of what this world is, what created being is, what Creation is in its entirety and in what it contains. That greater understanding must include specific scientific understandings but can’t be limited to such understandings.
Human freedom just as much as the human mind can only be understood if we understand created being in a deep way for human freedom and the human mind are closely linked reflections of created being, reflections of some large part of the thoughts God manifested as Creation. He chose with absolute freedom; we choose in imitation of our Maker, with far less but significant freedom. We shape our minds in response to what is in our own bodies and in response to what lies outside of us and so also do we learn to be free.