More on Free Will

Max Borders posts his take on if we have free will at TechCentralStation. In short - we don't:

"Am I free?" you may ask. First, the bad news: no, you're not.

What you call making choices or exercising your Free Will is an illusion. I realize this seems highly counterintuitive, even absurd to suggest. But the following considerations may convince you that you are not, indeed, free.

First, we must agree that your body (and brain) is made up entirely of physical atoms and molecules. In other words, there is no supernatural essence like a "spirit" that animates your physical body. If we cannot agree on this, the rest of this article is moot.

So far, so good:

Now, all of those atoms that make up your body are subject to certain regularities we might call the laws of nature. These are the same sorts of regularities that are exhibited when you pick up an object and it falls after you let go (as you would reasonably expect it to). Or, if you were to push your hand against your coffee cup, you would expect it to move along your desktop. We think similar "nomic" or law-like regularities apply to human beings, as we are a part of the universe by virtue of being physical in our makeup. Another way of talking about all of this is the familiar
language of "cause and effect."

There are no causeless effects, it seems -- at least at the macro-level we live in from day to day. Chairs don't fly up into the air and coffee cups don't move across desktops unless some force acts upon them -- "causing" them to move.

So, our bodies and brains are subject to causal laws, as well. Even though the myriad cause-and-effect chains happening in the human body are extremely complex, it is not possible for us to break these causal laws just because we're human. The same can be said for apes, cats, chickens, bugs and bacteria, as all are creatures that belong to the causal-physical world.

Another way to define causation is to say: everything that happens is a result of some antecedent event. That means every single thing that happens in our bodies, from neuronal firing to DNA replication, is an event that is caused. If we were to extend these processes backwards in time, we would find these same regularities hold, otherwise the universe would have turned out to be a place of complete disorder and we would never have evolved.

Here's the problem. In our everyday language, we say we "choose" tea over coffee, or we "make a decision" to turn left or right. But since all of our so-called decisions take place in our physical brains, we are confronted with a very deep problem. When we say we make a choice, aren't we committing ourselves to what I call "self-starter theory?"

This is where he makes the natural dualist perception split. Since we have the ability of self-reference, or the ability to think about ourselves, as if we are an external observer to our mind and body at work, it is natural to assume that we are separate. Dualism is the illusion, the observer inside the mind is the illusion. There is no distinction between saying we choose tea over coffee, and our physical brains following a deterministic physical process resulting in the choice of tea. They are two aspects of the same process. The conscious experience of choosing tea is the subjective sensation of the physical process which results in the selection of tea. Because we both experience that conscious sensation "first hand" and at the same time have the sensation of observing ourselves in action as if as a detatched observer, we fall under the illusion that the conscious "I" is separate, and acts on, the physical mind, as a user acts on a computer keyboard.

It is a question of identity. What do we mean when we say "I"? What does our identity refer to, if not our mind and body? Why is the default, intuitive reflex to "disown" the body?