Quite possibly as powerful a belief that pervades the globe
as human nature beliefs is the belief in 'free will',
which is simply defined as the ability to make decisions
free from constraints, suggesting that there is somehow
an independence of the brain that is unrelated to everything around us
that affects it.
Now, I am aware that this an extremely contentious subject
as the existence or absence of free will calls into question
a myriad of other beliefs and traditions that many people cling to
spanning across religious, political, and legal institutions
and the entire monetary system itself.
So, let’s delve into it. What do we know?
We don’t usually attribute other natural phenomena
like storms, tectonic plate movement, growth of trees
or the ocean’s tidal movements to free will, no matter their unpredictability,
since we understand they are the result of a chain of causes and effects,
strictly obeying the laws of physics.
So, if our desires and choices are likewise the result of natural law,
then the notion of free will is to be discredited.
If our minds are merely brains containing electrochemical signals,
as they certainly appear to be to neuroscientists,
then we have no free will.
Why do we assume that our brains are exempt from these natural laws?
It is likely because we are uncomfortable
about not really being in control of our decisions
that we’re really just biochemical social machines.
There’s a fascinating BBC documentary called 'The Secret You'.
The ending scene shows a fascinating experiment
to demonstrate exactly this: That what seem like decisions
or free choices to us are really governed by neuronal processes
that we are not consciously aware of.
Professor Marcus du Sautoy,
who conducts the sequence of events in the episode,
is on a quest to find the true source of our decisions.
He is told to randomly decide to press one of either a left or right button.
At the same time, he has his brain hooked up to a scanner system
to record the brain activity that leads up to
making the decision to press either button,
and the computer records when the button was pressed.
The results were quite astonishing to the professor.
They could determine up to 6 seconds in advance of the decision
he was going to make each time,
simply by scanning the pattern of neuronal activity in his brain.
So this implies that our conscious decisions
are secondary things to our actual brain activity.
Truly fascinating. This experiment has been performed
dozens of times and the results are always the same.
To reiterate, the experiment reveals that there’s a deterministic mechanism
that leads up to your decision at a later point that’s inevitable.
It can only go that way.
Much of the time, we make the mistake
about attributing certain behaviour to free will,
simply because we’re ignorant about the source of behaviour.
The more we understand about the sources of behaviour, including plant and animal tropisms,
the less we tend to attribute it to free will or instinct,
which is another nothing-word
that gives no information about the source of the behaviour.
Jacques Loeb’s work, as I mentioned, is wonderful to look at for these issues,
specifically his book 'The Mechanistic Conception of Life',
which still holds much value even after all these years.
All of Loeb’s work with the word 'instinct' was eventually thrown out,
and he said there are certain patterns of behaviour
we haven’t yet been able to decipher. Let’s hunt them out.
Let’s try to find the mechanisms that generate behavior.
Free will is akin to the 'god of the gaps' type arguments.
You can't just squeeze 'free will' into whatever gaps
we have in our understanding because you want it there.
In short,
your brain’s decision-making circuitry,
in your frontal lobes controls your choices.
When you choose between a papaya or a banana,
patterns of neural activity representing these two possibilities
appear in your prefrontal cortex.
Copies of each pattern grow and spread at different rates
depending on your past experiences and sensory impressions.
Eventually, the number of copies of one pattern passes a threshold,
and you pick either the papaya or the banana or buy the Honda or Toyota,
or travel to Paris or Barcelona.
I’ve been going through another book called 'The Myth of Free Will',
compiled by Cris Evatt, which is a compilation book of about 50 academics
across many fields of science, giving their take on the issue.
A great point made throughout the book is that
people seem to intellectually reject the idea of free will,
yet they live their lives as if it exists,
meaning that while we logically understand it’s an unscientific idea,
we haven't yet been able to incorporate this into our value system,
which brings me back once again to the idea of sustainable values.
If we were to really understand and embrace the reality of the myth
of free will, there would be immense implications for society:
not only in how we perceive ourselves and our fellow human beings
but in the very structure of society itself,
which again would suggest at the absolute need
for radical reform to a Resource-Based Economy.
So the implications would be as follows:
We can no longer blame people or get justifiably angry at people
since they are just a product of all the environmental forces
they’ve been exposed to, combined with their biology.
We must entirely reform how we treat aberrant behaviour.
Aside from the powerful case for the need of reform of the prison system,
by people like Dr. James Gilligan,
the legal and prison systems operate with the assumption
that 'criminals' are individually responsible for their actions,
and that it is the person that must be punished,
rather than the environment that created them that must be radically altered.
Most importantly, this understanding invalidates many premises
upon which the monetary-market system is based:
such as that people who work harder deserve more fruits
for their supposed contribution to society
ignoring, of course, the irrelevancy of most jobs.
People’s efforts can only be as good as their environments permit them to act,
so why would we reward something that they cannot help.
Some people get more, and some people get less,
not because of any worthiness or deserving quality,
but because people had unequal environments
that granted some people with the ability to succeed in the market system
and others without it, it's as simple as that;