We are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe. Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain — the organ that does the "choosing." And the neurons and molecules in your brain are the product of both your genes and your environment, an environment including the other people we deal with. Memories, for example, are nothing more than structural and chemical changes in your brain cells. Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics.True "free will," then, would require us to somehow step outside of our brain's structure and modify how it works. Science hasn't shown any way we can do this because "we" are simply constructs of our brain. We can't impose a nebulous "will" on the inputs to our brain that can affect its output of decisions and actions, any more than a programmed computer can somehow reach inside itself and change its program.And that's what neurobiology is telling us: Our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output.Psychologists and neuroscientists are also showing that the experience of will itself could be an illusion that evolution has given us to connect our thoughts, which stem from unconscious processes, and our actions, which also stem from unconscious process…Our feeling of personal agency is so overwhelming that we have no choice but to pretend that we do choose, and get on with our lives.
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If there is delusion over the character of human nature, it is universal. And whether one takes sides with secular or religious argument is irrelevant. So long as we remain an unsustainable species, our human nature remains neither moral nor spiritual, only aspirational without a way to realize such ends!
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Coyne's analysis is an exercise in self-refutation. He must assume the viewpoint of an outside observer, giving an objective, 3rd-person description of what human nature is really like. Yet according to his own analysis, that kind of critical detachment from what his brain is telling him shouldn't be possible.
DeletePsychologists and neuroscientists are also showing that the experience of will itself could be an illusion that evolution has given us to connect our thoughts, which stem from unconscious processes, and our actions, which also stem from unconscious process…Our feeling of personal agency is so overwhelming that we have no choice but to pretend that we do choose, and get on with our lives.
ReplyDeleteThe wording is bizarre. We are capable of having "illusions" and "pretending". But what sort of entities are capable of pretending or of having illusions appear to them? Conscious ones, not mechanistic ones. The very words chosen to describe the materialist conception of the mind point to something beyond the merely mechanistic and thus refute the point that is trying to be made.