Tammy Bruce: You, Robot

You, Robot

A philosophical post by Maynard

The current edition of The Economist has several articles inquiring into the nature and function of the human brain, including this opinion piece questioning the existence of free will. It all sounds very highfalutin', but let's set aside the academic gobbledygook and look at things from an everyday perspective.

Every action is a reaction to some previous action. Would anyone (other than a quantum physicist) argue with this premise? Causality began with either (take your choice) Creation or the Big Bang, and it continues inexorably until the corresponding (suit yourself) End of Days or Big Crunch.

So it follows that free will cannot be a natural phenomenon. Free will, if it existed, would constitute an effect without a cause. This is simply not possible.

As a practical matter, we acknowledge the inherent causality of human activity all the time. Let's say you learn that someone is a child molester. You immediately start looking for why this happened; for example this person may have been molested in his youth, thus setting a process in motion.

So free will doesn't exist. We are all just a collection of immensely complex mechanical reactions to earlier mechanical events. If our ability to analyze was more comprehensive, we could know exactly why everything happened. There is no place in this natural universe for what we think of as "choice".

On the flip side, we subjectively experience free will, so we know it exists. Any academic claim to the contrary is nonsense cooked up in some madman's ivory tower.

So you see how our affirmation of humanity rests upon an article of faith. We (most of us, anyway) believe in our own free will, in spite of the intellectual assertion that there can be no such thing.

In this sense, we are all religionists, whether we admit it or not. To deny the supernatural is to deny one's own existence.

Where do you stand? Do you declare your Faith? Or do you yield to the wisdom of experts who declare us to be automatons?

Maybe the eggheads are right, and there really is no free will. Maybe it's all a grand illusion. We only think we're driving, but really we're kids seated in shopping carts spinning a toy steering wheel while Mommy pushes us around. (Which begs the question of who or what is "Mommy". As you see, there's no escaping the concept of a Higher Power...)

Posted by Maynard · December 28, 2006 11:08 PM · Permalink
Faith/The Divine | Maynard Post | Religion | Science & Technology

Comments

Yea, I believe in free will, because I've seen the lack of causality in people determining their own actions. Seemingly intelligent people will make actions based on sheer nonsense that never showed up previous to this, such as one of my friends voting against Jim Talent because Talent's necktie reminded him of his uncle. Lots of things people do can't be explained by upbringing, beliefs, etc, so there must be a free will element in effect. Otherwise, people would never surprise us, because based on past actions, we'd be able to successfully predict what they'd do in the future.

Posted by: WolvenBear at December 29, 2006 01:29 AM

If free will did not exist there would be no explanation for evil actions...unless one wishes to blame the Creator for those actions which may be the point of denying free will in the first place...

Posted by: SLABBOTT at December 29, 2006 04:45 AM

I believe in free will, and I do not believe that bad experiences doom you to perpetuating a cycle of the victims becoming the perpetrators.

Using the child molester example, I know someone who suffered molestation as a child; but they did not perpetrate the same crime against others when they became an adult, though the thought of perpetrating the same crime against a child does cross their mind, at times.

The book, "Crumb Family Comics," (Paperback) by underground hippie comic book artist R. Crumb & family, tells the story of R. Crumb's brother Charles, who was obsessed with thoughts of pedophilia, written in the brother's own words, but he freely chose NOT to commit the crime of child molestation.

Though they may have suffered with reliving the nightmare experiences in their thoughts, even daily, they certainly did not use the haunting memories to justify molesting a child themselves. What I saw was that as an adult, the childhood victim of molestation struggled mightily to NOT become a child molester themselves, and physically succeeded, though the childhood emotional pain never left them.

I think the technical term is "normalizing," when a victim of the trauma of child molestation cannot accept that such a heinous act has been committed upon them, they can lessen the grief and pain by convincing themselves that the traumatic act is just a "normal" event in life.

I don't have any trust in the Psychiatry industry, and especially not in the ringleaders of the industry. They constantly and increasingly try to normalize immoral acts, while doing the opposite, condemning traditional moral values.

It is becoming more and more common for "scholars" and Psychology/Psychiatry voices to become more and more bold, and greater in number, proclaiming that adults having sex with children really isn't bad for the child. The notorious sex "research" expert, Alfred Kinsey himself, believed that adults having sex with children was not wrong, and Kinsey eagerly accepted "research" details of such encounters.

Go to amazon.com and look up the book, Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences: The Red Queen and the Grand Scheme (Paperback) by Judith A. Reisman. This (currently out of print?) book has many details of Kinsey's perverse and criminal methods, and you will even see a reader reviewer denying that anything was wrong with Kinsey's research, (but those folks are like Holocaust deniers, except that the majority of the public is kept in the dark about the true Kinsey by the MSM).

Posted by: Psalm_9:17 at December 29, 2006 09:45 AM

If all is known about something at an exact point in time (all is known that has happened before), all forces are known that acted on it, including all previous forces that acted upon previous forces, etc., (and the laws that guided those forces did not and will not change, unless those changes are known) then, without free will, an all powerful entity can know exactly all that was to happen. But if all is known about something, then wouldn't "God" know how that thing would act, free will or not? Wouldn't an all-powerful and all-knowing entity know what your free will decisions would be?
The question is, what is free will?
Is free will the ability to make a decision that cannot be known, not even by "God"?

Posted by: helpunderdog at December 29, 2006 10:04 AM

“Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died”

I was just reading about this issue in Tom Wolfe’s book, “Hooking Up”. One of the essays in the book is “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died”. The essay is also on the internet. He covers Darwin, neuroscience, brain imaging, and Nietszche.

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/WolfeSoulDied.php

“Sorry, Fran, but it's third and twenty-three and the genetic fix is in, and the new message is now being pumped out into the popular press and onto television at a stupefying rate. Who are the pumps? They are a new breed who call themselves "evolutionary psychologists." You can be sure that twenty years ago the same people would have been calling themselves Freudian; but today they are genetic determinists, and the press has a voracious appetite for whatever they come up with.”

Nietzsche’s famous quote is “God is dead” meaning intellectuals no longer believed in God. It’s interesting to read what Nietzsche went on to say about the implications of that.

“Nietzsche said that mankind would limp on through the twentieth century ‘on the mere pittance’ of the old decaying God-based moral codes. But then, in the twenty-first, would come a period more dreadful than the great wars, a time of ‘the total eclipse of all values’ (in The Will to Power ). This would also be a frantic period of ‘revaluation,’ in which people would try to find new systems of values to replace the osteoporotic skeletons of the old. But you will fail, he warned, because you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says ‘Thou shalt’ or ‘Thou shalt not.’”

Posted by: pat_s at December 29, 2006 02:40 PM

maynard, it only works "scientifically" if you assume hard materialism. how long has it been since the famous "i think therefore i am"

Posted by: botg at December 30, 2006 06:15 PM

Scientifically, "predestination" went out with Newtonian mechanics and the clockwork universe. Quantum mechanics MANDATES free will. It's not even a very interesting discussion.

Posted by: Kevin Murphy at December 31, 2006 04:16 PM

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