FREE WILL
In the Guardian article, the ‘free will’ conundrum is framed as a ‘freedom of choice’ issue, arguing that there are basically two camps: the free will deniers and those in favour. The former include hard-core scientists who simply claim that humans are included in the never-ending ‘cause and effect’ laws of nature while the latter are woolly-eyed ‘compatibilists’:
they think determinism and free will are compatible. (There are many other positions in the debate, including some philosophers, many Christians among them, who think we really do have “ghostly” free will; and others who think the whole so-called problem is a chimera, resulting from a confusion of categories, or errors of language.)
OK, so the Guardian author does acknowledge that there are other possibilities and yet he keeps flogging the dead horse, i.e. the simplistic argument that whatever happens had to happen because otherwise it would not have happened (trotting out mass murders as evidence is quite bizarre). He even dismisses (or not even mentions) the contrary science, e.g. chaos theory, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and all that entails quantum physics. Quite obviously there are many random events that have no particular cause, at least in the present. How this plays out in human brains is yet another dimension not at all understood by those simple minds (Including various philosophers and scientists noted in this article). Advances in neuro-science merely confirm what is eminently obvious, e.g. that thought centres in the brain light up milliseconds before a speech act. Here, this is interpreted in that what we say is predetermined by the laws of neuro-physics operating in the brain. If that were the case we would know how language emerges from the brain but so far no one has the faintest clue (cf. Chomsky’s numerous treatises on this matter). Indeed language is the very instrument by which the ‘free will’ problem, is, as poorly acknowledged above (even if only in brackets), ‘is a chimera, resulting from a confusion of categories, or errors of language’. ‘Errors of language’? Poor grammar? Inadequate vocabulary? Twisted logic? While Wittgenstein has shown that it is impossible to reduce language to a logical system (e.g. how to prevent language from telling un-truths), there is the equal realisation that language as thought is the only instrument humans uniquely have to save the world from human destruction. It is the (free?) choices we make today and tomorrow that will determine the outcome? Indeed the term ‘free will’ is an oxymoron simply because the ‘will’s’ connotation is one of enforcement, like Nietzsche’s often misunderstood ‘will to power’. What will happen or will not happen has nothing to do with ‘free will’. Perhaps there are elements of random choices, even people in power make, despite their mad determination to execute their plans. All the people who do not ‘make’ history may yet find a way to change the ways that human affairs are run, i.e. to the benefit of 99% of the people on earth. To that end language (the pen) is still ‘mightier’ than the sword - even though this is a poorly worded metaphor because normal people do not yearn for ‘might’ in the way the swordsman does. Hopefully all the mighty people will fall on their swords before they destroy all of us. Perhaps a random mutation in the ‘mighty’ brain is all we need - and then again, perhaps not an appropriate metaphor in our age of the mutating virus.
Cf. 'Right at this minute, I could start talking about the weather outside, or about a baseball game I saw 50 years ago. We are incited to say particular things, but we are not compelled to do so.'
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/27/the-clockwork-universe-is-free-will-an-illusion
No comments:
Post a Comment