![]() ![]() This shocking conclusion comes from a series of experiments that revealed something quite remarkable: Our brains decide a course of action before we know it. Sam Harris, for example, wrote a short book arguing the case. Many neuroscientists and some philosophers consider free will to be an illusion. Still, work in neuroscience has prompted a reconsideration of free will, even to the point of questioning our freedom to choose. We have no clue what kinds of laws it follows, apart from very simplistic empirical laws about nerve impulses and their propagation, which already reveal complex nonlinear dynamics. Neuroscience and free willįortunately, the mind is not a solar system with strict deterministic laws. Laplace probably knew, I suspect, that it was all hubris. Legend tells that when Laplace gave a copy of his book Celestial Mechanics to Napoleon, the emperor saluted him on his accomplishment but also asked, “Why is there no God in your cosmos?” Laplace replied, “Because I have no need for this hypothesis.” That is the apex of deterministic reasoning and why people thought free will was a goner. Laplace even speculated that if a super-mind had the power to know the positions and velocities of every particle in the universe at the same moment of time, it would be able to predict the future for all eternity - even the fact that I wanted to write about free will today and that you would be reading this. They all followed precise quantitative laws that were able to predict when Halley’s comet would return and when and where the next total solar eclipse would occur, among many other astronomical phenomena. The French mathematical physicist, Pierre-Simon Laplace, had beautifully refined Newton’s physics to describe, in quantitative detail, the formation of the Solar System and planets and the stability of the planetary orbits around the Sun. If there is no free will, if we are indeed automatons of sorts, then to what extent are we really choosing when we think we are? And if we are not choosing, what or who is? And if we are not choosing, why do we have this notion or feeling that we are? A clockwork universeĮarly in the 19 th century, the idea that the universe was a giant clockwork mechanism was all the rage (at least for the intellectual elite). There are good and bad choices, and the bad ones will cost you dearly, if not in this life, then in the afterlife.Įven if you don’t subscribe to this particular narrative, the point is that choices come with consequences. This seems to imply that with knowledge comes the independence to make choices and the freedom to act according to your will. In the Old Testament, free will became an option after the Fall, when Adam and Even were kicked out of Eden for eating the apple of knowledge. Traditionally, it has been a topic for philosophers and theologians. The question of free will is essentially a question of agency, of who is in charge as we go through our lives making all sorts of choices. ![]()
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