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Today’s post is at The Stream: Pretend to Believe In Free Will Or Else You Will Make Bad Choices.
I want to be nice about this, but believing that we do not have free will is dumb. If you’re stung by this opinion, and do believe we lack free will, then remember: I had no choice but to call your belief idiotic.
Attacks on the notion of free will (free will itself is immune to assault) are increasingly common. The latest foray is found in The Atlantic, by philosopher Stephen Cave in “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will: But we’re better off believing in it anyway.”
Some twenty five centuries ago, Zeno of Elea gave the world some clever paradoxes, one of which is this. If you start at point B and want to get to A, you must first go half way between the two. Once at the mid point, you still have to go half way again from the mid point to A. And once at your new midpoint, you again have half way to go. And so on ad infinitum. Because no matter where you are, you still have half the distance between where you are and your destination, thus your travel is endless…
Well, Elea was a different place than the modern West. Nowadays theories have precedence over reality.
Cave says the “sciences have grown steadily bolder in their claim that all human behavior can be explained through the clockwork laws of cause and effect.” He thanks Charles Darwin for sparking this boldness. He also says, falsely, that there is “agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons [in our brains] determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.”…
But where Zeno retained his love of reality, and recognized movement happens, Cave surrenders himself to his theory body and soul…
Give in to base instincts? As in freely choosing to act in certain ways?…
But isn’t blame an act of free choice? Yes, sir, it is. If there is no free will, the rioting rabble that pillages a town can’t be blamed, nor can the judge who hangs the riot’s instigator. They are all slaves to their neurons.
It is bizarre and logically contradictory for Cave, Smilansky, or anybody to argue, as they do, for our leaders to freely choose this or that policy in “an attempt to retain the best parts of the free-will belief system while ditching the worst.” Theory trumps reality again.
Listen, dear reader. You do not have to know how a thing works to know that it works. That some philosophers cannot unravel Cave’s argument, just as ancient philosophers couldn’t solve Zeno’s riddle…
Go there to read the rest. There is no free will, so you cannot make a choice and you must do as I say.