For readers interested in reading the previous parts
of this series, links to them are given below:

Part-1: Science, Objectivity & Postmodernism:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mukto-mona/message/11880

Part-2: Science vs. Mysticism & Philosophy:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mukto-mona/message/11939

Part-3: Science, Logic, Faith, Beauty.. etc
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mukto-mona/message/11986

Part-4: Science, Miracles & the Paranormal:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mukto-mona/message/12044

Part-5: On the Nature vs. Nurture Debate:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mukto-mona/message/12399

Part-6: A Scientific View of Life Death Immortality:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mukto-mona/message/13265

Part-7: Brain and Religion:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mukto-mona/message/17727


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ON FREE WILL VS. DETERMINISM/PREDESTINATION

Are human actions result of conscious decisions based on free
will or due to a deterministic result of natural causes? This
is n age old question that has been debated for centuries by
philosophers and thinkers. Not surprisingly classical
philosophers could never agree on the answer to this question,
just as they could not agree on the nature vs. nurture
question, due to their lack of knowledge about modern
scientific insights on neurology, quantum theory and the
science of complexity. Just as modern science has pretty much
settled the nature vs. nurture debate (Of course that required
a rephrasing of the question to make it scientifically
meaningful), modern science also has settled the dispute about
freewill vs. destiny. The verdict of science and scientists is
that there is no true freewill. Free will is an illusion!. I
will try to elaborate more on this. But the verdict of
scientists does not seem to trickle down to the popular level,
majority of whom still believe that we humans have free will,
"we" are in charge of "our" actions, echoing the view of the
religious apologists, who insist that God has given us free
will, so we are accountable to God for what we do, good or bad,
etc. The libertarians also take this lofty view of humans,
crediting humans of an ability of freedom to choose and act
freely. So what is free will? The popular notion of free will
is that it means that that humans have an ability/atrribute
external to the physical body of humans, which can control the
action of the human (via the brain) and choose between
alternatives. The ultimate implication is that free will is an
agent uncaused by natural laws, i.e not subject to the natural
laws. Astute readers will not miss the implication of this that
this is nothing but the old ghost in the machine idea, the idea
of a "soul" directing the body and action of a human from
outside the body. So the free will is ultimately attributed to
the soul, which humans refer to as "we", "me", etc. This
illusion results from the first person perspective. When a
third person perspective is taken of humans then it is the
causal link between natural laws (Acting on the billions of
neurons) and human actions that is seen and observed as
obvious, and the illusion goes away. In the free will view,
human soul/self is viewed as an autonomous entity, not caused
by any natural laws, so it is endowed with the ability to do
anything not determined by natural laws. But in the modern
neuroscientific paradigm, where human actions are seen as the
sole result of natural laws acting on the human brain, there is
be no free will, there is no soul either, the supposed
provenance of free will. Modern neuroscience has driven this
long held human perception and belief to extinction. Just as
Nietsze declared centuries ago that God is dead, Tom Wolfe, the
author of the bestselling fiction "Bonfire of the Vanities"
declares in his essay "Sorry your Soul just died" : (http://www.
orthodoxytoday.org/articlesprint/WolfeSoulDiedP.htm)


"Eventually, as brain imaging is refined, the picture may
become as clear and complete as those see-through
exhibitions, at auto shows, of the inner workings of the
internal combustion engine. At that point it may become
obvious to everyone that all we are looking at is a piece of
machinery, an analog chemical computer, that processes
information from the environment. "All," since you can look
and look and you will not find any ghostly self inside, or
any mind, or any soul."

The Time magazine, in its annual special feature on Mind and
Body on January 20, 2003 issue begins with this: "Mind and body,
psychologists and neurologists now agree, aren't that different
. .. The thoughts and emotions that seem to color our reality
are the result of complex electrochemical interactions within
and between nerve cells....The mind is like the rest of the
body...."

Neuroscience also reveals that the self, which defines who we
are, lies in the synaptic connections (neural pathways) of the
neurons of the brain. Each individual brain has its own
distinctive synaptic connections (which is also ever evolving),
which imparts the distinctive self and the awareness of the self
that all humans possess. This is the basis of the book by
renowned neurologist Joseph Ledoux titled "The Synaptic Self:
How our brains become who we are".

Neuroscientist Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee in their book
"Phantoms of the Brain, page-256 writes: "our sense of having a
private, non-material soul 'watching the world' is really an
illusion".

A similar view is expressed by Harvard psychologist Dr. Daniel
M. Wegner. He suggests that modern neuroscience reveals a
commonsense physicalism that the brain conducts business on its
own. It doesn't need a further, non-physical agent to
orchestrate the dauntingly complex operations that constitute
awareness, cognition, and control of behavior. In his book,
"The Illusion of Conscious Will," he says that free will is a
feeling — merely a feeling of control over our actions. When we
think, that we are going to get up now," and when we do it a
moment later, we credit that feeling with having been the
instigating cause. But as we all know, correlation does not
equal causation."

Dr. Wegner debunks the free will myth using the example of
hypnosis, ouija board, dowsing etc. If truly there was free will
agent ouside the brain conrolling it, such exampkle sof losing
conscious control o one's will would not maksem sense. He also
cites Psychologist Benjamin Libet's classic doscovery thet our
conscious awarness of a willed act actually is preced by the act
itself!

Human body or brain, are the products of natural laws (via the
process of evolution, dictated by the laws of Physics
ultimately). So a belief in freewill inevitably reduces to a
belief in soul, which is external to the natural laws and not
bound by it. Many secular humanists, who may brag about their
rational mind dismissing the idea of God and Soul, unwittingly
betray their belief in soul when they insist on the existence
of a true human free will. Owen Flanagan, professor of
philosophy, psychology, and brain sciences at Duke University
in his book, "The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of the Mind
and How to Reconcile Them" mounts a strong, uncompromising
attack on both secular and religious beliefs supporting their
underlying notion of soul. Flanagan blames this widespread
erroneous belief on Descartes. He argues that the brain and its
supporting nervous system seem quite capable of doing all that
the soul traditionally was supposed to do.

So is there no free will at all?, one may ask in desperation.
Well, it is more a semantic question. As I mentioned earlier, in
the first person perspective, all humans are aware of a
"feeling" of being in control, of their brain, of their body,
and thus of any actions that results therefrom. So if free will
is defined as that feeling of being in control, then it
trivially exists. I must also add that this "feeling" itself is
hardwired in humans through evolution, i.e is also naturally
caused. But free will truly does not exist in the sense of any
force or power independent of the causal laws of nature. So why
is it that the verdict from science about the absence of true
free will does not seem to percolate to the ordinary mass? I
can think of two reasons. First of all only those scientific
truths seem to catch on that either have utilitarian values,
like Superconductivity, photoelctric effect, or are appealing
to the human imaginations, like the ideas of Quatntum
uncertainty, relativity (both of these also have utilitarian
implications asw ell), black holes, time warp etc. Any truth
which is unapealing, or even seems to be dangerous, would not
only be not publicized enough by scientists, but would also not
be heeded to by the non- scientific community. The non-
existence of free will falls into this latter category, just as
the truth that human behavior is largely genetically
determined, and only partly environmentally determined (even
the environmental component is ultimately genetically
determined, since environment itself is created by the
propensities in human mind/brain, which is genetically
determined). If humans believed that they don't have freewill,
that they are robots then a chaos would result, the entire
fabric of morality in society would fall apart etc. Just as
evolution doesn't favour that all humans tell the truth, or
that all of them lie, it may very well be that evolution
doesn't favour that all humans realize and find out the
unpleasant truths. So it will not be surprising that many
humans will continue to believe in free will despite
overwhelming evidence to the contrary from science.

As philosopher Saul Smilansky argues in his chapter on "Free
Will, Fundamental Dualism, and the Centrality of Illusion" in
Robert Kane's The Oxford Handbook on Free Will, that "although
we don't have free will in the traditional libertarian, contra-
causal sense, a widespread appreciation of this truth would
constitute a dire threat to our moral commitments and practices.
Disbelief in such free will is a literally dangerous idea of the
second category. In order to protect our moral virtues, it's
better to have the false belief that we have free will."

As I argued above, belief in free will that is external to
the human brain is equivalent to belief in soul. Now it is
also the case that proponents of free will use the existence of
free will to justify accountability and personal responsibilty.
There is a fallacy in this view. The very insistence on the
existence of free will posits that the "self" controls the body
and brain, not the other way around, i.e the "self/soul"
is responsible for the free will. But invariably the consequence
of one's conduct is an effect on the body or brain(mind) of the
person (penalty in the form of fine, imprisonment, rebuke etc).
Now the "soul/self" is claimed to be beyond the human body and
brain, external to it, and is the ultimate agent for the action
of the human body and brain. The immediate consequence of this
view is that soul/self is not affected by any effects on the
body or brain. Then the question is how does this punitive
action on the body/brain can be meaningfully justified as
bearing responsibilty for the act supposedly the self/soul is
responsible for? If the punitive acts affects only the body and
brain, then the notion of self/soul is redundant as the raison
de etre for moral responsibility and accounatbility. Therein
lies the paradox of free will vs. moral responsibility.

So far I have been referring to the notion of free will in the
sense that human acts and decisions are not controlled by the
brain due to the causal laws of nature, but by an external
self/soul. In the scientific view, free will is defined as
an act that is not predicatble deterministically from natural
laws. In this sense the decay of a radioactive nuclues is an
act of free will by the nucleus. The ultimate example of free
will is the creation of the entire universe by a random vacuum
fluctuation.

It is known that at the Quantum level (microscopic world)
exact outcome of microscopic events are unpredictable.
That fact has prompted some to argue that since human brain
is ultimately composed of microscopic particles, hence human
brains also act non-deterministically like quantum events.
But the claim that human brain (Which is macroscopic) simply
amplifies the randomness at the microscopic level is debatable.
First of all, Quantum Mechanics itself is not a completely
non-deterministic law. That would imply a total lawless world.
Rather Quantum mechanics is a deterministic law that assigns
*precise* probabilities to quantum events at the microscopic
level. Let me difress a bit and clarify a common perception
about Qunatum Mechanics. The percpetion is that Quantum
Mechanics implies that events at Quantum level are random,
unpredictable. But that is not what Quantum mechanics, says,
rather Quantum mechanics acknowledges the unpredictability at
the Quantum level as a given fact of nature (i.e an axiom)
and assigns precise probabilitites to specific quantum events.
It is the assignment of these probabilities that is success
of Quantum Mechanics. Heisenberg's undertainty principle
only refers to the relative uncertainty between conjugate
varibales in a precise quantitative way. But Quantum Mechanics
does not itself from its own principle derive the fact that
microscopic events are random and unpredicatble. This is a
fact that we have to accept as given in nature and is borne
out by observations. Anyway getting back to the main point,
at the macroscopic level, when the number of particles
are large, the average behaviour of the aggregate, which we
observe is actually a deterministic event, even though the
individual behaviour of particles in the aggregate are non-
determinsitic. Hence the brain, which is composed of billions
of neurons, where each neuron itself is a composite structure
may not be quite random in its action. The microtubules in
the neuron are claimed to be the quantum components of the
neuron. But that is not a settled fact yet. But one must be
reminded that even if brain turns out to be a quantum system
(thus random), in the absence of a soul, it still cannot
justify moral responsibilty of individuals, because in that
case a human (body or brain) still has no control of the
action of their brain either, since that is purely a matter
of random act.

Although the claim that brain is a Quantum system is debatable,
one thing that is not so debatable is that the brain is a
chaotic system, because it is a thermodynamic system in far from
equilibrium, and is composed of large number of particles. Such
systems always show inherent chaotic behaviour and thus
unpredictability. Even indivodual neurons are themselves complex
enoigh to be chaotic. In their book "Are we hardiwred?", authors
Clark and Grunstein says a single neuron may receive information
from a thousand or more other neurons, each of which was itself
impacted by a hundred or a thousand inputs in a feedback loop.
This massive complexity of the brain's systems can produce
alterations whose impact on behavior would be as unpredictable
as the pathway of the hypothetical boulder down a mountainside.
But I still have to remind ourselevs that chaotic
unpredictability does not imply a true indeterminism, because
chaotic systems still obey the deterministic laws. It is the
impossibility to enumerate the almost infinite set of variables
that makes the behaviour of chaotic systems unpredictable,
thereby making them practically indistinguishable from truly
non-deterministic systems.

Now let me go on to some simple nuts and bolts example to
illustrate the illusion of free will.

For example we hear often people saying that if you follow steps
1 through n, an intended result can be achieved. (Example
studying hard will yield good grades in an exam etc). There is
no debate on that. So why don't all achieve their desired
objective even though they all know the steps needed for this?
Some decide to follow the steps with firm resolve and achieve
it, where others are not as resolute and choose not to follow
them with tenacity. This temperamental difference between these
two kinds of people are inherently due to the difference in
their genetic makeup, causing one group to succeed and the
others not to. In other words it is a matter of destiny that
some people are the way they are. The brain of a human cannot
alter its genetic makeup or its environment, both of which
determine it's behaviour. Lets say you come to a point in life
where you have to make a choice of either 'A' or 'B', and your
life can potentially take a completely different turn depending
on which choice you make. You consider all the other factors
available to you, along with the long term memory in the brain
as input data and make the best choice for you. Here you made
the choice with your "free will power" and thus shaped your
future life but the input data on which you based your choice
may not be all under "your" control (i.e your brain). Even
leaving aside the input data, the choice made could be solely
due to your genetic propensity, which is hardwired. Let us
imagine a scenario where you advised " A" to make a certain
momentous choice that you are quite sure is the right one
through some objective assessment. But A, even though convinced
by the objectivity of your assessment, picks another option,
not because he/she assessed your advice carefully and concluded
that you were wrong, but because of certain instinctive impulse
he/she feels inside which impels him/ her to take a different
route. At the end it turned out that he/ she was wrong and
regretted not having followed your advice. This is a case where
the "choice" was definitely made by A, the choice being not to
follow your advice but go with his gut instinct. But A didn't
chose to be a person of the type to be driven by instinct and
not by objective consideration, That trait is inherent in
his/her, leading to a certain destiny. In other words the
choice of taking a certain route is in turn dictated by certain
attribute which is not a choice by conscious control. So no
choice is ultimately self-caused.

Another example is that we all know if a blood pressure patient
eats salt, or a diabetic patient eats sugar etc then that will
speed up their death. Even knowing this, some defy these rules
and invite early death, whereas others are very particular in
following proper rules and thus live a longer life. These two
sets of people have very different mind/personality which is
inherited by birth (genetic code) and which causes them to act
or make choices in a certain way that affects their life and
future accordingly. So, ultimately the the decision one takes,
being controlled by the chaotic brain with a host of
environemtal factors together with the historic contingencies
which are imprinted in the long term memory of the brain,
there is no basis of any human to act in a way that is not
caused inevitably by the natural laws acting on the brain
itself. So true free will does not exist. As mentioned earlier,
believing in Free will is a subjective perception or feeling
for those who believ in it. This feeling or perception remains
until an action is chosen and performed. Once the act is chosen
and committed, and if the act yields a significant positive or
negative result, the same act committed may seem to them as the
inevitable result of destiny in retrospect, i.e an act of free
will in past may appear to be a result of fate in retrospect,
of course in these cases the fate would also appear to be
determined by some cosmic force!, not by natural(material)
causes.

While in the context of fate or destiny it may be wort
mentioning a popular but fallacious view about causality. Quite
often people who may or may not believe in predestination make
the statement "Thanks God you were/I was not in the flight"
after hearing the news of a plane crash in which he/she or
someone they know were supposed to be on, but cancelled for
some reason. By this they are implying that IF they were on
that flight, the plane would have still crashed. A close
examination of this would reveal an inconsistency of thoughts
or logic. Lets say the person in question is "A" and the flight
is called "X". there are four possible events:

1. A was in flight X and X crashed
2. A was not in flight X and X crashed
3. A was in flight X and X didn't crash
4. A was not in flight X and X didn't crash

Now in the above example case "2" happened and the opinion by A
or his/her friends was that if "2" didn't happen then only "1"
can happen and not "3" Now there is no logical reason to think
that way. The world just happened to end up in 2 because of the
infinite sequence of cause and effect at play. A different
sequence of infinite cause and effect relationship may have led
to any other events, like event 3. Event "2"'s not happenning
does not imply that only event "1" can happen. We have no basis
of making predictions about event 1, on the basis of event 2's
happenning. These two events can be linked only if everything in
the world is identical except A being or not being in a flight.
But once A is in the flight then that implies a different world
with its different cause and effect factor (an example would be
the total number of passenger, weight or load distribution on
the plane is differnt now, not to mention a host of differrnt
factors that led to A's being in X in the first place) than the
world where A was not in flight X. So we cannot make any
conclusion about the world with A in flight "X" based on the
knowledge about the world in which A was not in "X". That would
in effect be a case of predicting future, fortune telling. This
kind of statement like "IF "A" had been in flight "X", THEN A
would have been killed in the crash of flight "X", is called a
counter-factual statement in logic and is a meaningless one from
a rational standpoint, because it assumes a condition which can
never be tested, since we cannot go back in past and change a
past event to test the validity of the conclusion regarding a
future event. So such counterfactuals reflect a poor sense
logic and reality.