So somewhere in all of this studying the biology
behavior, somewhere in there when you’re
realizing activity levels in this part of
the brain one second before this act: what
you had for breakfast all the way back to
like what culture your ancestors evolved to—All
of these are influencing your behavior.
Most of these variables we’re not even aware
of.
They’re subliminal.
We never would have expected it.
Inevitably somewhere in there you’ve got
to sit down and start having the Free Will
Discussion.
So is there any free will in there?
And the polite thing that I’ve sort of said
for decades is that “Well, if there is free
will, it’s in all the boring places, and
those places are getting more and more cramped.”
If you want to insist that today you decided
to floss your teeth starting on your upper
teeth rather than your lower teeth, rather
than the other way around, that that is an
act of free will—Whatever, I’ll grant
that one to you.
That’s where the free will is.
In reality I don’t think there’s any free
will at all.
If you look at the things that come into account
as to whether or not someone is going to do
the right thing in the next two seconds amid
a temptation to do otherwise, the variables
in there reflect everything from whether they’re
having gas pains that day because of something
unpleasant they ate that morning—That makes
us more selfish, more impulsive, et cetera—to
what epigenetic effects occurred to them when
they were a first trimester fetus.
When you look at the number of things we recognize
now that are biological—organic—where
500 years ago or five years ago we would have
had a harsh moral judgment about it.
Instead we now know oh, that’s a biological
phenomenon.
When we look at that, either we can say the
last 500 years of realizing all of this biology
is going to stop right here and there’s
never going to be a new piece of knowledge
in that area—Yeah, there’s areas of behavior
we still can’t explain biologically.
But if all you can do is see the logical direction
we’re going with that is what we’re going
to get to the point is recognizing yeah, we’re
biological organisms.
This notion of free will, for want of a less
provocative word, is nothing but a myth.
What’s going to be really challenging though
is to figure out how you structure a society
that actually runs humanely built around the
notion that we are merely biological organisms.
And that one I haven’t a clue.
If someone tells me, you know, “Oh, nice
shirt you’re wearing today,” and I say
“Oh gee, thanks!”
I’ve just shown that on some fundamental
level I have trouble accepting there’s no
such thing as free will.
No: actually I picked this shirt today because
the culture I come from has these values and
my visual, you know, color receptors told
me that this shirt matches with this.
You know you still have a reflex to attribute
some sort of free will and sort of tiny little
domains.
If that’s going to prove horrible and too
difficult to overcome, that’s fine.
Where we need to do the heavy lifting is when
we’re making judgments about volition in
areas where we harshly judge people.
There we really have to do the hard work of
thinking through that there’s not a lot
of free will going on there.
