Sometime in
November, I went visiting a Nebraskan couple in Utrecht. They are both very
good people and philosophically inclined, he from a background in medical
studies, she with a creative and literary bent of mind. They looked exceedingly
happy together, and it was very good to be there; of necessity I must summarize
this part briefly, for, as Tolkien remarked, it is much easier to tell a story
about bad times than about good times (I paraphrase).
At table, we
talked about our lives and our studies. I mentioned my desire to investigate,
at some point or other, our capacity of making free decisions. This has become
problematic in light of neurological discoveries (of which I admittedly know
little). It is all very well to say that the human person is capable of
self-determination, but our physical infrastructure seems externally determined
through and through.
The lady from
Nebraska said that she believed in free will, and that her stories involved
people making truly momentous ethical decisions that changed their lives. Some
universitarians (those gowned cogs in the 21st-century machine) considered her
too much a Romantic. I cordially sympathized with her outlook, myself
undergoing enthusiasm; then went home and tried to make the best case I could
make against free will, so that a more skilful philosopher could blow it to
bits and perpetually reroute the depraved neurons responsible for this
intellectual atrocity.
Consider
yourself invited.
The argument:
1. Every act
of the will has a mental and a material component.
2. The mental
and the material components are in proportion to each other.
3. The
material component follows the laws of matter.
4. At the
molecular level, the motion of matter does not deviate from Newtonian patterns.
5. The
material component of the act of the will occurs in the brain at the molecular
level. (*)
6. The motion
of the material component does not deviate from Newtonian patterns. (from 3, 4
and 5)
7. The mental
component is in proportion to a material component that does not deviate from
Newtonian patterns. (from 2 and 6)
8. One and the
same material component is in proportion to one mental component only. (**)
9. The mental
component cannot deviate from a pattern that stands in proportion to the
Newtonian pattern governing the material component of the act of the will.
(from 7 and 8)
10. A will
that cannot deviate from a pattern is not a free will.
11. Hence, there
is no free will. (from 9 and 10)
Clarifications:
(*) Though the
act of the will involves more than a motion of the brain, yet that motion is
decisive for human movement.
