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.
From an e-mail:
ReplyDeleteYour first thesis is too universal. As it stands it would imply that angelic and divine wills have material components. It might be that there are no angelic or divine wills, which would solve the problem for your argument. Or you can limit your argument to human wills, but then it seems the door is open to asking why, if the other kinds of will have the material relation not at all, the human will must have that relation all the time in fully directive fashion (the material directing the will).
Spinoza now forces himself into my mind—with the appropriate material correlates of course, who thinks that Deus sive Natura are two names for the one being, each name picking out either the material and extended aspect or the mental and willing aspect, though both are aspects of the same being. Spinoza, surprisingly, writes an Ethics; one wonders what it means for those beings which are themselves not the entirety of Deus sive Natura, though Deus could perhaps have one (and divine voluntarism is true).