Free will #9 – Being Honest: Problems I have Created for Myself

          When it comes to the beginning of the universe, some will say that God created the little ball that started the big bang.  They say that there has to be an uncaused cause to start it all, and God is that uncaused cause.  And then the materialists will say “then who caused God?”  It’s a valid question.  What we spiritualists are doing is pushing off the problem of an uncaused cause into the spiritual, or non-material, realm.  I know that those who delve into quantum mechanics might like to say that the material world can somehow achieve something equivalent to an uncaused cause, but I personally can’t accept that mathematics can trump reality to that extent.  So, yes, I push off the uncaused cause into the spiritual realm and say “there is God.”  It’s a valid criticism.

          Well, I’m doing the same thing with free will.  I say that people have a will, and that will influences (sometimes very weakly, as I have discussed previously) what we do.  The will, I claim, makes decisions that are independent of, and cannot be totally predicted by, all of the inputs provided to it.  And, further, the decisions of the will are not random.  Thus, that makes decisions of the will a true starting point for something, and therefore it is valid to call them uncaused causes.  From a materialist-only standpoint, the will couldn’t really be an uncaused cause unless the will has existed forever in its original (and current) state.  Actually, in some religious views, including Christianity, there is support for the idea that each person was created before they were born and, to a greater or lesser extent, who they are now is who they were created to be.  But I want to leave those religious concepts out of the conversation for now.  The issue at hand is that, from a purely material perspective, the will has the same problem as the little ball at the beginning of the big bang.  If you keep working backwards, you eventually get to something as far back in time as you can be and you are left asking “who caused that?”  With respect to the will, I’m doing what spiritual people do with the big bang – I’m pushing the uncaused cause into the spiritual realm.  Thus, when I say that the will is an uncaused cause I also say that the will is in the spiritual, not material, realm.

          To simplify it, here is what I am claiming:

1.  Each person has their own independent free will.  They make at least some decisions that are not totally, 100% dependent on all of their combined past inputs, and those decisions are not random.  I’ve decided this point based on my own personal experiences and the described experiences of everyone I know.

2.  In order for a decision to have some component that is not dependent on the past, and is not random, it must be an uncaused cause.

3.  Uncaused causes don’t exist in the material world.

4.  Therefore, free will is non-material, i.e. spiritual.  By extension, then, each person has a spiritual component to them.  If they have free will, then they cannot be purely material.

Further, I have made the following observations in earlier entries:

5.  Human decisions are ultimately encoded in the signals of neurons.

6.  Human decisions also encode free will.  By that I mean that free will can be observed in the decisions that people make.

7.  Therefore, free will is, somehow and some way, encoded (or at least observable) in the signals in neurons.

And finally:

8.  If it were possible to observe every neuron’s activity, you would find at least one neuron exhibiting responses consistent with free will.

9.  It is not possible to do #8.

So…there you have it in summary form.  I can see that almost every statement I make in the list above can be argued against, and some statements are almost naïve in their simplicity.  However, I think my two conclusions (#4 and #7) are valid conclusions if my preceding statements are valid.  I hope, at least, that there are no logical inconsistencies there. 

I will have to delve into each one of these statements in the future.  Some are highly dependent on careful definitions of each term (e.g. “material”, “spiritual”, “free will”, etc.).  I suppose statement #1 is the most controversial, yet it is the one I feel most strongly about.  I think most people – even hard determinists – would agree with #2 (but they would use it to say “and uncaused causes don’t exist, so therefore free will doesn’t exist”).  Personally, I feel that statement #3 is my weakest, although again, I think the hard determinist would agree with that one.  But sometimes I wonder – are there really any hard determinists left?  They’ve all gotten soft in their old age!

The one thing I’ve tried to do in my line of thinking is not stoop to what I believe the soft determinists do.  Soft determinists get to avoid the problem of uncaused causes and yet somehow retain personal responsibility and human freedom.  I don’t think they are playing fair – they are cheating.  When faced with a true/false question, the soft determinist gets to answer “yes” and the rest of their soft determinist buddies all applaud and say “good answer”!  Hah!  More topics for future discussion.

Well, although I am a non-materialist – spiritualist – at heart, I don’t like the fact that someone can argue that all I’ve done is push everything I can’t explain off into some vague spiritual realm where the normal rules don’t apply.  I wish I had a more satisfying answer.  I wish, actually, that I had a more scientific answer.  But I don’t.  However, that doesn’t mean I’m ready to discard it all.  No, there is much much more to the spiritual realm that I also need to address, and will address, in the future.  Much of it is intimately wrapped up with the #1 Crazy Thing that I discussed in a previous entry.  We’ll get to all that in time…