Free will - Part II

Thinking about free will is like talking about music. I console myself that the problem of free will has flummoxed some of the greatest minds that genetic recombination has thrown up in the sorry excuse for a genome that we call 'Homo sapiens'. Hume, Berkeley, Descartes, Nietsche and even Darwin made a complete pig's ear of it. The basic problem seems to be that the brain (and its shadow, the mind) is a mechanism, an engineered clockwork toy. It's current state is determined by it's antecedent states.

This determinsitic position can't be evaded, either through an appeal to chaos theory (which just says that predictions are too hard to compute, in practice, but not in principle) or to quantum uncertainty (random past events determine our present states just as surely as non-random events). If free will exists, where does it enter? Where is the backstage door through which it slips, un-noticed, while the scenes change?

Since Libet performed his experiments in the 1950s, showing that our brains and bodies act about half a second before we 'decide' to act, it has become increasingly clear that our feeling of agency is an illusion. We do things and these things are then recorded by our consciousness. This perspective is deeply disturbing. That thing you just did, the keystokes you just made on the computer, even the mistakes, were not made by 'you'. They were made by your brain, which then reported them to you.

One response to this might be to deny it, laugh it off as the fantasy of mad scientists. Unfortunately, you can only go down this route if you remain determinedly ignorant of the relevant evidence. Philosophers and scientists who actively study and think about this problem get around it in a variety of ways. No-one who has really thought about it hard seems willing to deny that free will is an illusion but most seem to defend the position that freedom somehow emerges from the fact of our evolution against a background of a deterministic world. Personally, I don't get it. The philosopher Susan Blackmore claims that, when she goes to a restaurant, she finds herself thinking 'I wonder what she'll order?'. Sometimes I find myself contemplating the question of when I'm going to drag my fat arse out of this chair and into bed and I sort of know what she means but it is really hard (impossible?) to get this third person perspective.

What I think at the moment is that I lack freedom on three levels.

1. Genetic. I am predisposed to behave in a certain way. My genes exert an extraordinarily poweful influence over what I think, say and do.

2. Deterministic. The state of my brain a moment ago determines it's state now.

3. Alcoholic. Even if it turned out that I were free under 1. and 2. above, my alcoholism would emprison me in a vice at least a bad.

So what is to be done? Well, nothing obviously.

More anon, when I've figured out all the shit that Hume, Berkeley, etc. missed.