Should you go to law school or medical school? Do want to go to Paris or to Madrid for vacation? Do you want pie or cake for dessert? These are the kinds of decisions we make daily, the routine (and not so routine) decisions that guide the direction of our lives.
But neuroscientists, studying our brains, have discovered something disconcerting. The electrical activity in the brain representing, say, a trip to Madrid fires immediately before you make the conscious, supposedly reasoned decision to go to Madrid. As an article by Stephen Cave in this month's Atlantic puts it:
The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.
These neuroscientific findings are but the latest justification for abandoning our traditional belief in free will, and accepting our scary role as part of a deterministic universe. Everybody's life, according to determinism, is predetermined by the structure and physiology of his brain -- every decision, minute to minute, proceeding according to cause and effect.
And since each person's actions are pre-determined reactions to his environment, including the actions of other persons, we must assume that all of human history has followed the same rules of physical cause and effect as do the events of geology and physics. Human activity is thus of the same character as the orbits of asteroids and the erosion of creek beds.
Dr. Cave, a writer and philosopher who received his Ph.D. from Cambridge, devotes most of his Atlantic article to showing how, although we live in a deterministic world, it's better that we ignore that fact. Or at least that people who are not professional philosophers should ignore it. People behave better in many contexts, is one unsurprising conclusion, if they believe they are acting with free will.
But if our lives are pre-determined, aren't we indulging in a free will fallacy by worrying that people will make bad decisions because they don't believe in free will? It's long been the joke that philosophers don't believe in free will, but spending their lives writing and teaching as though they do.
Which, of course, is exactly what Dr. Cave recommends -- let's pretend we do have free will.
Some philosophers, Cave observes, such as Dr. Sam Harris, try to work around this paradox by claiming a distinction between "determinism" and "fatalism."
When people hear there is no free will, they wrongly become fatalistic; they think their efforts will make no difference. But this is a mistake. People are not moving toward an inevitable destiny; given a different stimulus (like a different idea about free will), they will behave differently and so have different lives.
I'm not a philosopher, and I don't grasp the distinction. To me, it appears that if every human being's life is pre-determined, their effect on each other is also pre-determined. From the first instant of the Big Bang, the glory of Athens, the Terror of the French Revolution, the style of Donald Trump's hair-do, and my writing of this blog were completely predictable, given full knowledge of the initial conditions. To me, "fatalism" just sounds like a more emotion-charged version of the term "determinism." But, as I say, I am not a philosopher.
Christianity has brooded over the same issue, in theological terms, for two thousand years. God must have had full knowledge of his entire creation when he created it, including which humans would ultimately be saved and which would be damned. Therefore, why should we strive earnestly for salvation? John Calvin had one extreme answer; modern Protestants have a far more optimistic answer (if they even contemplate the issue).
The Catholic Church, steering a middle road, generally holds that predestination is a necessary result of God's infinite knowledge, but that prayer and striving for salvation are duties imposed on us by Christ's teaching. It's a mystery, we are told. Don't try to second-guess God, or imagine how his mind works. Just do your best to follow the teachings of Christ.
Which -- come to think about it -- is essentially what Dr. Cave is suggesting to us in a secular, rather than theological, context.
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