We continue considering that Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne deny free will: find the entire series here.
Just how far down the mechanistic/materialistic/reductionist rabbit hole does Jerry Coyne go?
For a taste, pun intended, consider the following statements made by PZ Myers:
We are literally soulless machines made of meat, honed by millions of years of ruthless, pitiless evolution…When we die, there is no paradise, no hell…Everyone who has ever lived has or will simply end, and become nonexistent. That should be the scariest, most depressing part about being an Atheist. No future? How awful. But it isn’t.
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You want to make me back down by trying to inspire revulsion with dead baby pictures? I look at them unflinchingly and see meat. And meat does not frighten me.
What saith Coyne?:
Our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output. As far as the computer metaphor goes: our brains are the hardware and our minds are the software.
Recent experiments involving brain scans show that when a subject “decides” to push a button on the left or right side of a computer, the choice can be predicted by brain activity at least seven seconds before the subject is consciously aware of having made it…
“Decisions” made like that aren’t conscious ones. And if our choices are unconscious, with some determined well before the moment we think we’ve made them, then we don’t have free will in any meaningful sense. This is one of the problems with neuroscience, neurobiology: much of its conclusions are nothing but interpretations. In this case, Coyne is interpreting brain activity according to his own determined brain activity. The non sequitur is that just because we do not become conscious of a choice for some time it does not mean that we did not make the choice. Just because “‘Decisions’ made like that aren’t conscious ones” does not mean that they are not decisions.
Psychologists and neuroscientists are also showing that the experience of will itself could be an illusion that evolution has given us to connect our thoughts, which stem from unconscious processes, and our actions, which also stem from unconscious process. We think this because our sense of “willing” an act can be changed, created, or even eliminated through brain stimulation, mental illness, or psychological experiments.
The ineluctable scientific conclusion is that although we feel that we’re characters in the play of our lives, rewriting our parts as we go along, in reality we’re puppets performing scripted parts written by the laws of physics. See what happens? You take an Atheistic interpretation of brain activity, you wrap a Darwinian story around it (an illusion that evolution has given us) and you demand an authoritative conclusion that it is an “ineluctable” aka unavoidable, inescapable “scientific” (be thou impressed) “conclusion” that “we’re puppets” of “the laws of physics.”
Most people find that idea intolerable, so powerful is our illusion that we really do make choices. But then where do these illusions of both will and “free” will come from?
We’re not sure. I suspect that they’re the products of natural selection, perhaps because our ancestors wouldn’t thrive in small, harmonious groups — the conditions under which we evolved — if they didn’t feel responsible for their actions. Sociological studies show that if people’s belief in free will is undermined, they perform fewer prosocial behaviors and more antisocial behaviors.
Another Darwinian story: just tell a tall tale about what natural selection may have possibly done to our supposed ancestors because they may have needed it to survive and voila! Thus, speaketh science! Be thou impressed! The point that “Sociological studies show that if people’s belief in free will is undermined, they perform fewer prosocial behaviors and more antisocial behaviors” is fascinating as research does show that Atheists and agnostics are the least moral and least charitable amongst us—see:
Are Atheists Healthy, Happy, Moral, etc.?
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