March 11, 2007
Don't blame me...
Peter Burnett, writing on new ideas in neuroscience that imply that we have no responsibility for what we do...
.....Professor Morse is correct that there is nothing particularly original here. Each new wave of determinist thinking tends to arrive with a splash and claim the idea that our behaviours are influenced by genes, brains, nature, nurture, the stars, the climate or whatever is brand new and a counterpoint to a supposed universal historical belief that humans are independent actors in full control of their lives and equally capable of choosing from an infinite number of possible actions. In fact, the opposite is the case. Almost nobody believes that or ever did. Free will, moral agency and individual responsibility are gifts of monotheism, which holds we have the capacity to rise above our largely determined natures, but not without struggle and not unaided. That belief is the historical exception to the rule and the grounding of the most prosperous, culturally rich and successful civilization in history.Posted by John Weidner at March 11, 2007 08:01 PM
Determinism is the default belief in human history. It defines paganism, which explains why aboriginal peoples and so many African communities cannot break out of endless cycles of poverty and pathology. It defined much of Asia until Asians consciously and expressly rejected their traditions to adopt Western ways. Since about fifty years after the Enlightenment, it has largely defined secularism. Not unlike medieval astrologers, Marx, Freud, Darwin and a host of minor others all argued man is in the grip of forces of which he is unaware and which absolved him of responsibility for his actions and fate. Their popularity was instant and widespread, demonstrating what every lawyer knows–that people will go to the most extreme lengths to find exculpatory explanations for their actions, no matter how heinous or injurious. It is the man who genuinely admits responsibility that is the rare exception....
These sorts of arguments never really interest me much...I mean, say "faith" is found to be rooted in a chemical and electrical reaction in the brain - so what? Who's to say God can't work through chemical and electrical reactions in the brain? And say we were to discover that what we consider "free will" is really a cascade of neurons, triggered by training and habit and impacted by logic centers and pleasure centers, etc. Again, so what? Why is free will only valid if it is not played out using neurons?
It's like saying Microsoft Excel doesn't really exist, because it's all 1's and 0's, don't you see? There is no "G33" box! Well, yeah, but so what? We sum up hundreds of strings of binary characters by using the concept of G33, we interact with G33, and the fact that G33 is really binary strings doesn't really matter at the level we live life at. Implying that there is no Microsoft Excel, or no free will, or no faith, just because we know something about their mechanisms, is just sophistry in modern dress. Put another way - we may know the molecular structure of marble, but that doesn't mean sculptures don't exist.
I believe all our emotions and convictions and relationships and faith - that they all map to physical, chemical and electrical changes in our brains. But so what? That doesn't make them somehow less real.
Posted by: Ethan Hahn at March 12, 2007 08:25 AMAnother thing to think about, though perhaps it's apropos of nothing with respect to this entry:
In the Chronicles of Narnia (I think it was "Voyage of the Dawn Treader"), one of the children (Lucy?) asks Aslan why it is that He doesn't act directly on Earth as He does in Narnia. Aslan replies that He made the various worlds to work according differing sets of rules, and the rules governing Earth don't allow Him to act directly as He does in Narnia.
Of course, C.S. Lewis was a devout Christian.
Arriving at the same point from another direction, though, is James P. Hogan, a writer of science fiction, and formerly of atheist leanings. (He must have had an interesting childhood-- his father was Irish Catholic, and his mother was a German atheist.) He wrote a short story some years ago titled "Making Light", in which he imagines God as an engineer and contractor, building worlds to suit Himself, subject to rules He made long ago and administered by a heavenly bureaucracy. One day He decides to create this world called "Earth", but the bureaucracy throws so many obstacles in His way (citing His own rules) that He decides to forgo direct intervention in the development of Earth, and thereby pleasing the angel-bureaucrats. What the angel-bureaucrats don't know is that God has decided to do things sneakily, writing the rules of Earth in such a way as to cause the things He wants to happen without His direct involvement.
It always amuses me when people note science's inability to point to something in the human body as being "the soul", and therefore assume that science has proven that souls don't exist. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, of course.
Also, what differentiates you, John, from me or Ethan or Charlene, etc., is not the amount of brain tissue, or the number of brain cells in that tissue. It's how those brain cells are arranged and interconnected. What is important is not matter, but pattern.
When you stop to think about that, and the complexities of the macroscopic physical world, and the Alice-in-Wonderland aspects of the world on the sub-atomic scale, one can't help but be terrified, if only in some dim way, at the thought of the Architect who could craft the world we live in.
Which is probably why the determinists don't want to think about that.
Posted by: Hale Adams at March 12, 2007 04:13 PM
