I’m writing a new book about Free Will: Why we don’t have it and why that matters

Posted on by Peter Thorpe

Contents

Overview

I’m on a mission to write the world’s most evidence-based, citation packed, and easy-to-understand book on why we don’t have free will and what the implications are. This will be my most important project during my 3-4 months sabbatical vacation.

Why this topic matters

I believe the question of whether or not free will and moral responsibility exist is the single most important question in the history of philosophy. It has deep ramifications for society, morality, religion, and the criminal justice system. Modern science and philosophy have shed considerable light on this topic, such that some definitive answers have emerged, and I believe these answers will positively transform the way we human beings understand ourselves, our role in the universe, and how we treat one another. I also believe it will help drive alignment and collaboration between many different secular organizations, faith groups, and common citizens about how we can make the world a better place for everyone and how we can cleanse belief systems of those elements that cause conflict instead of compassion, and callousness instead of commiseration.

What the general public believes

A number of studies by preeminent academic and research institutions show that the majority of adults in the Western world believe in a non-physical soul, that is distinct from the brain, that governs behavior.[1][2][3] Along the same lines, most adults in the United States, East Asia, and South America believe that we inhabit a world that is generally governed by the physical laws that have been discovered by science, but yet makes an important exception for human beings, who, in their daily lives, make choices that are not the inevitable results of the past and the laws of nature.[4] In fact, the image of a mechanistic world, in which every action is the inevitable result of the state(s) of the universe at the prior instant(s), together with the laws of nature, and whatever quantum indeterminacy might be in operation, seems to stand in stark contrast to the manifest image[5] we have of ourselves as free, rational beings, who, by virtue of that rationality, have been liberated from the chains of naturalistic causation, unlike the lower animals around us, and unlike the machines we have ingeniously designed to help us advance our own purposes.[6]

What academic philosophers and scientists believe

The majority of scientists and philosophers agree that human beings are entirely material beings that are governed by the same laws of physics that govern all of physical reality.[7][8][9][10] Here are some helpful quotes on this subject from some of the world’s most esteemed scientists and philosophers:

Common sense tells us that we exist outside of the material world—we are connected to our bodies and our brains, but we are not ourselves material beings, and so we can act in ways that are exempt from physical law. For every decision we make—from leaning over for a first kiss, to saying “no” when asked if we want fries with that—our actions are not determined and not random, but something else, something we describe as chosen.

This is what many call free will, and most scientists and philosophers agree that it is an illusion. Our actions are in fact literally predestined, determined by the laws of physics, the state of the universe, long before we were born, and, perhaps, by random events at the quantum level. We chose none of this, and so free will does not exist.

Paul Bloom, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University.[11]

People [human beings] are physical objects which, like atoms or ball bearings or bridges, obey the laws of physics.

We [human beings] are moist robots.

Dan Dennett, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.[12][13]

In a sense, we can hold no one responsible. I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act as if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being. I know that philosophically a murderer is not responsible for his crime; nevertheless, I must protect myself from unpleasant contacts. I may consider him guiltless, but I prefer not to take tea with him.

Albert Einstein, arguably the greatest scientist in the history of the world.[14]

Though we feel that we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets. Recent experiments in neuroscience support the view that it is our physical brain, following the known laws of science, that determines our actions, and not some agency that exists outside those laws. For example, a study of patients undergoing awake brain surgery found that by electrically stimulating the appropriate regions of the brain, one could create in the patient the desire to move the hand, arm, or foot, or to move the lips and talk. It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.

Stephen Hawking, (former) Theoretical Physicist and Cosmologist and Physics Professor and Director of the Center of Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge and one of the world’s most esteemed physicists in history.[15]

What the implications are

  • All punishment-reward based religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are false in their essential claims about sin and judgement. Sin doesn’t exist, so there’s no need to be “saved” for your sins or participate in any cleansing rites or rituals for the sake of making restitution for the moral “disorder” introduced in the world by your actions. That said, religion can still serve important social functions such as providing citizens with a sense of community, infusing the human person with a sense of purpose and dignity, and providing a support system for times of both emotional and financial distress.
  • Morality is a socially useful fiction that is ultimately based on facts about the moral preferences shared by the vast majority of human beings. Punishment purely for the purpose of retribution is nonsensical, because human behavior and decision making is entirely mechanistic. On the other hand, consequentialist, forward-looking foundations for praise and blame are entirely justified for the pragmatic reasons of building the kind of society that most of us would enjoy living in.
  • We can’t bank on religious tales about the afterlife and rewards in a heavenly paradise. This means we have to get our hands dirty and work hard to build the kind of paradise that humanity has dreamed of since time immemorial.
  • The fact that human anthropology is ultimately reductionist is actually a cause for celebration and not a cause for despair. If there is no nonphysical soul, then whatever the principle is that generates the human conscious experience is itself subject to investigation, and, more importantly, modification by the tools of science. If the afterlife is not a journey made by a ghost in the machine, then it can be realized through the perpetual maintenance and reconstruction of the machine’s material constituents. We will need to leverage technology and transhumanism to bring about the metaphorical kingdom of God on earth, and we must understand the necessity of transhumanism in reaching the highest goal humanity has ever and will ever have.[16]

Why I’m writing this book

I’m writing this book because, as explained above, the implications of the non-existence of free will and moral responsibility are very deep and impactful for a wide variety of human social practices and self understanding. At the present moment, I have not come across any single work on the subject by any author that has singularly convinced me that free will and moral responsibility don’t exist as anything more than socially useful fictions. Rather, it was by reading a wide array of academic books and research papers that I eventually became convinced of this thesis over a period of years. Therefore, I want to write a book that will bring together all of the relevant facts, arguments, and datasets from researchers in diverse disciplines such as philosophy, physics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and experimental psychology, all accompanied by citations to the original sources. This way, it will be easier for newcomers to the subject to see and understand in a few hours what for me has taken years.

Book talks & Discussions & Debates

It’s very important to me that the readers of this book understand that the ideas I’m espousing really are cogent on the level that any impartial observer should find them convincing. They represent the majority viewpoint in every academic discipline that has something to say about free will and moral responsibility. To that end, I will be making every effort I can to engage with both scholars and popular speakers on the subject so that these ideas can be critically examined in public forums.

This process has actually already started for me. For example, I was able to leverage some connections I had within the Catholic Church to have a lively debate/discussion on the subject with Priest-Scholar Juan Jose Sanguineti who has written 16 books and over 100 scholarly articles, many of which specifically deal with the subject of free will from both a philosophical and scientific standpoint.[17] We exchanged four long form essays expressing and challenging one another’s viewpoints and it is one of the highlights of my life to have been able to discuss such an important issue with such an eminent academic. I will ask his permission to make our discussion public after the book is published, but for those interested feel free to send me an email and I can share the full discussion privately.

On that note, please reach out to me at thorpep138@aol.com if you’re interested in debating/discussing the subject or if you can put me in contact with someone who is. I look forward to making these discussions as public and available as possible so we can help get the world on the same page about such an important matter.

How this subject changed my life

The topic of free will and moral responsibility is very near and dear to my heart. For the vast majority of my life, I took the existence of free will for granted, without any serious reflection on what it was, other than the power to make both rational and moral choices, and the corresponding responsibility to choose right from wrong when coming to decision points, a kind of power and responsibility that was unique to the human race, and that undergirded human moral dignity and duties. For me, it also undergirded a deep religious faith as a young adult, and, as many of you know, I even spent a year discerning whether or not I had a call to the priesthood after many nights and weekends spent with monks and friars in various seminaries and monasteries in the east coast of America.

When I became convinced after years of study that free will and moral responsibility didn’t exist, the character changes I experienced were positive, and not malicious or hedonistic as I had anticipated. I became:

  • More forgiving and accepting of my own human faults and failings. I understand that what has happened is no other than what had to happen, and I keep with me the lessons from my failures and mistakes that have molded me into the stronger, wiser person I am today rather than yesterday.
  • More forgiving and accepting of differences in others. Other people, with all their shortcomings and defects, are no other than the way nature and their environment has crafted them up until the present time. Letting go of the instinctive hatred and animus toward my fellow man was so much easier as I understood the underpinnings of human behavior more deeply. In turn, I began to feel more positive in my interactions with other people, and was spurred to understand human psychology and social interaction more deeply so that I could cultivate the habit of enhancing the beautiful qualities in others and minimizing the effects of their faults.
  • More compelled to be productive with the time I’ve been given. I feel now that outside of some kind of radical innovation coming from transhumanism, I am destined to die and cease to exist for all eternity in a relatively short period of time. This has spurred me to live life to the fullest and to accomplish as quickly and efficiently as possible all of my major life goals.
  • More hopeful. The truth about human nature and the implausibility of the promise of a religious afterlife paradoxically creates a hopeful path for everlasting life. There are two options on the table: either there is a supernatural realm where our consciousness can survive or there isn’t. If there is, then that will take care of itself. If there isn’t, then that means that the phenomena we see around us, including human consciousness, are the byproducts of the natural world and we can therefore harness and modify the natural world to produce the effects we want to see. I am hopeful that technology can and will be used for radical life extension, so writing this book is part of my (admittedly very small) contribution to the ultimate goal of building the heavenly paradise on Earth for all of humanity. In a separate post, I’ll write in detail about all the evidence showing that transhumanism plausibly can bring about radical life extension and what we can all do to contribute to building the metaphorical kingdom of God on Earth.

Bibliography

[1] Caruso, G. (2018) Skepticism about moral responsibility – Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-moral-responsibility/ (Accessed: April 5, 2023).
[2] (2018) Attitudes toward spirituality and religion, Pew Research Center. Pew Research Center. Available at: https://www.pewforum.org/2018/05/29/attitudes-toward-spirituality-and-religion/ (Accessed: April 5, 2023).
[3] Bloom, P. (2004) Natural-born dualists, Edge. Edge. Available at: https://www.edge.org/conversation/paul_bloom-natural-born-dualists (Accessed: April 5, 2023).
[4] SARKISSIAN, H.A.G.O.P. et al. (2010) “Is belief in free will a cultural universal?,” Mind & Language, 25(3), pp. 346–358. Available at: https://people.duke.edu/~fd13/2010/Sarkissian_et_al_2010_MindLang.pdf
[5] “a species…will always be equipped with a somewhat idiosyncratic way of gathering and partitioning information about its world; it will have its way of ‘conceiving’ the world so it can act effectively in it. Extending somewhat a concept of Sellars’, we may call this ‘conceptual scheme’ of a species its manifest image”
Dennett, D.C. (2015) Elbow room: The varieties of free will worth wanting. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. pp. 121 https://www.amazon.com/Elbow-Room-new-Varieties-Wanting-ebook-dp-B08BT9CXHJ/dp/B08BT9CXHJ
[6] Bloom, P. (2004) Natural-born dualists, Edge. Edge. Available at: https://www.edge.org/conversation/paul_bloom-natural-born-dualists (Accessed: April 5, 2023).
[7] Dennett, D.C. (2015) Elbow room: The varieties of free will worth wanting. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
https://www.amazon.com/Elbow-Room-new-Varieties-Wanting-ebook-dp-B08BT9CXHJ/dp/B08BT9CXHJ
[8] Bloom, P. (2012) Free will does not exist. So what?, The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Available at: https://www.chronicle.com/article/free-will-does-not-exist-so-what/ (Accessed: April 5, 2023).
[9] Stoljar, D. (2010) Physicalism. London: Routledge. https://www.amazon.com/Physicalism-Problems-Philosophy-Daniel-Stoljar-ebook-dp-B003FC9QKU/dp/B003FC9QKU
[10] Hawking, S. and Mlodinow, L. (2010) The Grand Design. New York, NY: Bantam. https://www.amazon.com/Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking-ebook/dp/B003TXSF5C
[11] Bloom, P. (2012) Free will does not exist. So what?, The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Available at: https://www.chronicle.com/article/free-will-does-not-exist-so-what/ (Accessed: April 5, 2023).
[12] Dennett, D.C. (2015) Elbow room: The varieties of free will worth wanting. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
https://www.amazon.com/Elbow-Room-new-Varieties-Wanting-ebook-dp-B08BT9CXHJ/dp/B08BT9CXHJ
[13] Coyne, J. (2018) Free will and incompatibilism, YouTube. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiZAlG-BhwA&t=183s (Accessed: April 5, 2023).
[14] Viereck, G.S. (1929) What Life Means to Einstein – the Saturday evening post, The Saturday Evening Post. The Saturday Evening Post. Available at: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/wp-content/uploads/satevepost/what_life_means_to_einstein.pdf (Accessed: April 6, 2023).
[15] Hawking, S. and Mlodinow, L. (2010) The Grand Design. New York, NY: Bantam. https://www.amazon.com/Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking-ebook/dp/B003TXSF5C
[16] Leaving aside the eventual heat death of the universe
[17] (2015) Sanguineti, Juan José, Diccionario Interdisciplinar Austral . Instituto de Filosofía Universidad Austral. Available at: http://dia.austral.edu.ar/Autor:Sanguineti,_Juan_Jos%C3%A9 (Accessed: April 5, 2023).

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