Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia; Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.
Are We Free to Choose?
Post 46.07/12/2018 continued . . .
Rational Moral Progress Free Will versus Free Won’t
In theory, with a numbered list of thus-saith-the-Lord laws, religions don't have to rely on fallible human reason to deter-mine guilt or innocence. But, in practice, they have always turned to arcane biblical exegesis and religious commitees to divine God's will in difficult cases. Yet a more scientific principle of justice has emerged, based on the idealized concept of Natural Rights2. In a real state of nature though, there is a simple hierarchy of rights based on power : big fish eat little fish. Only humans create abstract rules of ethics to establish who does what to whom. In that artificial construct of Natural Law, moral relevance is in Agency and Inter-agency. For example, animals can't enter into social contracts with humans. Yet a dog integrated into human culture won't normally eat a human, while a wolf in his natural state would do so without compunction.
Since the question of conscious choice is integral to the notion of morality, Shermer asks if we are indeed free to choose our actions. Some secularists claim that human behavior is pre-determined by an unbroken chain of cause & effect stretching back to the Big Bang. Nevertheless, no one actually believes that he is a mindless zombie driven by ancient urges. So, Shermer intoduces the concept of “Free Won't”3. In our contingent world, humans are never totally free to make unconstrained moral choices. Only an agent outside of our space-time world would be perfectly free. But a current theory of how the brain works is based on a business corporation. Normally, most decisions are made on lower levels, then relayed to a decider-in-chief at the top, who only exercises veto power to stop processes that are already in motion. This modified determinism model was made necessary by recent experiments indicating that conscious decisions are delayed reactions to subconscious motives. Those computer-like cause & effect processes present go/no-go options for the conscience4 to allow or deny. That's why human behavior is unpredictable, as compared to natural agents. For us, a fork in the causal path is an opportunity for creative, or moral, action.
Like Pinker, Shermer provides lots of charts based on empirical studies, to convert subtle signs of moral progress into graphical illustrations of upward trends over time. By his well-defined standards, most humans today are much better off, econom-ically, politically, & physically, than those before the Enlighten-ment era. Ironically, many secular and religious citizens of the orderly wealthy West, would be skeptical of those conclusions. Intuitively, they feel that morality has been on the decline during the modern age of science & technology. Which is exactly why Pinker and Shermer felt compelled to set the record straight, with hard evidence instead of gossipy news headlines or apoca-lyptic fiction. Both see humanity progressing in technology, and thriving in civil morality, on into the foreseeable future. Although I'm aware that small religious cults are striving against the current of secular progress to artificially trigger the Armageddon — that Jesus promised two thousand years ago, but apparently forgot to implement — I'm also cautiously optimistic.
4. Conscience : Literally, to know within. To be conscious of right & wrong. Similar to Freud’s Super-Ego. Your highest personal authority. The core of Character & Virtue. It’s not actually a separate mind within the brain, but a holistic function of all modules, motivated by lower levels, but guided primarily by the executive- level planning & decision-making forebrain.
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