User:John Faupel

The Free Will Myth and its Consequences

1. How free are we to make our own choices? The answer to this question seems obvious: the way we choose to live our lives seems determined by no one but ourselves. We have a sense of achievement when we make the right choices and failure when we make the wrong ones. The feeling that we are responsible for our own behaviour underwrites all our spiritual and temporal beliefs: 'good' behaviour should be rewarded’, 'bad' behaviour should be punished. Surely, therefore, we must be responsible for our choices? Yet, when we try to discover the real reasons why we choose one thing rather than another, the answer is far less obvious. Certainly some of our behaviour, such as yawning or sneezing or snoring, is largely beyond our control and we can’t help eating when we’re hungry or falling asleep when we’re tired. Habits too are difficult to break and while performing routine activities our thoughts are often on entirely different things. Moreover, it is not easy to identify reasons for our preferences for food, fashion or entertainment, nor can we fully explain why we sometimes feel bad tempered and sometimes happy. In fact, we don't seem to have much control over our mood swings at all, even when they seriously affect our judgement. The real motivation for much of our behaviour may go back a long way, perhaps as far as childhood or it might even be genetic.

2. Although our emotions may play a much greater part in our journey through life than we think, what about those actions that are carefully thought about in advance and intentionally performed? What is actually going on in our heads while making these sorts of conscious choices? All attempts at identifying some kind of ‘ghost in the machine’ [Ryle] that might be responsible for rational decisions of this kind have led nowhere. Nothing like a pilot at the controls has ever been found. The human brain contains more than 100 billion nerve cells (neurons), many of which communicate with one another by a network of fibres that send signals across any one of several thousand possible connections (synapses) and they are firing and altering in response to ever-changing sense data and memory all the time – even during sleep! But the brain is only a part of the overall nervous system; signals are continually being sent to and from all parts of the body. Moreover, it has been discovered that our emotions can independently affect the neurons of the brain with the body’s internal chemicals by means of neuropeptides and their receptors [Pert]. The body’s overall ‘field of intelligence’ seems to be the most complex thing in the known universe and is only now beginning to be seriously investigated, so it is hardly surprising we know so little about how we think and act.

3. Determinists believe all our thoughts are a direct consequence of their antecedents. In other words, from any set of circumstances, there can be one and only one possible outcome. If we knew enough about an individual’s genetic make-up, their acquired experiences and the situation they found themselves in at any particular point in time, they claim it would be possible, theoretically at least, to predict that person’s thoughts and how they would act at the next point in time. Until fairly recently, the belief in this kind of precise relationship between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ has been the basis for all scientific enquiry, not just for that of the human condition. And, it has to be admitted, seems to have helped us make a great deal of sense of the world. On the face of it then, a determinist model would appear to be a reasonable starting point for understand the workings of the human mind. But it contains a fundamental problem: if any thought is an inevitable consequence of its antecedents, those antecedents themselves must be an inevitable consequence of their antecedents and so on, ad infinitum. This kind of reasoning leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that all our present thoughts must have been pre-programmed from the beginning of time [Laplace] and can only conclude with a causa sui. If such a mechanistic view of the world were correct, determinism would leave no room for personal choice, so free will would seem to be a delusion.

4. How then has this approach been so successful in discovering laws from which predictions can be made about the way nature behaves? It certainly seems to have helped in understanding the inorganic, although less so for the organic and, in particular, for that of human thought and action. If predictive laws are not merely descriptive, they need to be expressed in precise quantitative language. Yet mathematics, which is the quantitative language of science, seems to have entered the mind of man thousands of years ago with the belief that all objects of similar character, such as people, animals, plants, or even stars in the sky, were the same as each other. Only by assuming objects of the same type or classification were identical could they be counted, which has led to the development of the basic functions of arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). By assuming the fingers and thumbs of one’s hands were all the same has probably led to the base-ten number system. In reality though, no two objects of the same class, whether apples or oranges or anything else in nature, are ever quite the same in character, let alone in space or time, so classification itself must be subjective. And, of course, it has been particularly subjective with respect to the classification of humans according to race, religion or gender for example [Hacking]. So all quantitative modelling contains the fictional assumption that ‘similarity’ equals ‘sameness’. Mathematics has developed from our relentless search for order in nature, even though the universe itself might have no ultimate order at all. It is, therefore, quite erroneous to assume it can tell us absolute truths about the world - it is an invention of our own minds [Stewart].

5. This may seem like nitpicking but when predictive laws are applied repeatedly over time, minute errors can magnify out of all proportion and become chaotic – forecasting the weather is an obvious example, and the planets will not follow predictable orbits forever. Moreover, these laws are most commonly expressed as relationships between two variables and apply only under controlled conditions, whereas the world outside the classroom or laboratory is a turbulent soup of many inextricably related variables. In fact, it has been shown that all mathematics has limits to its logical validity [Gödel]. Perhaps doomed also, as a result is the ideal of science – to devise a set of axioms from which all phenomena of the external world can be deduced [Boyer]. And at a sub-atomic level, the deterministic relationship between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ breaks down completely. Although laws of probability help to qualify the uncertainty of forecasting by replacing relationships between variables with relationships between probability distributions of variables, it is still a quantitative tool and therefore also fictional. Nature never rigidly obeys the algorithms we invent, even though they seem to be the only method we have for understanding it. No matter how sophisticated our modelling becomes, it still remains a construct of our own minds rather than of nature’s. The universe is not only queerer than we think; it is probably queerer than we can think [Haldane].

6. And a similar indeterminacy seems to be intrinsic to the evolution of life itself. After all, the amazing diversity of species that has evolved over countless generations from their humblest beginnings indicates that any ‘cause’ seems to have an indeterminate number of possible ‘effects’. All laws are therefore subject to errors of induction. In fact, the characteristics of plants and animals always deviate from their parental norms - usually only slightly - but in ways that can never be precisely predicted. Nature does not change over time in a deterministic way, it does so by chance variation about parental norms, so that those variations themselves become new norms from which, again, chance variation occurs in the next generation. And whether any of these variations survive the generations or not depends largely on their compatibility to the environment in which they find themselves - also by chance. For every species of flora and fauna that have survived in this way, there are probably a great many more that have become extinct by exactly the same process. Species that survive seem able to ‘learn’ somehow, although perhaps not consciously, by their mistakes or errors. So all the observable patterns in nature that appear - at least superficially - to presuppose conformity to prescribed laws have actually come about by countless events of ‘trial and error-elimination’.

7. But isn’t the way we think just an ongoing process of trial and error-elimination too [Popper]? In our attempt to make sense of the real world, we can do no other than make increasingly informed ‘guesses’ about it based on our limited experience. Then, when the errors that these ‘guesses’ inevitably contain are revealed, replace them by better ones. It seems, therefore, our brains have learnt to function in much the same way as evolution itself, even though the time frames involved are usually measured in milliseconds rather than in days, months or years? Those rare ‘eureka’ moments - times when one thinks, or sees things in quite a new way - are probably much akin to mutations in the natural world. In some experiments, with far-reaching implications [Libet et al], it was shown that people, whose neural networks were electronically measured, became aware only retrospectively that their brains were 'preparing to act' but, yet, before they actually did so. In other words, they were not aware of the intention until after it had been triggered in their brains. In practice, this allowed a very brief interval of time for the conscious mind to veto a subconscious intention if it so desired. If our behaviour can be controlled at all, it appears to be more by our conscious [Meehan] than by our subconscious thoughts. ‘Preparing to act’ is somewhat akin to a subconsciously intended ‘trial’ or ‘conjecture’ and if consciously vetoed or inhibited in some more conscious way, it is like an ‘error-elimination’ or ‘refutation’. This suggests we cannot intentionally initiate our emotions or ill-defined feelings or thoughts milling about by habit, imitation or association in our subconscious minds any more than we can initiate our dreams, even though we may appear to be ‘free’ to exercise some measure of retrospective control, by ‘approving’ or ‘disapproving’ of them if we give them conscious consideration. In other words, the emotions, feelings or ill-defined thoughts that are associated more with the primitive part of our brain (the limbic system) respond to stimuli before the ‘thinking’ part of the brain (the neocortex) can begin to process them [Le Doux].

8. Unfortunately though, this begs the deeper question: is this conscious ability to ‘approve’ or ‘disapprove’ of subconsciously evoked emotions, feelings or ill-defined thoughts really an exercise of free choice? The criteria by which they are either approved of or dismissed altogether, is presumably by reference to already acquired norms of behaviour based on past experiences but these norms themselves must have become established in the memory by the same process of ‘trial and error-elimination’. How else might the acquisition of habits be explained? Thus, the brain seems to continually learn by modifying future expectations in the light of past experiences [Schank]. However, this on-going loop-feedback process of attempted pattern-matching of present thoughts with past responses to them is far from rational. First of all, in an ever-changing world, present thoughts can never be quite the same as remembered ones, so any attempt at comparison will always be approximate or error-prone. Recalling the past is not like checking facts in a history book: it is more like ‘Chinese whispers’, whereby memories of past experiences change imperceptibly all the time, depending on one’s state of mind during recall and this process goes on all the time, even during dreaming [Rossi]. Then there are those memories that are less about objective facts than about the subjective feelings associated with the facts. All one might remember about some experiences are the emotions that the facts evoked, such as happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust or anger. Even sights, sounds, smells or tastes might evoke memories that are only tenuously associated with the original facts and any of these associations might remain in the memory even after the original facts are long forgotten or denied. Thus, we do not rationally ‘choose’ to process and respond to experiences in the ‘best’ possible way, even though we attempt to do so by continually comparing subconsciously evoked experiences with acquired norms and from these comparisons new or modified norms of habit or taste are gradually formed. To the evolutionist, this neurological process of ‘trial’ and attempted ‘error-elimination’ should seem rather familiar.

9. Such imprecise neurological processing must surely be indeterminate. In other words, becoming aware of a subconscious feeling or thought results in any one of many possible outcomes – none of which can be known in advance. The fact that every possible outcome is likely to be very similar may give rise to the erroneous impression that they are all one and the same and that the process is actually deterministic. After all, we are creatures of habit and generally respond to the same sorts of stimuli in more or less the same sorts of ways but we do not live in a static world, so no two situations are ever exactly the same and nor are our states of mind at the time, so our responses can never be identical either. Although indeterminacy may be a necessary prerequisite to free will; in itself, free will - which implies a value judgement based on conscious choice - is not an inevitable consequence of indeterminacy. So now to the most important question of all: do we actually possess free will or not? In a literal sense it implies ‘randomness’ but to survive in a world fraught with difficulties, no sane person could achieve such uninhibited freedom. But with respect to more rational human behaviour, an action is said to be the result of free will if (a) it is ‘personally performed’ i.e. that it is the result of some factors that the person has given due consideration to, (b) it is ‘intentionally performed’ i.e. that the person is conscious of the intended result and (c) it makes a ‘crucial difference’ to the outcome of the choice. Yet, irrespective of whether an action makes any crucial difference or not, if it is ‘personally performed’, it is by definition subjective and if it is ‘intentionally performed’’ it implies some objective knowledge of the emotions and embryonic antecedent feelings that define the parameters of that action in the first place.

10. As has been shown: consciously ‘approving’ or ‘vetoing’ emotions, feelings and thoughts, is a highly subjective process. If, in the case of moral decisions, we resist the temptation of putting ourselves first, our actions are judged ‘moral’; if we favour ourselves to the detriment of others, we are judged ‘immoral’. Exactly how it is possible to consciously make such decisions ‘personally’ and ‘intentionally’, if they are not just the error-prone outcome of heredity and accumulated experience, has never been adequately explained. Yet if, for the moment, we accepted that people were capable of making such choices in some fairly objective and rational way, it would justify rewarding or punishing them because they had been freely responsible for doing so. And herein, perhaps, lies the real clue as to why we seem so passionately committed to the belief that we possess free will: because we assume those penal codes by which people are rewarded or punished for their behaviour are valid, we also accept the free will choices upon which they depend are also valid, rather than asking first whether this basic premise has any foundation in reality or not. We assume without question that those who have done ‘wrong’, have done so because they deliberately and knowingly chose to do so and should accept the consequences. Conversely, those who have been ‘good’ deserve praise or reward in some way. Yet we do not seem to attribute free will and hence moral choice to the behaviour of any other species of plant or animal, so it must be a human construct that appears to justify the moral codes of conduct we attempt to live by. Perhaps we should ask how or why we ever began to assume we had a ‘free’ and independent ‘will’ to make moral choices of this kind in the first place.

11. This question is more of a socio-anthropological than neurological nature and to find the answer we need to go back in human history a long way - more than ten thousand years in fact - when such beliefs were probably entirely alien to human thought. Before that time all humans lived as hunter-gathers in small egalitarian band communities and, as far as we know, seem to have behaved according to tradition, rather than by adherence to any consciously constructed codes of morality. At least today’s rapidly disappearing hunter-gatherers across the world, whose social structures are believed to have changed little since those times [Smart], do not have any conception of law-like rules of conduct. Instead, their adopted codes of social interaction have been acquired by tradition and handed down through the generations by example alone. Their behaviour is regulated by, what have sometimes been called, ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ sanctions [Ratcliffe-Brown]. In other words, group members are either accepted, or in extreme cases rejected, according to their conformity to, or deviance from common practice [Drew]. Although this may be the precursor to penal justice, it is without reference to any prescribed law-like rules of conduct whereby ‘good’ behaviour is reward and ‘bad’ behaviour is punished. Because all the members of these band communities, generally comprising fewer than 100 kith and kin, depend upon one another for their survival, they evidently value their intimate social needs far more highly than their solitary needs. When group cohesion is threatened by deviant behaviour, attempts are made to restore the status quo by means of ‘empathy’, ‘sympathy’, ‘reciprocity’, ‘food sharing’, ‘reconciliation’, ‘consolation’, ‘conflict intervention’ and ‘mediation’ – means of social cohesion that are also evident in many of our non-human primates [Flack & de Waal].

12. It was the agrarian revolution, when settled farming led to great concentrations of population and the development of the first hierarchical urban societies that caused this personal inter-dependence to become a less effective means of social control. Even if rejected by kith and kin, ‘non-conformist’ behaviour would still have been capable of surviving within these larger communities and one of the earliest urban settlements was Jericho, which may have housed about 900 people in 9,600 BC. Over the next few thousand years, concentrations of population around the Nile Delta and in the alluvial regions between Asia Minor and the Indus Valley gradually grew into city-states [Fagan]. Unfortunately, the behaviour of the citizens of these urban settlements could not be organised and kept under control effectively by inherited tradition alone, so conformity needed to be established by prescribed rules of conduct. The traditional practices of band-communities no longer had much relevance to urban life and changes in the new ways of living had to be enforced by hierarchical authority. In fact, fragments of written legal texts that reveal the union of church and state for controlling people’s behaviour [Laurie] have been found going back nearly four thousand years, with the Hammurabi Code being one of the more complete surviving records of these newly prescribed rules of conduct for organizing such societies.

13. Authorised by the King of Babylon, the Hammurabi Code proclaimed that acting in ways that the authorities considered unacceptable, such as ‘stealing’, ‘adultery’, ‘incest’ etc., would result in punishments, such as having one’s ‘eye put out’ or ‘tongue’ or ‘hand cut off’, or being ‘put to death by burning or drowning’. Two hundred and forty-five of these rules have been deciphered, nearly all of which were written in the conditional form: ‘if one commits an unacceptable act ‘X’ then punishment ‘Y’ will follow’. As such, they assumed citizens had the freedom to choose ‘X’ or not to choose ‘X’ but, if they decided to choose ‘X’, then they should expect punishment ‘Y’ to follow as a consequence. These days, it is generally thought that people have free will only if they can choose between ‘alternative possibilities’ and that they ‘could have done otherwise’ [Kane]. On the face of it then, the Hammurabi Code seemed to have assumed citizens of the state had free will because it offered them ‘alternative possibilities’ and, even when they had made their choice, they could have done otherwise if they had wanted to. The text, nevertheless, went on to explain that many of these choices were caused by common human weaknesses such as ‘laziness’, ‘carelessness’, ‘ignorance’, ‘lying’ and ‘cheating’ – weaknesses that are still all too easily recognisable in most of us today. Although similar attempts to control behaviour, based on implied free will, had probably been developing for some time in many other towns and cities, the Hammurabi Code is among the first written evidence that human beings were assumed to possess the free will to consciously succumb or not to succumb to these common human weaknesses.

14. Many other legal codes, such as the Ten Commandments, the Koran, the Law of Karma and the Edicts of Ashoka, are all similar human constructs and dependent on this same premise. Yet, despite their ubiquitous adoption, the implied ‘free will’ upon which they were based never seems to have been explained - merely assumed to be beyond question. Statements in the Hammurabi Code, such as: ‘these are righteous laws’; they are ‘laws of justice’ or ‘there is no wisdom like unto mine … my words are well considered’ and just in case any citizens were still in doubt, ‘the great Gods have called me … king of the righteous’, are all typical a priori attempts to justify their validity on the grounds of authorised prescription, rather than on rational argument or commonly accepted agreement. Such explanations turn out to have no more substance than, say, a parent responding to a child who questions their orders, with: ‘because I say so!’ And the same attempt to control behaviour seems to have spread rapidly and been enforced with increasing dogma and inflexibility throughout the World. In fact, the penal laws of ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, Palestine, India and China, inflicted punishments for flouting authority as severe as any in human history. Even today, all known justice-systems are based on this same premise - namely that citizens have the free will to choose between obeying or disobeying the standards of behaviour imposed upon them by church or state. Administering pain for flouting authorised prescription, however, would seem to constrain the citizens’ freedom of choice since they were obliged to conform for no other reason than to avoid the risk of punishment [Durkheim & Mauss]. If ‘morality’ were a valid attribute of human behaviour it would have to be voluntary, not because of fear of retribution for immorality. For thousands of years voluntary free will has become the established blueprint for the way we perceive and try to control human behaviour - whether it is in the ‘education’ of our children or in the way we encourage conformist behaviour and restrain deviant behaviour. It has even pervaded folklore and myth: ‘justice’ is done only when ‘good’ triumphs over ‘evil’. In fact, the assumption that we somehow ‘choose’ between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, as defined by the spiritual and secular values of society, seems to assume we are ‘freely’, ‘willingly’ and ‘knowingly’ capable of doing so.

15. So, if the commonly held belief that we have ‘free will’ turns out to be a myth [Strawson, Skinner et al] and that we are not capable of deciding to do other than what we do do, how are our so called ‘moral’ or ‘immoral’ choices really made? The explanation is very simple: if we have acquired norms of behaviour that have conditioned us to be socially responsible, we are less likely to think of benefiting ourselves at the expense of others; if we have not acquired these norms, we are more likely to favour ourselves with little consideration for others. Even though it has been suggested [Baumeister] that we are ‘active participants in allowing ourselves to sometimes lose control’, we surely must do so because our thoughts and feelings are inescapably contained within the parameters of our accumulated experiences. Such experiences may include parental ones, along with other social interactions and encounters - even by our genetic capacity to process such sense data - none of which, in all fairness, we can justifiably be held responsible for. After all, we do not choose our parents and our friends or acquaintances are usually acquired by chance encounter or mutual appeal, rather than by rational or conscious choice. It is simply the cumulative influence of such sense data and the way our brains are able to process it that shapes our thinking, not some detached moral conscience to which credit or blame can be attributed. Those who are charged for crimes they cannot themselves explain, or are the result of a momentary impulse or an uncontrollable passions (not I, not I but the wind that blows through me) are probably nearer to the truth than any prosecution lawyer who has been employed to try and prove them guilty.

16. In fact, there is increasing evidence that environmental factors such as group conformity, obedience to authority, fashion and numerous forms of propaganda, unconsciously affect our behaviour all the time [Waller, Double]. Several important experiments have shown how people can be persuaded that their own sound judgements are misguided when they differ from the judgement of other group members [Asch]; also that people are prepared to inflict pain on others because they are told to do so by authority figures [Milgram]. And of course the power of persuasion is ubiquitously demonstrated by advertising, upon which corporations spend vast amounts of money in order that they might be profitably reimbursed from the increased sales revenue it often generates. In one extreme case, an envious seventeen-year-old shot dead another youth, whose fashionable trainers he had seen advertised on TV and said he simply had to have them. In fact, we unknowingly perform all sorts of mannerisms, gestures and rituals, whose origins we are quite unaware of. Some are culturally conditioned but others are thought to trace back to our ancient ancestors [Morris]. History, moreover, is plagued with political and military despots and megalomaniacs that have manipulated the innocent minds of the masses, who might otherwise have lived longer, happier and less turbulent lives.

17. Apart from environmental influences such as these, there are many physiological defects and imbalances in brain chemistry that affect the emotions, learning abilities, memory and even decision-making [Trusted]. It has been found, for example, than there is less than average grey matter in the prefrontal cortex of those who commit criminal acts - half our prison population has an average reading age of less than eleven years - also that the brains of psychopaths do not recognise facial expressions such as happiness or fear and cannot therefore respond to others with normal empathy. Hormonal or testosterone imbalances can result in serious mood-swings, violent behaviour or uncontrollable sexual urges. In one particular case, a respectable schoolteacher developed paedophiliac tendencies as a result of a brain tumour. His anti-social behaviour only returned to normal when the tumour was removed but, as the tumour grew again, the paedophilic urges came back until, yet again, the tumour was removed. Another case concerned a pleasant, mild mannered railroad worker who turned into an objectionable lout as a result of an injury to his pre-frontal lobe [Mcmillan]. And a court of law once accepted that a man’s shrunken brain was the principal reason for a serious embezzlement he had committed [Kulynych]. Moreover, imbalances in neurotransmitters such as serotonin, or mineral deficiencies such as lithium or zinc, whether of dietary or genetic origin, have been found to be common among criminals. Other studies have also shown how dietary imbalances of sugars, fats, salts and various additives in processed foods contribute to deviant or anti-social behaviour, especially in children.

18. No one wants to believe their feelings, thoughts and actions are only the consequence of their heredity and environment but whatever additionally it might be has remained singularly elusive. Those who believe they have the ‘will’ to make choices that are in some way beyond such environmental conditioning and brain chemistry must identify what else allows them to do so. If they believe it is their innate, single-minded nature that gives them the willpower to over-ride such prejudicial influences, even if only partially, they must ask themselves how are they capable of doing so? Or maybe they think they are able to control their emotional desires, such that they can act more in accordance with the moral codes of their society, in which case it would be an amazing coincidence if it were not their upbringing and training that had conditioned them so to do [Double]. In any event, every society’s spiritual and temporal codes of, so-called ‘moral’ behaviour have themselves been culturally or politically conditioned too and have frequently led to crimes being committed in the name of obedience to authority [Kelman]. Either way, the parameters of ‘the self’ cannot escape the boundaries of our genetic nature and the cumulative sum of our sense-data conditioning – the vast majority of which never even enters consciousness anyway [Bargh] and so cannot be knowingly accepted or rejected. It seems that consciousness can only observe thoughts and actions after they are born [Eccles]; it does not initiate them. If consciousness had any causal role to play, it would be irreducibly impossible to define it [Searle]. The ‘self’ is perhaps more like a referee that attempts to ensure play is conducted according to the rules of the game but does not take an active part itself - a referee, nevertheless, that has acquired the rules from heredity and experience. Any, conscious ‘control’ can only be exercised retrospectively by means of memory, whereby one’s conditioned response to present stimuli has been affected by the memory of one’s conditioned response to past stimuli.

19. If the notion of ‘free will’ is eventually seen to have no relevance whatever to human thought or action, then the foundations upon which the whole edifice of morality have been built must be re-appraised. All justice-systems should be seen as mere measures of conformity or deviance from the accepted spiritual or temporal norms of a society – norms that have, themselves, evolved by trial and error-elimination over the millennia for no other reason than to maintain order and obedience to authority on the grounds of practical and political expediency. So, to attempt to control behaviour by punishing deviance from authorised prescription can never be justified on moral grounds because morality, by circular argument, needs to be re-defined as mere conformity to such prescription. Since the birth of the city-state, penal justice may indeed have helped to promote order within society but at what cost? Any benefits must be offset against its more sinister derivatives: namely guilt, bigotry, hatred and revenge, not just within societies but between them too. Cross-cultural differences in morality have been the cause of unimaginable violence and misery throughout recorded history. Of course any deviant behaviour that causes suffering needs to be addressed but punishment cannot the solution since it is based on the spurious assumption that the perpetrators have the free will to do otherwise. The only alternative to punitive justice would seem to be a multilateral shift towards ‘restorative justice’. This aims at encouraging the victim, the offender and the community to search for solutions, which promote repair, reconciliation and reassurance [Zehr]. Ironically though, just such a procedure unconsciously evolved to become the common practice for maintaining social stability among hunter-gatherers long before the cancerous seeds of punitive justice had begun to infect human consciousness [Ross]. In fact, ‘restorative justice’ itself is miss-named because it does not imply any form of ‘justice’ at all. Rather, it is a non-judgemental social procedure for attempting to maintain commonly accepted standards of behaviour and, in the light of disagreements, for finding new mutually acceptable solutions to them.

20. It has been suggested that the above logically possible position - determinism is false but moral responsibility still fails to exist - has no advocates [Weatherford]. If this is so, it is perhaps because the conscious part of the brain has conditioned us, maybe irreversibly, to believe in our own social constructs, even though we are undoubtedly driven more by our emotions or homoeostasis [Damasio]. Compliance with the plethora of rules, regulations and laws of conduct that post-Palaeolithic man has cumulatively constructed in order to control every aspect of modern life [OPSI] seems to have convinced us we can conquer natural evolution by conscious prescription. In attempting to do so however, we seem to have become increasingly alienated from our fundamental natures. Even if it were possible to agree upon a universal code of spiritual and temporal conduct that defined the ideal society and was free from cultural bias, it would still not follow that we were capable of conforming to it. The genesis of all human thought and action remains fundamentally indeterminate in nature, at least within the constraints of each individual’s cumulative experiences, along with all the neurological uncertainties involved in ‘approving’ or ‘vetoing’ their own thoughts and actions. Ever since the birth of the city-state we have become conditioned to believe we were capable of exercising free will in our choice of moral conduct and should be rewarded or punished accordingly, yet this method of control does not seem to have achieved better standards of social cooperation than any of the other species of flora and fauna. The evolutionary process of trial and error-elimination by which all nature has evolved applies equally to that of human thought and action, and hence to our own indeterminate destiny.

WJF (1.6.07) comments@free-will-myth.org.uk (FEEDBACK WELCOME)

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