By GABRIEL DANTAS ROMANO*

Consciousness and free will are natural phenomena that the current stage of science cannot explain, but that does not mean they should be excluded from our framework of understanding reality as non-existent.

The book Determined: The Science of Life Without Free Will, by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, was recently released in Brazil. The publication joins the ranks of philosophers and scientists who disbelieve in the existence of free will, such as Galen Strawson and Skinner.

The publicity of ideas does not always depend on their veracity, but often on the ability of a group of people to tilt the balance of public opinion in their favor, building an attractive image and/or creating an environment conducive to their acceptance. The Multiverse and some variations of the Gaia Hypothesis, for example, are not consolidated scientific attestations, yet they were ideals that enjoyed a certain popularity as if they were.¹ In the case of free will, the peremptory statements of some prominent scientists may hide an intense history of debate behind their theses. Mr. Sapolsky himself invests his ideas with a noble purpose: to free human beings from the heavy burden of guilt. This intention can be seen as marketing or scientific benevolence.

The modern denial of free will began as a corollary of Newtonian mechanics. It was from Newton onwards that we were able to calculate the movement of celestial bodies, determined by a set of variables (forces) acting upon them. If, by knowing all the forces acting upon an object, we can predict its movement, objects and the universe are determined by a set of previous events. Human beings, as part of nature and a deterministic universe, are equally so — it would remain to know all the moods of nature that act upon us in order to predict our attitudes.

Kant's philosophical endeavor, in part, arose to solve this question. How can human freedom exist in a mechanical world, with movement determined by objective laws of physics, if human nature is subject to these laws? At the time, philosophers really wondered how humans as undetermined agents could exist within this framework. Kant got around the problem: the external sensory world, dominated by the laws of physics, appears to us according to our sensibility; however, independent of our experience, there is a world of things as they are in themselves. The noumenal world is the world as we perceive it, while the phenomenal world is the world of reality as it is in itself. Human freedom and practical reason, as objects in themselves, are not part of the deterministic framework because they cannot be grasped.²

In other words, the world of physical laws as we see it cannot say anything about us and our freedom. Thus, the philosophical debate about the possibility of free human will has gone on for centuries and today, despite scientific advances, is not at a very different stage than before.³

First, as in any scientific work, one must conceptualize what is meant by “free will.” The meanings are varied. However, when radical determinists say that there is no free will, they are saying that there is no form of free will, no scope for freedom to make decisions. According to them, we are not the authors of our own choices and should not be held morally responsible for them.

This is what the Basic Argument says. Galen Strawson, in his article called The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility, a position that is repeated among all determinists: “There is an argument, which I will call the Basic Argument, that seems to prove that we cannot be truly or ultimately morally responsible for our actions. According to the Basic Argument, it makes no difference whether determinism is true or false. We cannot be truly or ultimately morally responsible for our actions in either case.

The Basic Argument has several expressions in the free will literature, and its central idea can be quickly conveyed. (1) Nothing can be cause about – nothing can be the cause of itself. (2) To be truly morally responsible for one's actions, one would have to be cause about, at least in certain crucial mental respects. (3) Therefore, nothing can be truly morally responsible.”

On the same line, Robert Sapolsky he even stated that “we are the sum of what we cannot control”, that is, “we are nothing more or less than the sum of biology and the environment”. However, understanding behavior as the objective and determined result of a sum of factors (environmental, social and biological) does not make sense, since external factors do not act on an empty chamber that is merely responsive, like an automaton, but on the inner sensitivity of an organ with a cognitive nature. Human biology itself, which Sapolsky includes in the calculation, provides us with the ability to make decisions, develop reasoning, direct our own thoughts and experience reality through feelings. Within cognitive science, these human capabilities are a reality. Our thoughts are not necessarily rational all the time or most of the time. However, in any case, the very possibility of developing rational thoughts opens up room for a certain scope of freedom and conscious decision-making.

Radical determinists get around this by saying, like Galen Strawson, that even rational thoughts and conscious decisions are determined, because they are caused by and exist within a sequence of previous events. Thus, another wave of philosophers, since David Hume, have gotten around the imbroglio by means of compatibilism, stating that there is no conflict between determinism and free will.

This brings us to the other issue. The opinions of scientists from major universities, expressed in books, are not necessarily solid scientific statements, but rather theoretical speculations that still reside in a realm beyond verification. Telling this to the general public is a big deal, because many ideas are sold as the true scientific position and not as a scientific position within a broad debate that has not yet found reasonable consensus.⁴

For a great scientist who defends a certain thesis in gray areas and without consensus, there is another great renowned scientist who defends another. Chomsky, a linguist and cognitive scientist, for example, unlike Sapolsky, defends the existence of free will, as do countless other intellectuals. In the field of philosophy, if there were determinist philosophers like Spinoza, other names like Descartes, Kant and Hegel defended freedom as a possibility.⁵

Discussions about free will date back to millennia-old philosophical debates and are currently within the scope of the philosophy of mind. In fact, science has not yet reached the stage of being able to explain how consciousness exists – that is, how matter (the brain) can generate consciousness. What chemical elements make up the mind and consciousness? We do not know, much less do we have the technical or intellectual property to say. We see that there is no consensus or even a reasonable understanding on the subject. So, how can we say something definitively about phenomena related to the mind, such as free will?⁶

Unfortunately, public or scientific debates are not always conducted with care. The Dunning-Kruger effect explains that individuals with half-truths/information can feel that they have an understanding of the whole. Not that this is the case with Sapolsky, he even presents good reasons to think that we are determined. But, in fact, there are fields in science that border more on uncertainty…

With quantum physics, for example, what we understood about the behavior and nature of matter became insufficient, which led science to seek new explanatory models of reality (see the writings of Werner Heisenberg).⁷ In a similar vein, Nobel Prize-winning mathematician Roger Penrose went so far as to say that elements of our reality do not function according to any current physical theory.

In a way, we return to the noumenal and the phenomenal. It is no wonder that, agreeing with Kant, Heisenberg goes so far as to state that “it remains for us to add that the science of nature does not deal with nature itself, but in fact with the science of nature, as man considers and describes it.”⁸

What I mean by this is that consciousness and free will (whether free or influenced) are natural phenomena that the current stage of science cannot explain, but that does not mean that they should be excluded from our framework of understanding reality as non-existent. According to Noam Chomsky, “it would be absurd to doubt something which we intimately understand and experience within ourselves, merely because it is by its nature incomprehensible to us. Concepts of determination and randomness are within our intellectual understanding. But it may be that human decisions cannot be accommodated in these terms, including the creative aspect of language and thought.”

It is at least curious that the establishment confer human attributes to artificial intelligence — such as consciousness, the ability to understand and make decisions — while subtracting these aspects of human nature, since we are seen as automatons determined by the sum of external and internal forces. In the new framework of understanding that they are painting of reality, the machine becomes a person and we become a machine.⁹

*Gabriel Dantas Romano is a history major at the University of São Paulo (USP).

Notes

1. On the Gaia Hypothesis and its holistic variants, see the book The Anthropocene and Earth Science by Jose Eli da Veiga.
2. View Critique of Pure Reason e Critique of Practical Reason by Immanuel Kant.
3. On philosophy of mind and science, see What kind of creatures are we?, by Noam Chomsky.
4. For example, biologist Richard Dawkins' popular work on selfish genes was classified as pseudoscientific by the Argentine physicist Mario Bunge. In the human sciences, Francis Fukuyama, a renowned political scientist from Harvard, even published a book defending the thesis that history had reached its end. We conclude that the reputation of those who say it is not science.
5. In Hegel's case, he defends at least some form of free will in the preface to the book Philosophy of law.
6. Again, Chomsky reflects on the subject in a very erudite way in the book What kind of creatures are we?. Furthermore, I recommend Freedom and Neurobiology by John Searle, as well as his other writings.
7. To be more specific: Problems of Modern Physics e Physics and Philosophy. Certainly, these are works that demonstrate admirable erudition.
8. Problems of Modern Physics, Ed. Perspectiva, p. 19-20.
9. See John Searle's Chinese Room Argument.

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