The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [110]
There is a more fundamental idea of free will than the conscious feeling that it’s up to me which way I will decide. It’s the idea that we humans are autonomous agents who act on plans and projects that we give to ourselves, as opposed to having forced upon us by others. This notion of free will or freedom as autonomy—self-rule—has a long pedigree in European philosophy that runs back through Kant, the philosopher who could not see Darwin coming. It’s not going to take scientism any longer to dispose of this theory than the others. Since the brain can’t have thoughts about stuff, it cannot make, have, or act on plans, projects, or purposes that it gives itself. Nor, for that matter, can it act on plans that anyone else favors it with. There are no plans. That’s just more of the illusion Mother Nature exploited for our survival.
THE LAST FOUR CHAPTERS have given us a lot to think about. Perhaps too much to swallow? Conscious introspection is wrong about the very things it is supposed to know best. Our brain navigates us through life very nicely, thank you, without ever thinking about anything at all. The meanings we think are carried by our thoughts, our words, and our actions are just sand castles we build in the air. The same goes for the plans, designs, hopes, fears, and expectations by which we delude ourselves into thinking we organize our lives. The last step, denying the self and free will, that’s not even hard compared to the first three things scientism makes us take on board.
How could we have gotten things so wrong? Besides, if all this is true, why haven’t we heard about it from the neuroscientists? A lot of people will argue that since these conclusions are unthinkable by us, they have to be wrong. And there are others—mainly philosophers—who have worked hard for decades trying to show that science has a way of accommodating all the things the last four chapters have jettisoned.
Scientism needs to respond to these objections and questions, and the doubts they raise. First, think back to the arguments of the first six chapters of this book. Everything in the last four chapters was already ordained by the fact that physics fixes all the facts and excludes purpose or design from our world. If you are going to allow that real purposes and designs can somehow pop up out of nowhere in a world where physics had hitherto fixed all the facts, you might as well have put God into the universe at the outset.
In the second half of the twentieth century, three generations of the smartest philosophers who ever took science seriously tried to reconcile it with the idea that we have thoughts about stuff. Solving the problem was crucial to dealing with the deepest problems about logic, about language, even about ethics and values. It was a central part of the philosophical program of naturalism. Anyone who had succeeded would have secured the glory of Kant. No one came close, as even their most sympathetic colleagues were quick to tell them. When scientism says that the brain can’t have thoughts about stuff, it stands on the shoulders of these philosophical giants who tried to show otherwise and failed.
Second, these illusions about the mind were for a long time absolutely crucial to our species’ survival. Mother Nature had every incentive to really hardwire them into our brain, or come as close to it as possible. What would really be surprising is if the illusions were easy to dispel.
But dispelling the illusions about the mind is crucial to scientism and to science and technology. At the end of Chapter 4, we noted that the illusion of purpose was the second deepest illusion scientism needs to dispel. The deepest illusion is that thought is about stuff. We have seen that this