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Originally Posted by Within Silence
The Argument Against Free Will from Sufficient Reason
1) Take some arbitrary event, E.
2) If E had no cause sufficient to bring it about, then it wouldn’t have happened.
3) But E did happen.
4) Therefore, E had a cause sufficient to bring it about.
5) Since E is arbitrary, we may safely conclude that all events have causes sufficient to bring them about.
6) It follows that all of our actions are caused by prior events.
7) It also follows that the prior events leading to our actions were caused by other prior events, and so on…
8) Therefore, everything we do is the result of causal chains extending backward in time long before we were born.
9) Therefore, everything we do is caused by forces over which we have no control
10) If our actions are caused by forces over which we have no control, we do not act freely.
11) Therefore, we never act freely.
Free Will and Neurology
The experiments of Jose Delgado:
Showed that you can cause movements of the body by stimulating specific parts of the brain. For example, a monkey could be caused blink, move its arms, or even to get up and walk around.
· It works on humans, too.
· The subject experiences the movements as though they were voluntary actions. Human subjects will even come up with reasons why they were doing it, despite the fact that the action was caused by an outside electrical stimulation of the brain.
In one subject, electrical stimulation of the brain produced “head turning and slow displacement of the body to either side with a well-oriented and apparently normal sequence, as if the patient were looking for something.” This was repeated six times over two days, confirming that the stimulation was actually producing the behavior. But the subject, who did not know about the electrical stimulation, considered the activity spontaneous and offered reasons for it. When asked “What are you doing?” he would reply “I am looking for my slippers,” “I heard a noise,” “I am restless,” or “I was looking under the bed.” (PP, p. 104)
The experiments of H. H. Kornhuber:
· Confirm that the characteristic brain activity responsible for bodily movements begins up to one-and-a-half seconds before the person is consciously aware of having made any decision to move. A technician watching an electoencephalograph can know that you are going to move your finger before you do.
What the experiments suggest is that free will is just an illusion borne of ignorance. We believe that we are in control of our actions because we are not aware of their true causes.
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