Q&A: On Abiogenesis and Free Will
On Abiogenesis and Free Will
Question
Hello, in a long discussion with a friend who argued against free will and in favor of determinism, we came to the conclusion that the disagreement between us is about abiogenesis, and I wanted to ask about that, but first I’ll explain:
He argued that if he had complete instantaneous information about all the atoms and the bonds between them, along with their physical and chemical properties in the world, he could know with absolute precision what would happen in the next moment, and the one after that, and so on. Basically, we’re all a kind of very complex robots, but with enough physical-chemical knowledge and calculations it would be possible to know with certainty what we will think and how we will act at any given moment. If so, then there really is no free will, only the laws of nature and complex mechanisms operating within them.
I argued that this is indeed true, but that there are influences this way and that from the “soul.” That is, there is a spiritual realm that science neither sees nor deals with, and it affects thoughts and actions, and that is how free will actually exists.
(On second thought, it seems I’m using some baseless assumption, namely that there is a soul—I’m not defining what that means—and the truth is that I’d probably get tangled up trying to explain how it intervenes in or affects the laws of nature…)
In the end we came to the conclusion that it would be possible to isolate the soul from the body in a theoretical experiment in which we fully copy all the particles of a certain person’s body to another place, and thus—if he lives and functions, we’ll see that there is no soul, only an illusion of consciousness; and otherwise, it will be a lifeless corpse.
I wanted to ask in general what your opinion is about this. It doesn’t have to be at length (I have a feeling you’ll say that we’re both wrong). If you’d prefer to refer me to chapters in your books, that would also be good. Do you address this specific question in your book on free will? It may be that this is the whole book; I still haven’t had time to read it.
Answer
That is indeed the whole book. There is an article summarizing it here on the site: https://mikyab.net/%d7%9e%d7%90%d7%9e%d7%a8%d7%99%d7%9d/%d7%9e%d7%91%d7%98-%d7%a9%d7%99%d7%98%d7%aa%d7%99-%d7%a2%d7%9c-%d7%97%d7%95%d7%a4%d7%a9-%d7%94%d7%a8%d7%a6%d7%95%d7%9f/
In short, if you do not accept determinism, then you must necessarily assume that the laws of nature are broken at the point where a process begins whose source is our will. There is an electron that moves without any physical force acting on it. You are not getting tangled up in anything; you are simply claiming that. The claim that there is no such electron assumes that the laws of nature govern all of reality and that there is no soul or spirit, and that is a baseless assumption. Moreover, you can see there that determinism and randomness are two unsupported theses about which we have no observational information. By contrast, free will is the thing about which we have the most intimate experience. One can always say that this experience is an illusion; but one can likewise say that about determinism and about science itself, which are also based on our a priori assumptions.
The experiment you thought of will not help you. It may be that when a body has a certain structure, a soul enters it. That is, after all, what also happens in the biological world.
And all this, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with abiogenesis. I did not understand how that got dragged in here.
See also columns 645-6.