Originally shared by Thomas Paris
Wow! That was totally unexpected. By me, at least.
See, I’ve had this problem for a long time, where I can’t reconcile two ideas dear to me: on the one hand, I’m convinced we’re gifted with free will. But on the other hand I stand firmly in the reductionist camp, when it comes to our mind and by that I mean there’s nothing more to our mind, intelligence, self-awareness, … call it whatever you want, nothing more than what we can see in our brain: synapses and neurons. Well, you could argue there’s more to it than that, if only because there’s the rest of the body and we’ve learned fairly recently that our gut was almost a second brain. But anyway, let’s just keep it simple: it would be theoretically possible to predict what someone will do just looking at what’s happening to their neurons and synapses. Not possible in practice because that system is too complex but not because there’s more to it than those molecules. But that would seem to imply free will doesn’t exist and our behaviour’s encoded in our cells. As I said: impossible to reconcile. Or so it seemed to me until I saw this video, which has given me a simple (but not simplistic!) theory that could do it. Is this what’s really going on? I don’t know. And we may never know. But at least now I have a good reason to believe free will and reductionism may not be incompatible after all. Phew! Now I feel much better.