There is no free will!
Let’s analyze free will from the point of view of neurobiology. Does it really exist?
Difficulty: 🧠 🧠 .
Links to the sources used for the article will be at the end!
What is will?
The will is your ability to make a choice based on thought processes.
When I say that there is no free will, I mean that it is possible to predict what you will do or influence your choice so that you do not even understand it.
And interestingly, we can prove both options.
For the first, we will need reductionism, for the second, just statistical information from social research.
Reductionism
Reductionism is the principle of representing something complex from its components, simpler, having simpler, obvious and understandable properties, which makes it possible to analyze the entire system as a whole more simply.
It seems that this principle should work without exceptions in the study of any complex system, but unfortunately this is not the case, sometimes it is better to choose another method of study.
When considering something complex under the prism of reductionism, we should not forget that we can lay it out as we want, as deeply as the world allows us.
The human mind is very complex, it consists of ~80–100 billion neurons and ~2 quadrillion synapses, ~20–40 thousand genes, ~23 pairs of chromosomes, where each component of the system is responsible for its personalized task.
If we know exactly what is happening in a person’s mind, how which components behave, it will be possible to put forward their subsequent actions not at the level of a person’s decision, but at the level of the consciousness system, which is even more interesting than just predicting the yes/no answer.
Now we could not decompose a person’s mind into all these components, and it is still an impossible task to monitor them in the “live broadcast”.
This method could work, but we are not developed enough for this. Therefore, the proof of the absence of free will is only theoretical. On the other hand, in this way we simply show an analysis of human actions, can this be called an interception of free will?
Social research
Your choice is based not only on the information that you know about the question and the time provided for its answer. This includes emotions, smells and all other factors caused by your mind.
For example, according to one of the studies, the judge’s decision on the early release of a criminal depends on the last time he (the judge) ate. This is just nonsense, a person’s life is decided by some kind of snack.
Your emotions and choices can be influenced by smell, this has been found in the course of numerous other studies, and this is also nonsense. Again, a person’s life (without context) can be decided simply on what kind of smell a person feels, not on the time that is given to choose both information and a question, more precisely from them, but only as part of the solution.
On the one hand, we realized that from the point of view of reductionism, this is how it should be, because the mind consists of a large number of components and you yourself do not understand what is happening in your head during each action. On the other hand, it is socially dangerous and unacceptable to influence the “free will” of some person, but we can still abuse it.
Still, is there free will or not?
If we look at this from the point of view that we can say with perfect accuracy the subsequent actions of a person and influence them and this is the control of his will, then there is no freedom of will as such.
But if we consider the very fact that a person can form an opinion, despite the fact that knowing how it is formed, we can influence and predict it and consider it simply the adaptability of his consciousness, then you might think that there is free will.
Conclusions
You can assume that there is free will, that it does not exist. Both options are correct, they have confirmation, or rather the point of view from which they are considered. Now it is impossible to put forward any option forward, but when we can perfectly predict the subsequent actions of a person at the atomic level, I think it is worth giving the dominance of the point of view where there is no free will.
Sources (13)
will (neuroscience), will (neuroscience) (2), reductionism, genome, components of the mind, dna, chromosomes, the difference between dna and chromosomes, not working reductionism, the fate of the defendant depends on the judge’s snack, the importance of smell, nonsense, the importance of smell (research).
