(Image: Michael Glenwood)
Neuroscience says we don’t make our own decisions – but if we believed that, the world would be full of liars, cheats and losers
IT IS the year 2500. Physicists have long had a Grand Unified Theory of Everything and neuroscientists now know precisely how the hardware of the brain runs the software of the mind and dictates behaviour. Lately, reports have begun to emerge that computer engineers at the Institute for Advanced Behavioural Prediction have built a quantum supercomputer that draws on these advances to predict the future, including what people will do and when. Trusted sources say that IABP researchers have secretly run thousands of predictions about citizens’ behaviour – and they have never been wrong.
Suddenly, deep philosophical questions are making headlines as commentators sound the death knell for free will. On the face of it, the consequences of proving all our actions are predetermined look bleak. Psychological experiments have shown that undermining people’s sense of free will leads them to behave more dishonestly, more selfishly and more aggressively. But perhaps there is no need to panic. Some philosophers have found that our sense of free will is less threatened by determinism than the commentators suppose – so even faced with incontrovertible evidence that behaviour is predetermined, we still see ourselves as free and responsible for our own actions. Nothing will change.
Who is correct? Will the public buy this reassuring message? Or will the manifest truth of determinism kill off belief in free will, taking down notions of moral culpability and punishment with it? Will nihilism, moral disintegration and anarchy…
