Why Popular Biologist Claim There Is No Free Will

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Transcript

Discussions of free will are legion, and human beings have been debating and discussing and philosophizing different notions of free will for thousands and thousands of years, possibly even longer, though of course it's hard to know what ancient tribal hunter-gatherers from the Paleolithic era were discussing in terms of consciousness and philosophy of consciousness.

But so far as we can tell, this has been an important idea in the human conceptual framework of life for a long time.

So what is free will?

Well, free will would be the ability to choose some kind of directionality, some kind of trajectory

that falls outside the scope of mechanical conditioning.

That is, that there are patterns set in place which control, constrict, and bind us as human beings, and free will is the ability to step out of that and to make a decision that is truly sovereign in a sense of speaking, that is chosen by whatever the individual essence

Actually Is.

And we have to recognize that there is a lot of mechanical conditioning on us as individuals.

There's the ancestral conditioning of billions of years that have given you this physical body that has these tendencies and these desires and these impulses which are simply a part of being alive.

There's familial conditioning.

patterns that you have absorbed from your family.

There's conditionings from religion, from society, from culture, from the people around you.

And all of these different factors come into play when we are discussing what free will is.

Because free will is acting inside of all of these patterns that are not really chosen by you and that you're acting them out on a consistent basis, day to day.

A large part of your life has been in one way or another crafted by these mechanical patterns regardless of whether or not you have free will.

And so one of the patterns that I have been noticing in this discussion of free will lately is a lot of biologists and people who are trained in classical biology who fancy themselves to be consciousness researchers claiming

that there is no free will.

And of course, this claim that there is no free will is not new.

It's been going on for a long time and people have arrived at this conclusion for any number of reasons and from any number of different disciplines.

So I'm not claiming that that's something unique, but it's the one that I have chosen to spoke to today, which is biological thinking in the modern 21st century and how it frames the human being as a collection of

Selfish genetics that are only interested in their own individual reproduction, that they emerged out of an evolutionary mechanism which is inherently random and meaningless, and that we are just, in a sense, flesh robots or machines that are run by this mechanical nature, not to mention all the other factors we just talked about earlier.

that add to this mechanical conditioning.

And thus, within this context, then it would make sense, right?

We're just programmed flesh machines being run by greedy genetics that are really just trying to carry out their impetuous and we're just along for the ride.

And civilization and conditioning and hormones and neurotransmitters and all of these things that biologists tend to focus on a lot

run the show.

We're just, again, hitched along for the ride.

And a lot of these notions are really just contemporary stories of the nature of the world.

I actually wrote an article recently on my Substack called War, Sex, and Broken Narratives About Our Ancestors where I look at some of the biological research that actually shows us that there is not a clear cut

definition of what it even means to be an individual on a genetic level and that in fact we might just be these massive colonies of many different forces conjoined together some of which are human and some of which are bacterial and some of which are viral and some of which are parasitic and that being able to define an individual genome on its own and herald that as the leader of life is really a shaky proposition in a lot of ways but

That's actually not what I want to get into now.

It's just something that comes up in this type of discussion to put a little bit of doubt in their idea of the world being so clean cut.

But let's step back and look at this from a whole different angle.

The real reason that a lot of these biologists claim that there is no such thing as free will is because free will is a function of

The soul.

That's right.

And within the modern, contemporary, western, scientific paradigm, there is no model for the soul.

There is no language for the soul.

There is no understanding of the soul.

In fact, many of them would say, or at least, let's take a lot of these biologists, and I know because I have been following this research, many of them would say that there is no such thing as a soul.

That the soul does not exist, that it's some fanciful illusion.

And looking at the wisdom teachings of indigenous and tribal and traditional cultures from all around the world, they would say that the idea that there is no such thing as a soul is the illusion.

That the soul is, in some senses, the most real aspect of what we are.

and one of the most important faculties to cultivate.

And if we're looking at ourselves purely as flesh machines, then of course there is no free will because the body is not what has free will.

It is the soul which animates the body that carries this free will.

This ability to tap into something that falls outside of mechanical condition and to choose a different trajectory.

Now the thing about soul is that soul is both something that is present and innate and that can be cultivated.

It is both and.

And not everyone has the same amount of capacity to be in touch with their soul or to transmit soul into the world.

This is something that we all instinctually know.

We have encountered individuals who have a lot of soul.

and we can sense that, we can feel it, we can see it, we can taste it, we can smell it, they wreak a soul.

There are some cultures that have more soul than others and there are cultures and individuals which are soulless.

A large part of modern civilization and consumerist ideology is in some senses soulless.

It's a soulless, hungry ghost that

simply can't be satiated.

It doesn't have soul.

It's not full of soul.

And so what that means is that some people, some cultures even, have more free will than others.

And that's a difficult idea for a lot of people and a lot of these biologists to deal with.

Because it's not something that can be quantified in the same way that they like to quantify things.

And it's also not this homogenized force that moves through nature on this even keel basis.

The soul is something that emerges in some people more so than others and that can be cultivated with certain practices much more than others.

And that certain experiences in life can actually give you more soul or at least more access

to transmit soul or more connection to soul.

Possibly it's all of those and maybe just one of them.

Who knows?

In some ways soul is also a mystery.

And this idea that our soul is what gives us free will makes us really question what is the soul and what is it connected to.

And immediately then you have to start asking questions about divinity and consciousness from a divine perspective and not just as a creation of body.

A lot of biologists these days claim that consciousness emerges from body.

Many of the questions are, how does your brain generate consciousness?

And they're always looking for some really discreet

There is no singular, rigid idea of a single spot in your brain or some mechanism in the brain or some process in the brain that they can identify and then say, this is what creates consciousness.

Well, what if it's flipped the way that many indigenous, tribal, and traditional cultures claim, which is that matter

Yes, you do have free will.

No, it is not the same as everyone else's.

Free will is not equivalent.

And yes, you can cultivate free will by cultivating the soul.

No, your free will does not act in a vacuum.

Just because you have free will doesn't mean that every single choice you make from day to day is based in free will.

In fact, a lot of it probably is not.

And yet, the more you cultivate your soul, the more capacity you get to choose

from that place of free will.

The question is then, what does that mean for you?

And how do you choose?

And what do you choose?

And why do you make those choices?

And that takes us more into something I like to talk about called wayfinding, which is beyond the scope of this particular podcast.

But this is something that I wanted to touch on, that there's a lot of biologists these days claiming that there's no such thing as free will.

A lot of people in the modern world tend to

for whatever reason defer to biologists like they have the whole truth on life and they're just people who hold a certain perspective just like me of course and I'm just sharing mine but mine is at least backed up by the perspective of

Many, many, many different cultures for a very long period of time who have sought answers to these questions in a way that was not biased by modern contemporary thinking.