I promised myself I wouldn’t write about free will again. But so many people sent me this link to a story in the New York Times that I feel compelled to share it, ironically:
I won’t add anything to the NY Times article. I just wanted to show you that science is mostly on my side. And for those who still believe in free will, it’s time to accept that it’s a fuzzy idea with zero evidence. I don’t think free will even qualifies as a hypothesis because it can’t be described in any logically coherent way. You end up with phrases like “emergent properties,” which is another way of saying you hope someday you can describe what free will is, but right now you can’t even define it, much less test for it.
The discussion of free will reminds me, in an indirect way, of the question about whether people are “designed” to be carnivores. I hear this argument a lot because I’m a vegetarian.
By “designed,” I don’t mean to imply a designer. That’s an entirely different discussion. In this case I’m only referring to the question of whether the human body, in its current form, is well suited to eating meat.
Meat-eaters point out that we have sharp teeth and we can digest meat just like typical carnivores. Therefore we are natural meat-eaters. The counter argument is that true carnivores – a lion for example – can eat huge quantities of meat without any bad health implications. When humans eat a lot of meat, our arteries clog, we have heart attacks, and we die. Every person is different, but on average, too much meat in a human diet is unhealthy. And “too much meat” happens pretty quickly. That’s not much of a design.
I could be wrong about free will not existing. And I could be wrong about our bodies being more suited for the vegetarian diet than for meat. But in either case, science would have to discover something new in order to make the argument. The known facts all point in the same direction. The “feelings” all point in the other.