It is fairly obvious to most people that reason is not the
only access to knowledge (although in my enthusiasm for science I personally
tend to forget this at times).
For
example, can reason tell you what the experience of love is like, or of exhilaration,
or of fear, or of faith or of despair or of disillusionment or of indignation
or of justice or of perception or of reasoning? At most it can hypothesise how these
come about or tinker with drugs and neural stimulation to modify them but the
actual existential experience of these is beyond the gambit of logical analysis
or experiment. (see also Reweaving the rainbow).
For this we can be grateful. If the natural world is all
there is, then decision making can be nothing but a product of the natural world
and nobody has free will, or, ultimately, any moral responsibility for any
action. The decisions of a serial killer can be attributed to the atoms and
force fields in his brain-body system, in his parents, in the people around
him, in the ancestors of these and in the natural world going right back to the
creation of the universe – or, if you believe in an eternal natural world, to
an infinite number of past events which have occurred an infinite number of
times and which will repeat themselves an infinite number of times in the future.
I have not knowingly met a person who claims he has no free
will. We know it is not an illusion. It is as basic as believing that we
exist. Anyone who considers himself or herself as devoid of moral
responsibility cannot function as a human being in a human society. In effect,
this means that nobody can really claim that the material world is all there
is.
John
Author, 2077 AD
