Well, it’s Thursday, and that means I just got out of my Thursday morning breakfast meeting, and the topic of the presentation and discussion today was “free will”.

Diversion: Already a diversion. I just remembered the film, which I never saw, “Free Willy”. Do you think that was somehow a pun on the concept of free will? I must look deeper.

Diversion 2: Am I writing about free will this morning because I want to, or because I have no choice? Read on.

The gist of the presentation, which was excellent, is that scientists have concluded more and more that free will is an illusion and that we have no choice as to what we do, or what we think. That our thinking is always a physical process, governed by the neurons in our brains (and we have millions of them), and the challenge is to determine how those neurons direct us, not whether they direct us. To what extent our genetic history controls, and to what extent those neurons are governed by our experiences. And of course, to what extent can we (the societal we) control how the neurons of particular individuals work, whether by drugs, or therapies, or whatever.

And then comes the questions of good or bad. Does the knowledge that we are not making our own choices out of a floating free will make us more understanding of the behavior of others, or more impatient? How does it make us look at ourselves?

What does it mean to think that maybe we can change others’ (or our own) behaviors and behavior patterns by using drugs or other stimuli that change the way our brains work, and that we will get better at this as time goes on? What does it say about our criminal justice system? Should we be more tolerant of aberrant behavior, even when it adversely affects society? Should “punishment” not be for the sake of punishment, but for the sake of rehabilitation (which could be done by brain manipulation) or the sake of eliminating societal dangers, even if it means punishing someone who has no control over his/her activities and therefore isn’t really deserving of punishment?

If we give drugs (either recreational mind-altering drugs, or medicinal drugs) that have the effect of changing personalities to make the world (macro or micro) run more smoothly, are we tampering with something we would be better off letting alone, or are we showing progress in social engineering? Like everything else, we know that brains could be altered for the better, but also for the worse – and it depends on who is doing the altering.

And of course that brings us to Artificial Intelligence and to the question of consciousness. If we can influence thinking, are we creating a form of AI in the human brains we are altering? If we can create a machine that can “think”, are we creating a sort of consciousness in that machine?

It was pointed out that, even if one believes intellectually that free will does not exist, one can still believe emotionally that it does. Also, that it is possible that free will exists, but in a limited way. Most studies point to decision making being the result of biological or chemical necessities, not free choice. But proof, proof with a capital P, is hard to come by. And maybe the illusion of free will is a necessity – and also a result of biology and chemistry.

And then someone brought up the question of memory. If our neurons are to some extent controlled by our experiences (“I broke my foot jumping off a roof; I won’t jump off a roof again.”), how does memory fit in? What if I don’t remember something (maybe it happened to me when I was a baby; maybe I just have trouble remembering things), will the event itself still affect me, just unconsciously? So many questions.

As one of my Thursday cohorts pointed out, if I forget to do something, and my wife calls me out for it, it is not a satisfactory answer to say “It wasn’t me, it was my neurons that I can’t control.”

All of these questions (and there are so many) may be both extremely important and totally irrelevant. As our diagnostic science, our ability to alter our brains, and the complexity of the world all increase, how does this overall question of free will fit in?

Back to diversion: I did find an article on someone else’s blog from 2014 called “Free Will or Free Willy?” I read through it very quickly, and can’t say that I understand it, but it – from a religious (specifically Catholic) point of view – concludes that indeed God gave us free will, and advising us that we can use our free will for good if we choose, and that we should so choose. No science in that blog post, just religious belief. Should the writer be castigated for his lack of scientific reference? Or praised because he didn’t let science get in the way of his theoretical exercise of what may in fact be (in some form, under some definition) God-given free will?