Do we freely decide? Or are we playing out a script, completing a predetermined path?

My first confrontation with the concept of free will was in the context of fundamentalist Christianity.  It was then called “Free Will or Predestination”, the latter being a main doctrine of Calvinism, or Scottish Presbyterianism.  The question was whether or not God had determined the course of human history for each of us from the beginning, or whether we had some level of control over our actions.  It seemed like a slam-dunk to me, a strong-willed kid who never cared to be told what to do. In fact, the discussions I overheard in family and church circles were probably the first brick in my eventual wall between acceptance and rejection of an omniscient, omnipotent, all-caring God. Not much later, after suggesting that man could not reach the moon, since Satan had dominion over Earth and man would be beyond his reach there, thus giving man freedom from evil, I was greeted with silence and averted glances.  Perhaps I had gone too far, perhaps beliefs and reality were not necessarily related, even in the minds of believers, so another brick was set in place.

But free will is less a religious issue than a philosophical one.  Are we controlled by our own decisions or by external forces beyond our personal control?  That seems to me to be a meaningless question, a question arising from the notion of dualism of “Body and Soul” (notwithstanding the wonderful Coleman Hawkins rendition of that song) as posited by Plato and cemented in place by René Descartes in the 17^th century.  I strongly suspect that the vast majority of people still adhere to that split – that we have a soul that is somehow related to the body but which is independent of it, leading to notions of eternal life, reincarnation, past lives.  Such belief makes it difficult to see how soul, or ‘mind’, can make the body perform, how a ‘decision’ can tell the body to move or otherwise function.

If soul and body are separate, a paradox does exist.  But they are not separate.  “Soul” as a separate “Mind” apart from the biological entity that is the “I” is a fallacy, like many beliefs established without evidence but based on pure thought, as with Plato and Descartes.  The former can be excused, the latter not so much: Descartes asserted “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum) which already suggests the union of the two.  The belief, the fixation, continues into the modern scientific realm. Some neuroscientists assert that, because the brain begins its activity in decision making milliseconds before the person is aware she has made the decision, free will must not be real.  But of course, since all brain activity is one’s own activity, we see simply that a delay exists between the decision point and awareness of that decision point.  The brain, the person, acts as a unit in decision-making.  Awareness, as one of the functions of the brain, observes, and thus must lag the initial decision itself.  No mystery here – just the normal functioning of an incredibly complex multi-function compartmentalized associative and wildly interconnected organ called the brain – the “I” – not body-soul, or even the Christian trinity-inspired body-soul-spirit model.  We are one – each of us.

But for lovers everywhere, “I’m all for you, body and soul!” still rings true.