The Naturalistic Existence of Free Will, Soul, and Ego

In Tuesday's blog (8.26) I made a big deal of the concept of the actual existence
of an actual human soul, and of free will as something actually available to men.

“Free Will,” according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), refers to

"a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action
from among various alternatives [and] that the concept of free will is very
closely connected to the concept of moral responsibility."

As I shall show, this "moral responsibility" is at the heart of most schools of

naturalism--and there are many varieties, but almost all admit, "Brains and
buffaloes exist (for instance), but minds and moral values must not, because they
are invisible to the five senses and therefore invisible to scientific enquiry."
J. P. Moreland [italics added] http://www.boundless.org/features/a0000872.html

In quoting Moreland, I understand I am open to the naturalist's defense that I am

using religious claims to counter scientific claims. But the heart of this
metaphysical and epistemological portrayal by science of "man without mind or
moral responsibility" is what is wrong about naturalism, and what is right about
religion--for the wrong reasons.

It is because of the correct view of moral responsibility by religion, and of the

wrong view by science, that epistemological caveats were placed on the definition
of naturalism by which this Academy operates. [See sidebar]
[Mirriam-Webster Online defines caveat as "an explanation to prevent
misinterpretation; a modifying or cautionary detail to be considered when
evaluating, interpreting, or doing something." B.A.G.Fuller's definition, standing
alone, does not cover all the subjective, non-normative goals of an empirical
science that can scan a brain in real time and watch its parts "lighting up" while
the subject under scrutiny looks at pictures of porn or posies, listens to various
types of music, eats most-favorite and least-favorite foods, or in general has his
or her empirical sensory organs stimulated.]

The view of an active will that is free of coercion whether it is coercion by

other men or by nature, satisfies "the metaphysical requirement on being
responsible for one's action. [ ] But the significance of free will is not
exhausted by its connection to moral responsibility" (as we shall see,) continues
the SEP.

For the sake of the argument allow that "ego" is an agent of cause in the lives of
men. Naturalists will deny the ego exists, and people unfamiliar with the
complexities of naturalism will not know why the ego should be discounted at all,
since they believe all men believe it exists. The ego seems to be self-evident,
and we base our morals on restricting the ego as it attempts to become king of a
hill. Most naturalists do not agree it exists, that what appears "self-evident" is
fiction designed only to explain, before modern science "showed" otherwise, why we
acted in such and such a way.

So for the sake of the argment, "ego" is accepted by most men as the reason for
demanding and accepting recognition for one's accomplishments of time, effort, and
creativity; accepted as the reason for the recognition of individual sovereignty
and the dignity of persons to remain free of human coercion; and accepted as the
reason for values we place on other people, places, things, attributes and
actions.

But naturalists don't accept free will, the soul, or the ego as real objects, not
even as objects that reflect the reality of the mind, because they don't accept
"mind" as anything but a fiction designed to explain a phenomenon.

The moral argument for them is exactly "[a]s you'd expect in a culture wedded to
mind-body dualism but inhabiting an age of science..."
http://www.naturalism.org/choice.htm

That partial sentence says it all, if you know what is at stake. The mind-body
dualism leaves us "at the mercy of two monsters whom man [can] not fathom or
control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and of a soul moved by mystic
revelations—" Ayn Rand For the New Intellectual,
http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/soulbodydichotomy.html Men who believe in
existence without a free consciousness want no part in moral responsibility, as
the direct quotes below will show. That is why consciousness "inhabiting an age of
science" is not a good thing for them.

The problem is that "they" have now declared that not only does the soul not exist
either as "mystic revelation," nor as a natural element of the consciousness of
man. They also now deny that consciousness is anything more than neurons firing,
memes, genes, etc. and that what we think is consciousness--is not.

Modern science is philosophical materialism, "the metaphysical view that there is

only one substance in the universe" and that that substance is empirical."
http://www.skepdic.com/materialism.html The philosophical materialism of
naturalists is the belief that spiritual substance does not exist.

In one sense only they are correct: that thing which they deny as "soul" cannot be
objectively evaluated by any known scientific standards or methods. You can't make
the "soul" light up like parts of the brain do. It is metaphysical, but
metaphysical descriptions are descriptions of things that exist, in this case of
what we sense as the effects we feel as emotional, or at least physical, within
our bodies.

The difference between the materialist and the Objectivist position accepted by
the majority of all humans who ever lived and who live now, is that "ego," and
"free will" explain non-material objects that are not supernatural, and not of any
substance except of knowledge of events in space-time that occur inside out
bodies. As for "soul," Objectivists are on the side of the naturalists in
declaring it to be the effect of empirical activities originating within the
central nervous system, and which therefore die with the body.

Yet, it is disagreement as to the cause of these events that distinguishes the

difference between materialistic science and objective epistemology; and it
precisely the epistemology of both science and religion that is wrong.

A rational man will not harbor "the soul-body dichotomy. He will discard its
irrational conflicts and contradictions, such as: mind versus heart, thought
versus action, reality versus desire, the practical versus the moral. [ ] He will
know that the [ ] volitional level of reason and thought—is the basic necessity of
man’s survival and his greatest moral virtue. He will know that men need
philosophy for the purpose of living on earth. Ayn Rand For the New Intellectual

[I take up Rand so much in this article because one of the staunchest supporters
of scientific naturalism, denying the soul and individual responsibility for
personal action, is Tom Clark, of Naturalism.Org, already quoted above and much
quoted below.

In email between myself and Tibor Machan http://www.hoover.org/bios/machan.html

http://www.cato.org/people/tibor-machan, who has argued against Clark in the past
http://www.naturalism.org/libertar.htm#_ftn3, Machan said, "Clark is an avowed
reductive materialist, which is a highly restricted version of naturalism (it begs
the question as to what can be part of nature.)" Obviously, soul, ego, and free
will are not "parts of nature," but are reduced to biological functions of the
brain.

Science takes the fact that soul, ego, and free will cannot be objectively
evaluated by any known scientific standards or methods to mean that no such
ontological objects exist. When we insist they mean more than the identification
of empirical effects on our nervous system, the effect that "feels" like what
humans have always called our soul, our ego, our free will, science denies it.
Once we give those objects the identity of a "moral existents" of consciousness,
they cease to be scientifically useful. You can't put morals under a microscope.
So soul, ego, and free will are denied, not as things we don't recognize and can
not talk about, but as something with any scientific value. The only value to
science of the soul and the ego is that they are the empirical effects of an
empirical (chemical/electircal) cause, or of a conceptual, e.g., ideological,
cause.

But conceptual causes are, themselves, attributed to empirical causes, thus

eliminating them as ontological.

"In his book Consilience, E. O. Wilson took note that sociology has identified
belief in a soul as one of the universal human cultural elements. Wilson suggested
that biologists need to investigate how human genes predispose people to believe
in a soul." [attribution unknown]

"Man is viewed as coordinate with other parts of nature, and naturalistic

psychology emphasizes the physical basis of human behavior..." says the SEP.
[ibid]

"Daniel Dennett has championed the idea that the human survival strategy depends
heavily on adoption of the intentional stance. [This,] Dennett suggests, has
proven so successful that people tend to apply it to all aspects of human
experience, thus leading to [to] conceptualizations of soul."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul

Watching parts of the brain light up (with functional magnetic imaging resonance)
demonstrates a causal relationship between sensory stimuli, and those parts of the
brain responsible for registering something about the stimuli. Comparisons are
made on the particular emotions the subject is feeling at the time this-or-that
part of the brain shows activity.

For example, "when you're in love, your eyes light up, your face lights up -- and,
apparently, so do four tiny bits of your brain, said Andreas Bartels, a doctoral
student at University College London who presented his research at the Society for
Neuroscience."
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/11/08/love.in.lights.ap/index.html

We know this. This kind of thing is not new news. We've all seen it on TV if not
in our own lives. What those of us in the general population don't comprehend is
that scientists reverse the cause and effect, enabling them to make claims such as
that because a part of your brain lights up, it causes an emotion; therefore,
emotions are caused by events that take place within the empirical brain;
therefore, "an individual’s development and behavior are entirely the result of
prior and surrounding conditions, both genetic and environmental;" [italics
added]http://www.naturalism.org/center_for_naturalism.htm

Or this: "Our bodies and minds are shaped in their entirety by conditions that
precede us and surround us...We see that there but for circumstances go I. We
would have been the homeless person in front of us, the convict, or the addict,
had we been given their genetic and environmental lot in life." [italics added]
http://www.centerfornaturalism.org/descriptions.htm

But in order to humor us about our souls, and in an attempt to explain what it is
that people are comtemplating when they meditate upon their mortal souls, we get
explanations like this:

"It doesn't hurt...you know... to think about people playing harps sitting on
clouds..." Daniel Dennett; The Atheism Tapes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v46Wd7qwq0

The soul is the seat of self-awareness as a metaphysical entity. The soul

incorporates the inner "voice" of each living being. It is the basis for
consciousness of consciousness, because it is that consciously "given" thing
within us upon which we focus our consciousness. We focus our consciousness back
inside ourselves, and there we find an entity with a specific identity; the self.

Consciousness of consciousness is found in our Latin name. We are Homo sapiens

sapiens, not, as some mistakenly believe, just "plain old" Homo sapiens. "Plain
old" Homo sapiens is called "Archaic Homo sapiens" and lived "300,000 to 30,000
B.P." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_Homo_sapiens

The soul is the basis for our seat of self-awareness, but not the cause. The cause
is simply that when someone got around to looking, he saw. It had been there all
the time, like math and oxygen. But someone had to be the first to see it.

Other animals have self awareness, but it is on the level of what naturalist and
biologist Loren Eiseley called the eternal present. They are stuck in it. They
can't think further than their next meal, or at least further than their next act.
Chimps have been seen to take justice to the "eye for an eye" variety. Worse, they
have been seen stomping other chimps to death just for having accidentally entered
the other tribe's territory-- but they only stomped the other chimp to death after
searching for it for hours, in apack like wolves. That is more than "eye for an
eye," so it really means they have not given morality any consideration. They only
live by their emotions, and if you are an invading chimp, friendly or not, you
deserved to die.

A dog can think far enough ahead to know that when his master needs help, he must
go seek that help. Dog's have a persistence to be admired. But after the rescue,
they do not pat themselves on the back, and tell their friends, or their puppies,
how they heroically ran up the hill, swam the creek, and ran two miles to get home
to tell the Mrs. that the Mr. was injured. When the rescue is done, as far as the
dog is concerned, its done. There may be residual pride. Who has not seen a proud
pet. My cat's proudest moment was showing off her kittens, but after that it was
the night she brought home an owl. She didn't egoistically act as if she even
remembered it the next day.

So, after the event, everything is back to normal, and as for the chimps you
wouldn't know in either tribe that anything out of the ordinary had happened.
Because it was not out of the ordinary. And things were back to normal. Normal is
living in the present with no thought to any means of bettering their relations
with other tribes, or whether that is even necessary for their own survival as a
species, as a tribe, or as an individual. They act as their species has acted
since they popped up on the evolutionary scene, with a consciousness stuck in the
moment.

Man's self-consciousness is on a different level. I like to think that

psychologically man gained "sapient sapience" when the first Greek (or someone of
another culture such as the Chinese,) made the first syllogism of philosophy and
connected it to another and another. That was a feat no creature on earth had ever
done before, and that none but man has done since.

So inner reflection, on an ontological entity, as a learned action, and the

capability to make chains of syllogisms that are specifically philosophical, is
the seat of the self consciousness, and what it is conscious of is its empirical
sensory manifestations collectively called conscience.

But here is where I must repeat: science has the cause-and-effect backward. So
what if the mechanism of the brain causes those empirical sensory manifestations?
They relate to something, and that "thing" is value based. Science tests the
lighting-up of the brain by using sensory stimuli, but then forgets to mention
that all stimuli have value-based relationships to life; and that when it is man's
brain lighting up to the smell of popcorn, or the picture of a national hero, or
the sound of a melody that one danced to at his/her senior prom, that all those
things have value-based relationships to a human life.

This forgetfullness should bother us--greatly. Man has the virtue of volition.
Human beings are a volitional species, where "volition" means "[acting] without
being compelled - by someone, or by external circumstances, or by mental illness,"
against one's rational considerations. http://www.naturalism.org/lexicon.htm The
problem with this quote is that in the original it didn't end with "rational
considerations." It ended with "to do it against one's wishes" which the
materialist naturalist will tell you "are entirely the result of prior and
surrounding conditions, both genetic and environmental." [italics added]

Volition and free will are synonymous, where free will means "the capacity unique
to persons that allows them to control their actions,"
http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/freewill.htm No such virtue as volition can exist as
freedom to think or not, when genes and the chair you sit in and the sandwich you
had for lunch are the cause of your desire to talk to your mother, or vacation in
Orlando instead of New Orleans.

Why does science get cause and effect confused? It is entirely purposeful and
based on altrusim; and not just on altruism, but on altruistic bones that we
somehow get from mother nature even when altruism is a moral choice.

"The capacity for such self-modifying choices [as come with what some call free
will,] and their direction, for good or ill, can always be traced back to
influences that were prior to both our character and our choice-making capacity.
Such tracing is at the heart of empirical explanation; it’s what science does for
a living, partially. This is to say that, on a scientific understanding of
ourselves, our autonomy and its uses are fully natural and fully determined,
ultimately arising out of conditions that were not within our control.

"[To suppose the existence of free will] is to suppose that in empirical fact we
are merely self-interested creatures. But we aren’t; there are many altruistic
bones in our body," writes Clark. [2] [italics added]
http://www.naturalism.org/libertar.htm#_ftn4

Since he said this specifically in response to the "ruthless egoism" of

Objectivism*, let me quote again from the originator of Objectivism: [*rational
egoism is not ruthless. It is the justice one pays himself in recognition of his
individual sovereignty and of the sovereignty of every other individual.]

"Do not hide behind such superficialities [in the argument about altruism] as
whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue.
The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him
that dime." [italics added] Ayn Rand "Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the
Modern World,” Philosophy: Who Needs It

Altruism, as I personally argued with Clark, was coined by Auguste Comte and
adopted in Britain by H. Spencer. For Comte the word meant the eradication of self
as found in ones "desire," and it meant a life devoted to the good of others, not
just freely offered when one had a desire to do so, since desire was to be
eradicated. More particularly, Comte meant by "altrusim" selfless love and
devotion to Society. In brief, it involved self-abnegation conceived as an ideal.
As thus understood, altruism involves a conscious opposition to egoism, understood
as rational self-interest.

Altruism is not to be confused, as Clark does, with kindness, e.g., "altruistic

bones," or with good will or respect for the rights of others, said Rand. Altruism
makes kindness impossible, because Comte also meant that altruism was opposed to
the formal or theological pursuit of charity.

"The irreducible primary of altruism," Rand wrote, "the basic absolute, is self-
sacrifice—which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-
destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a
standard of the good." [ibid]

Clark responded, saying, "It would be nice if all Rand’s acolytes examined her
philosophy as assiduously as do you..."

To which I would add, "It would be nicer if educated men do not misunderstand it,
or the meaning of such words as "altruistic," as badly as you do."

I said that science willfully forgets to tell us about the value relationship that
existents have on our consciousness, and that this ought to bother us greatly.
Well, here is the reason why. It is as "faith based" as religion is, and I can say
this because people who forget to tell us about the value relationship of our
right to give or not to give to someone needy is what altruism is all about; and
the people who forget to tell us that tell us the things they want us to believe.

"Our bodies and minds are shaped in their entirety by conditions that precede us
and surround us...Seeing that we are fully caused creatures - not self-caused - we
can no longer take or assign ultimate credit or blame for what we do. This leads
to an ethics of compassion and understanding, both toward ourselves and others. We
see that there but for circumstances go I. We would have been the homeless person
in front of us, the convict, or the addict, had we been given their genetic and
environmental lot in life." http://www.centerfornaturalism.org/descriptions.htm

We are all blameless. The astronaut who walks in space cannot take pride for
having earned that position of responsibility as a crewmember: it was "entirely
caused by conditions that preceded him/her and surrounded him/her." And it was
genes that "predisposed" him or her to believe that all the hard work and years of
waiting were the cause of his/her position of responsibility on the crew.

Thus, it was Hillary Rodham-Clinton's genetic and environmental "lot in life" that
prevented her from winning the Democratic nomination; and Barrak Obama's charm,
youth, good looks, and electrifying speeches were not the result of having worked
hard to earn or to maintain those virtues, or to use them at the time in his life
when he knew he could make them come true; it was his "lot in life."

Do you know what a "lot in life" is? When used as it is here, it is a

predisposition, pre-set fate, that which one carries in his genes as given him by
some long-ago primate ancestor; and in his mental makeup as caused by the size of
the bedroom he grew up in, the condition of the mattress on his bed, and the lack
of calcium, or the excess of caffeinated soda he drank, while growing up or just
before deciding to run for President.

"Researchers [from the World Health Organization] are asking people throughout
Britain to describe how happy they are with their lot in life to help improve the
effect of the healthcare they receive."
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/16384.php

"[I]f we remain unconscious of [ ] predispositions we can only continue to run

into inexplicable and irresolvable conflicts. These are the battles where logic
and reason fly out of the window..." http://www.santafecoach.com/DRC/drcpp-
test%20theory.htm

"...environmental factors [ ] and genetic predisposition for asthma..."

http://www.onderzoekinformatie.nl/en/oi/nod/onderzoek/OND1289114/ Yes, I believe
we do have such things as predispositions to diseases that may be environmentally
or genetically caused. But there is no environmental or genetic predisposition to
running for President or for losing the candidacy, nor for robbing a bank, nor for
drive-by shootings, nor for cutting fetuses from living wombs, nor for strapping a
bomb to one's body and blowing it up in the middle of a market, nor for anything
else that science would like to attribute to "genetics and environment," which,
but for the grace of god go I.

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Posted by Curtis Edward Clark; Dean