Theology

I'm having an email conversation with Sigve Tonstad, MD, PhD (except the PhD is in theology from the University of St Andrews). He's brilliant, broadly educated, and quite obviously smarter than me. Therefore, I put a fair deal of work into my most recent email and thought it was worth posting a portion for general consumption and critique.

Interestingly, positing free will as an emergent property of the brain offers significant philosophical dividends regardless of the ontological implications. If the free will is an emergent property of the brain yet ontologically indistinguishable from the brain, then one could be a monist and eat his cake too. Allow me to first define the free-will cake and then argue why the emergent property perspective may be the only way for a monist to eat it. (I believe I do understand, by the way, the advantages of being a monist apart from the free-will dilemma)

First, free will must be categorically inexplicable. It must be inexplicable because explicability confers predictability. The degree of predictability may vary from case to case with the degree of inherent randomness, but the link between explicability and predictability is fundamental. The very act of conceptualization depends on recognition of patterns and trends, which in turn provide the raw material for prediction. In other words, prediction is the natural fruit of explanation.

But inexplicability alone is not enough. Free will demands categorical inexplicability. Whether or not there is a "straight line from physics to the brain", and even if "reduction does not work as a model" for explaining the brain's complexity, a strictly material view of the brain must view such inexplicability as a function of limited technological, conceptual, and intellectual capacity, not intrinsically unattainable mystery. For the honest scientist, the material brain is indeed inexplicable, but only temporarily. Therefore, the complexity of the brain offers no ultimate haven for free will.

Naturally, one might retain a strictly material paradigm by claiming that science will never fully explain the material brain. Such an argument, however, would require a radical rethinking of the nature of material reality. Indeed, such extreme redefinition would almost certainly place the argument just a few semantic steps away from an immaterial construction of free will. Perhaps this approach leads us closest to the truth. Can we be so confident, after all, that immaterial and material realities are actually separate? Exotic and enticing as such holistic thinking may be, it lends itself more to vague mysticism than logical conclusions; it is intuitively satisfying but intellectually slippery (at least to my Western mind),

To summarize, the free-will cake must be categorically inexplicable. A monist cannot eat this cake with a strictly material picture of reality because a strictly material picture of the self inevitably ends up in determinism. Yes, there is one variant picture of the material self which allows for free will, but it requires such a radical redefinition of material reality that the final picture morphs into a material/immaterial hybrid rather than a truly material view.

If free will acted as an emergent property of the brain, its effects would be seen in certain types of mental activity we see in the brain. By definition, we would never be able to visualize the actual interaction between the immaterial free will and the material brain. The interaction could still be observed indirectly, however. In The Brain that Changes Itself, Norman Doidge, M.D., utterly destroys the notion that our brains are sophisticated machines. Though Doidge never addresses free will, he raises the issue by default when he refutes the machine model of the brain. He also provides a highly convincing refutation of localizationism--the idea that brain functions are necessarily limited to delineated areas of the brain. Putting these two observations--that the brain is fundamentally different from a machine and that brain functions are not necessarily limited to localized areas--we can now ask the key question: if the brain changes itself, which part of the brain does the changing? To me at least, hunting for a single brain-changing location in the brain would be ludicrous. Instead, it makes more sense to assume that multiple areas of the brain always work together to affect changes in the brain.

And it is the changes in the brain--particularly in stroke and addiction rehabilitation--where I see evidence for free will acting as an immaterial emergent property of the brain. I find it very difficult to imagine a specific anatomical location being responsible for such change. Instead, the change must arise from the direction of a synthesized interaction arising from multiple brain locations. Such a synthesis is more than the sum of its parts. It is, indeed, an emergent property which I call free will.

On a theological note, I do think that the majority of Biblical texts on this subject seem heavily weighted in favor of a body-soul unity. But I sometimes wonder if my preoccupation with free will has taken me somewhat away from the body-soul question. I do not think, for instance, that the free will and the soul are equivalent. God values all the souls he created but can we say that the infant who dies at birth has a truly free will? Of course not, but surely God values this baby as a living soul!

Indeed, I am very wary of linking the soul solely to the brain (couldn't resist). To me, the breath of life--in my book, an emergent property of the entire body--would be a better candidate for the soul. This would make the soul a property of the body, which I guess would essentially be a monist perspective.

To me clear, my main contention is this: a strictly material view of the self must either redefine material reality in a basically unscientific manner or eventually acquiesce to determinism