Imagine a world populated only by robots. Robots do not choose what they will or will not do.  They act only according to their computerized algorithm. Given the same initial conditions, everything that follows will be inevitable. Perhaps the simplest analogy is the proverbial row of dominos. Tip over the first one, and the end result is entirely predictable, assuming no outside interference.

That assumption is important, but let’s set it aside until we get to it.

In such a world, a world of robots, no individual robot could ever be blamed for any of its actions, no more so than a domino could be held responsible for the consequence of its falling. 

Of course, we do not live in such a world. We are not dominos. While we are physical creatures that are governed by natural law, we are also more than that. We are living, conscious beings that have the ability to choose our actions, notwithstanding physical cause-and-effect. Granted, many of our actions are indeed governed entirely by physical processes, the chain of cause-and-effect that we see in nature. For example, reflexes are involuntary, but we also have the ability, and therefore the responsibility, to choose between alternatives, to make moral choices, to decide whether to act according to moral principle, or against it.

Amazingly, there is a large and influential population of intelligent, educated people who firmly believe that they (and we) are robots. While this may sound hyperbolic in its description of those people, it is the unavoidable conclusion that arises from their professed beliefs.

Those people cite “science” as the basis for their assertion that we have no free will. They are serious about this. With that scientific basis, their argumentation can seem insurmountably factual. What they ignore, however, is that when a seemingly sound and logical sequence of assertions leads inevitably to an absurd conclusion—particularly a harmful one—there must be something wrong, something incomplete, with that sequence.

As it turns out, the end result of that sequence is indeed both absurd and harmful. It tells us that we are not responsible for our actions, that we have no choice in what we think, say or do. It tells us that we are prisoners in a zero-sum game, puppets on a cosmic string. It tells us that good and evil are merely subjective. It avers that there is neither courage nor cowardice, but only predetermined responses to stimuli. In other words, their logic tells us that we are robots.

Perhaps the strongest argument against soulless determinism is the fact that people who say that they believe in it do not, in fact, live their lives as if it were true, nor do they project onto others a robotic image. They do, in fact, hold themselves responsible, as they do others, for the moral decisions we all make. They can mask this reality with sophisticated argumentation, but their arguments are overwhelmingly refuted, both by personal experience, and by scientific reasoning.

An irrefutable statement, debunking the supposed science, comes to us from the late JBS Haldane, a well-credentialed evolutionary scientist. He made an observation that has just enough subtlety to mask its profundity, and so it helps to point out what he actually was getting at.  He said:

If materialism is true, it seems to me we cannot know that it is true. If my opinions are the result of the chemical processes going on in my brain, they are determined by chemistry, not the laws of logic.

Materialism, in the above quote, also known as physicalism or naturalism—simply stated—is the philosophy adopted by many scientists. It considers physical reality to be the only reality that exists. If any other reality does exist, it says, there is no physical evidence of it, and therefore, it is unscientific to believe in it. 

What Haldane said amounts to this:  The only way in which we could know whether materialism is true or not, is if it is not true. If materialism is a correct philosophy, then our belief or disbelief in it is governed by inexorable cause-and-effect. If, however, it is false, then we can know that it is false. 

We can know that there is more to reality than the physical, because we are not robots.  We know that there is a spiritual component to reality because physics is incapable of accounting for the reality that we experience. Physics can describe color mathematically, for example, in terms of photons, wavelength and amplitude, but there is no physical basis for describing what you actually perceive when you see a color. Physics can describe consciousness in terms of its external appearance, but nothing in physics comes even close to explaining your inward experience of consciousness—the recursive experience of experience, or to use Stephen Hawking’s phrase, the “fire” in the otherwise sterile mathematical equations of science.

To ignore this is to ignore the harm that is inherent in a belief in only the physical. If we are mere assemblages of atoms, then there is no physical principle of science that says we have any human rights, and therefore, any requirement to respect them. The dominos will always fall according to the chain of cause-and-effect unless—unless there is an intervention from outside the chain.

We are that outside intervention. It is because of us that there is civilization, and art, and even science itself. We are the cause of their continued existence. Without us, society will descend into mindless brutality.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.