Free Will
People who deny that we have free will – the ability to make our own choices for our own reasons – have abandoned the power of reason. There are no rational arguments at all for the denial of free will unless you are claiming that we live in a meaningless machine universe – programmed since the beginning of time – and that we suffer from an inexplicable and extraordinary delusion that we could do x rather than y, when, in fact, we were always going to do x no matter what. Are we androids rather than humans with no choice at all regarding what we do? Or perhaps we are random behaviour generators that do things for no reasons. You couldn’t get any position more opposed to ours than one that denies that we have free will.
If we have no free will, it means that we live in a machine world ordained at the beginning of time, or a randomist world where things happen miraculously, for no reason. A liberal atheist such as Sam Harris who denies free will yet condemns Islam is no better morally than a Jihadist who beheads people. After all, both are machines subject to inevitable forces. If Sam Harris doesn’t have free will then nor is he free to condemn Islamic Fundamentalism. The fact that he
does, was, given his belief system, inevitable since the Big Bang, or happened through random processes, and was nothing to do with him. Equally, the Jihadist could never have chosen not to behead people since he’s just a machine for whom no choice has ever existed.
A universe without free will is by definition a meaningless, purposeless universe with no possible point to it, exactly as all scientific materialists have concluded.
The meaning of life is the one which we freely chose to invest in, but if we have no choice then we can give it no meaning, or only a programmed, illusory meaning, which is no meaning at all. Can a computer assign meaning to the universe? On what basis?
If we have no free will, if hard determinism is true, everyone is simply acting out a script, and every opinion expressed by everyone is not an opinion at all but a statement prepared at the Big Bang, billions of years before the first person even existed.
There is in fact only one occasion when we don’t have free will – at the conclusion of a Cosmic Age when the Force of Reason acts irreversibly to impose Absolute Reason on everyone, whether they like it or not.
Reason – expressed through ontological mathematics – is as much a cosmic force as gravity or anti-gravity. In fact, reason could be regarded as the mental aspect of gravity – that which draws things together and unites them, while unreason is anti-gravity, driving people apart in terms of individual faith, opinion, belief and interpretation.
What is the self-evident refutation of the denial of free will, apart from our own unarguable conscious experience that we are not in any way constrained to act in one particular way? It’s the fact that decisions take time. If we were devoid of free will, all decisions would be made instantaneously since there’s nothing to prevent immediate decision-making, Our decision-making is often slow exactly because we are weighing every angle using our free will. Free will slows down thinking because it generates viable alternatives, which we then have to ponder and evaluate before deciding what to do.
Free Will and Abrahamism
Some people think that free will is the essence of Abrahamism. On what planet? Abrahamism asserts the existence of a Creator God who made each and every one of us. Therefore, we are entirely dependent on him and caused by him, hence we can have no autonomy and no free will.
God is alleged to have complete foreknowledge of what we will do. Again, this cannot be consistent with free will.
In Christianity, the whole of humanity – including all unborn generations – are branded with Original Sin by God, i.e. a collective punishment is administered to humanity for the actions of Adam and Eve. An ineradicable stain is imposed on every soul. This is entirely inconsistent with free will and personal moral responsibility i.e. with being accountable for our own actions and not those of others. If the sons are punished for the sins of the fathers, there is no free will since we cannot control the behaviour of others.
According to many Protestant sects, our fates were determined at the beginning of time (predestination), before we’d been born, before we’d done a single thing. This is absolutely incompatible with free will.
According to Christianity, we need God’s “grace” before we can do anything good, and otherwise we are irredeemably evil. We are simply incapable of good works. This utterly contradicts free will.
According to Islam, all things are the will of Allah, a position that cannot accommodate free will. The medieval Crusaders also said, “God wills it.” If God wills it, and not us, then there is no free will (except in the unique and inexplicable case of God).
It’s absurd to assert that Abrahamism is based on free will. In fact, it’s based on the same denial of free will to which Sam Harris subscribes. Where Harris says we are the puppets of scientific forces, Abrahamism says we are the puppets of God. Either way, we are not free, and not in control of our destiny. Science is simply religion with a deterministic God replaced with deterministic (or indeterministic) laws of science. Abrahamists and scientists alike despise free will.
Anyone who supported free will would never posit a Creator God – a single first cause – and nor would they support objective, external scientific laws with no conceivable subjective, private, internal, or individual aspects.
As for Karmism being based on free will, what a joke! We are all either paying for our karmic misdeeds of past lives, or being rewarded for our karmic good deeds of past lives. In other words, we are the puppets of deterministic karmic forces from the past that prevent us from having free will in the present.
Christian Freedom?
Christians have no freedom because they are told what to do, what to believe, and are commanded to always obey. The point of the tale of the Garden of Eden is that if you disobey God, you go to hell. Ergo, all Christians are never free to disobey God (if they wish to avoid hell), hence are puppets and slaves.
The Science Delusion
“The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘you’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’ This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can be truly called astonishing.” – Francis Crick
And astonishingly absurd. Can a “vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”
behave? Can lifeless, mindless, purposeless atoms with no desires, will or agency
behave? In what conceivable way? Francis Crick – one of the Nobel Prize winners for discovering the structure of DNA – never suggested a mechanism for how lumps of matter are able to create life and generate purposeful minds. Because people such as Crick are materialist fundamentalists, they simply believe it
must be true that life and mind come from matter. They refuse to consider any other possibilities. If all you’ve got is matter then plainly life, mind, consciousness, purpose, and free will (or the illusion thereof) cannot be “explained” in any other way than materially. The fact that no connection whatsoever can be made between matter and any of these mental things is disregarded. Materialists are left to claim that all of these things inexplicably “emerge” from matter. They might as well invoke magic and miracles ... or even God! It couldn’t be any crazier.
Do neurons tell us what to do? That’s what people such as Harris, Dawkins and Crick claim. Who has the intelligence – us, or our neurons?!
Authorship
Are you the author of your own life, or merely a puppet or actor performing a pre-written role? Sam Harris asserts the latter, but that means that he himself isn’t actually making any arguments. He's merely mouthing words put in his mouth by scientific determinism.
Neuroscience
“...the classical notion of conscious free will [is that] conscious thoughts cause our brain activity, which produces our actions.” – Patrick Haggard (neuroscientist), UCL
So, what about the classical notion of unconscious free will, and that our unconscious thoughts cause our brain activity even more so than our conscious thoughts?
“I don’t believe in free will because I can’t. As a neuroscientist, you can’t really believe in free will. The key brain event is the firing of a nerve impulse in a neuron and it obeys the classical laws of physics.” – Patrick Haggard
For neuroscientists such as Haggard (and Sam Harris), the mind is just the software that runs on the hardware of the brain. However, it’s not at all clear what this means. Brains made of atoms are material objects. Where exactly is the software? Who writes it? Where is it stored? What language is it written in? How is it accessed and run? The analogy collapses as soon as you drill into it.
The claim being made is either that there’s an untenable Cartesian dualism involving software and hardware, and they can miraculously interact, or that software miraculously emerges from hardware and writes itself, using some magical, unexplained process.
Hard Determinism
If hard determinism is true, we have no choice about what we believe. But that means that those of us who accept the reality of free will have been compelled to accept this delusion. Yet it also means that those who reject free will and “know” that it’s an illusion have equally been compelled to accept this “truth”. They didn’t arrive at it through any choice or analysis. It was literally just given to them by the laws of science. But this means that the laws of science are insane and actually indeterministic (contrary to the original assumption) since they can produce different, totally contradictory results, seemingly at random, with no rhyme nor reason. Hence the original thesis is false, and scientific hard determinism can be formally disproven by simple logic.
If Nature is able to compel us (or some of us) to believe the opposite of what is true, how can we ever know anything for sure? Why should Nature deterministically provide some people with the “truth” (that hard determinism is true), and the vast majority with the “lie” (that free will is true). This is an infinitely greater mystery than simply accepting than free will is true! It violates Occam’s Razor by asserting that hard determinism somehow sets out to falsify itself in the minds of most people ruled by hard determinism!
The very fact that some people can accept free will and others reject it is proof that hard determinism is false since hard deterministic laws couldn’t possibly generate two mutually exclusive outcomes. This means that either compatibilism or incompatibilism must be true.
Where’s the Evidence?
What do people mean when they ask for “evidence” or “proof”? Almost invariably, they mean something that satisfies their senses or even feelings (a reassuring religious Mythos, for example). What they absolutely never accept as evidence or proof is an airtight rational or mathematical argument, which is regarded as some sort of abstraction or empty tautology with no bearing on reality.
If Wittgenstein – a professional philosopher – couldn’t accept analysis rather than synthesis as the incontestable basis of existence, what hope for all the dunderheads infinitely less intelligent than Wittgenstein? The fact is, we can’t persuade irrational people of anything at all since they simply don’t accept reason as reality and are always seeking sensory and emotional solutions instead. There’s no point in arguing with such people. If they can’t appreciate a rational proof, it’s not because the proof isn’t true, it’s because they’re too stupid to understand it.
Reality
is Reason. However, if you’re not rational, you will never grasp that. You will remain mired in empiricism, emotionalism and delusion forever, and, whenever anyone presents you with a rational proof, you will look at it in blank incomprehension or active disbelief, and say, “You haven’t proved anything.” Of course,
we have. You haven’t understood the proof, and that’s because you’re not rational or intelligent enough.
Proof is a purely intellectual activity. It has nothing to do with what you sense, what you feel, what you experience, what mystical intuitions you have, or any other irrational, Content-driven notions.
When you ask for evidence or proof, where’s your evidence or proof that you have the vaguest idea what you’re talking about? Don’t appeal to some contemporary “authority” such as Sam Harris as your justification – just because you have similar opinions to him and like him. After all, where’s
his evidence and proof? He doesn’t have any. Nothing he says is grounded in ontology, epistemology, rationalism or mathematics. Every argument he presents flows from fanatical materialism.
Some people seem to regard Harris as “spiritual”. In what way can anyone who defends to the hilt scientific materialism be spiritual? Who cares if he “meditates”? What does meditation have to do with spirituality? If, as the result of your meditations, you reach the false, empiricist conclusions drawn by the likes of Sam Harris and the Buddha, what good is meditation?
Ontological mathematics is an analytic system. If you can’t accept analysis as the truth, stop reading our books. You will never understand them. They are all about rational Form, pure Reason ... but you are locked into empirical Content, which is the other side of the coin from Reason, and entirely alienated from it. We can’t help you if you refuse to be rational, or are incapable of being rational.
If reality has an answer then that answer
must be analytic, providing a closed solution where everything proceeds by analysis of atomic, basis definitions in a system of pure tautology. If you reject this answer, you’re automatically swallowed by Nietzsche’s statement of unconditional skepticism: “There are no facts, only interpretations.” You have rejected reason and definitive answers and chosen to rely on opinions, conjectures, beliefs, and hypotheses that can never be proved true, by any means at all.
Nietzsche is a trillion times smarter than the likes of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking. If you reject the rationalist world of ontological mathematics, you must embrace the skepticism of Nietzsche and David Hume, and stop pretending you have any knowledge at all.
You know nothing, Jon Snow! 
