Our belief in free will is akin to the bias most people hold for a belief in God. In fact, I surmise they are connected by the same bias that triggers an emotional response in the brain when a persons beliefs are criticized. Considering that the same part of the brain used when someone thinks about God is the same part of the brain they use to determine the emotional state of other people, means that to your brain, God, if you believe in such a being, is deciphered using the same part of your brain you use to ascertain why your wife is so upset you tracked mud on the living room carpet. This is all going on inside your head, playing mind games between ones personal identity and their biases to emulate the relationship feeling most people think they have with Jesus. As the deity exists only in this persons mind, it creates a dangerously quasi objective point of view which translates a persons personal intents into the will of the divine. I believe this is also how people in a religious environment are easily manipulated and abused. If someone can be convinced that the effective partitioning of their own mind is an outside force, and they accept the leadership of the Church or a revered text as the voice of the God in their own mind, it can lead to a divorcement from reality so severe that people will kill for their beliefs and feel justified in doing so, or in America, persecute individuals like gay people based on commandment rather than a conclusion drawn from reasonable discourse based on evidentiary facts. I say this without the authority of peer review, but I am convinced that with further research into the human brain this connection will be identified, and to a large degree already has been...we simply lack the intellectual honesty as a society dominated by religious belief to accept the truth before us. This concerns free will, because the will of the Divine translates through this bias into the acceptance of the free will of human beings. It places our actions within a context that the modern findings of neuroscience are currently debunking. We are not as in control as we like to imagine. We are far more apt to be influenced by our environments than we care to admit, and who we are is less a product of choices as it is a combination of genetics, environment, and experiences.
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 03:46:15 +0000
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