Pastore Video

 

Frank Pastore narrated a Prager U video, named, Do We Have Free Will? I took notes on this video that has a posting date of 3/30/2015, though Frank Pastore passed away years earlier. I took notes on this video and will comment on my notes.

 

Pastore (P after this): “Do humans have free will or are our decisions entirely products of chemistry, physics, and genetics? Is there a difference between the brain and the mind? Could a neuroscientist with enough knowledge of our brains know every decision that we will make? The answers cut to the heart of what it means to be human.”

 

My response: I watched recently the 2021 video between Craig Biddle and Dennis Prager, and Prager says we only have free will if God exists (God gave us free will so that we could be free and real, not puppets. God is strong and secure and has no need for sycophants or puppets.).

 

Craig Biddle says we only have free will if God does not exist. If God exists, according to Biddle, and is all-powerful and all-knowing, then we cannot have free will. I think Pastore account is rather compatibilist, though from a Christian perspective, which likely would mirror Prager’s outlook on free will.

 

Pastore seems to say that we are biological machines (Robert Sapolsky, are you listening?) but that there is a ghost in the machine, not a homunculus or little man, but our mind or soul is residing beside or in our brains, so we have free will.

 

P: “In the external or physical world we are all aware of cause and effect. Object A acts on Object B with Force x. We all get that because it applies to just about everything from electrons to athletes.

 

But now consider events in your internal or mental world. What causes your thoughts? Some thoughts have external causes like when we touch something hot—we don’t deliberate, we just automatically pull our hand away from the burner. Our brain has already fired the instructions to do so involuntarily. In some strange sense we did not choose to pull our hand away at all because we did not choose to do that. Our brain did it without consulting us.

 

The second cause of our thoughts are internal causes: we are very anxious about giving a presentation, so we start to sweat and our heart rate goes up.

 

The third causal category of your thoughts is your conscious choices. Say you choose where to go eat. When you introspect about it, do you believe you are the active agent in charge of the process, or that you are a passive recipient of instruction, that you have no choice in the matter—that it is all external forces: environment, genetic, chemical, biological, and neurological?

 

In other words, do you think all your thoughts have external causes beyond your control or do you think you control some if not most of your thoughts? If all you are is a brain or exhaustibly physical system of synapses and neurons, if all you are is a brain, there is no you that is going to make a choice at all. Your thought processes are just a complex series of colliding electron dominoes colliding into each other.

 

This is just physical cause and effect, something that can be physically understood exhaustibly under physics and chemistry. If you are just a brain, there’s no you, an agent that is choosing, deliberating, exercising free will. You would just be a physical machine—a very complex but programmed computer.

 

But if you are something more than a brain, you would be something that has the brain. If you are more than a brain, you will choose an action based on reasons you mulled over. You would choose to think about these things and stop anytime you wanted to.

 

Here we have two different types of things: the immaterial mind (self-awareness, thoughts, spirit) and the material brain. You are the thing that has your brain. You are not the brain.”

 

My response: I approximately agree with Pastore, and we are some sort of compatibilists. Each person is a determined biological machine owned, managed, and directed by an internal immaterial mind.

 

The world is messy, and categories are not clean and sharply drawn. Dualism seems to be the metaphysical reality: that the world is made of body and spirit. So, living in the world and being of the world, each agent is material brain ruled by immaterial mind, and each human is half beast and half angel—that angel can elect to live as a living demon.

 

Such a messy ontological arrangement makes the material monists, and the spiritual monists pull their hair out, for dualism messes with their tidy understanding and way of arranging the world. Sorry, that is how things are in reality.

 

P: “Even if you are the foremost brain expert in the world knowing what’s happening with every electron in the human brain of a patient being operated on,  at this moment the surgeon does not know what is going on in the patient’s mind, and this is what makes the patient human. The surgeon has access to the patient’s brain, but only the patient has access to his mind. This is what makes the patient human and not a machine. Psychology, the study of what it is to be human, is not reducible to physics, biology, and chemistry.

 

Yet materialists, the theory that only physical matter exists, and matter is the only reality, argue that every thought and feeling are totally explained in terms of matter in motion, strictly physical phenomena.

The materialists believe that we are nothing but robots, and that free will is an illusion. Why do they believe this? They know the moment they acknowledge free will exists, that there is an immaterial you beyond the physical mind—that you are not just a brain—there has to be something non-physical that accounts for a non-physical mind.

 

Now when you exercise your free will, you are going to think there must be a Great Mind that accounts for the origin of your mind. But that is your free will as evidence of your free mind.”