A Bagful of Chemical Reactions by Jim McGuiggan

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A Bagful of Chemical Reactions

Sometimes we talk about "free will" as if there were absolutely no limits to our freedom. This makes no sense. There are all kinds of limits that are recognized. Limits that stretch from between a severely retarded child to environmental straight-jackets but though there are limits we're all sure that we can resist internal promptings and external stimuli. There's nonsense mouthed on the other end of that spectrum when people tell us there is no such thing as "free will". Another absolute. In various ways people like B.F. Skinner and E.O. Wilson assure us that we're nothing but a bag of responses to genetic and/or environmental shaping. As one man put it to a friend of mine, "You can't get away from the fact that your whole being, thought and behavior included of course, is the product of chemicals and elements, hormones and gland secretions."

So spoke a bagful of chemicals as it tried to persuade another sack of irresistible hormones and amino acids to believe something it didn't believe. The first bag of active chemicals seemed to think that there is something called "truth" that the second bag (which is what the first bag thought he was taking to) was seeing and needed to confess. Why the first bag should even want to bother to "persuade" the second bag is a mystery. The second bag (if what the first bag claimed was indeed true) had no freedom to believe other than it believed so why would the first bag make the effort? And why bother anyway? What does it matter what a bag of chemicals thinks? There's something that strikes us as out of whack when we hear one "machine" trying to persuade another "machine" that it matters what "machines" believe. And besides, if it's "true" we'll never know it because questions like, "Is it true?" have no meaning where everything is nothing other than it is.

Nobody can live believing such stuff. We don't hold a car tire responsible for going flat when it's punctured by a nail--it can't help it, it has no choice. The same would be true of people unless they have some kind of control and can transcend many of their limiting factors. Of course, by the same token, we don't lock up our car and then make a speech to it, "Thank you for being a good car today and taking me where I needed to go." So not only does the "no free will" school undermine responsibility it destroys the groundwork for praise. Why praise a bag of chemicals for doing what it cannot avoid doing? It can neither be praised nor blamed. Try living like that. In truth, it's a killer of life!