God and free will

It is an irony that the 500 years of Western enlightenment and scientific research that started with reason, logic and the individual liberties of self-determinism and self-fulfillment will now have to end with predetermination and absence of free will. And with the demise of ‘free-will’, at parallel, will come about the death of morals.

How has this happened? Seventeenth century enlightenment, 18^th century feminism and 19^th century liberalism — all were moving the western mindset away from religion based on religious text. Religion and the decrees of the Divine were things that had been inhibiting the free spirit of man from living its life to the fullest, from allowing it to pursue its happiness, and from letting it open the closed doors of the truths of nature. How did this frenzy for freedoms and liberties then go down the pitfall of servile pre-determinism!

Liberalism believed in the individual; in it all authority lay with the undivided inner person. The freedom, liberty and uniqueness of the inner person gave it complete authority upon itself and all matters pertaining to it. Only ‘I’ know myself, therefore only I have the right to control myself and tell what is good or bad for me!

This want for an escape from God and the moral code set by God dragged the West to formulate a way of thinking that would free it from the shackles of all pre-liberal morals such as the Church, the institution of marriage, the family-system, cloths, gender and so on. And the perfect cover to this self-centred materialism — that defined the pleasures of the self as the key and announced that everything that makes a person happy is ‘good’ and everything that doesn’t is ‘bad’ — was provided by Darwinism.

One only sacrifices one’s happiness to gather a bigger happiness related to his/her survival and reproductive need. Survival of the fittest and the need for reproducing the fittest were the only two goals nature had set for life, nothing else mattered.

This amoral Darwinism, despite all its feebleness and unprovability, has been the only argument against God that has lasted, and has become so deep-rooted in the West that eventually it is sweeping away the very liberties and authority of the self that it was constructed to defend. Clinging on to this theory as a core has affected the way scientist interpret their finding in different sciences.

Neuroendocrinology Professor Robert Sapolsky gives amazing insights on human behaviour biology, and how neurons and neural networks work. He concludes that neurons are mere agents working for ‘reward’, they react to stimulus, are control by chemicals, and work by grouping up or aligning with other neurons. And in these grouping-up or aligning the principle that is at work is ‘randomness’ or ‘chance’, not ‘purpose’.

The Professor admits that human brain is so complex and so many complex processes affect it, that reductionism will never reach the point in this field where exact outcomes will ever be predictable. With all this unfathomable gap in theory and real practice, theory inevitably represents ideological inclinations of the theory-giver, which is rooted in Darwin.

Though a staunch believer of evolution, the Professor remains adamant that we humans are nothing but beast-machines, evolved via evolutionary accidents, as there is no such thing as design or purpose and on top of that free-will does not exist!

This is exactly the line of thought followed by many working on life-sciences and artificial intelligence; they believe that all life processes, including the processes of the brain, are based on biological-algorithms. Just like a computer runs on algorithms, that are eventually based on a binary code, with only two possible states, off and on, 0 and 1. And just by making so many different arrangements of these two states, you are able to write complex algorithms that perform complex tasks. At the core, these algorithms can be programed in either of the two ways, either a deterministic or a random manner — but they never have freedom like free will.

Now, self-learning-based artificial intelligence will in near future evolve its understanding of the human subject to the extent that it will understand all the complex human algorithms so perfectly, that it would be no longer possible that ‘I’ know myself better than the AI systems that ‘know me’ in and out, with access to knowing everything I like or dislike, my every move, every reaction, every mood, correlated with my heartbeat and the state of my different bodily organs, and even knowing how my neural system is reacting to different stimuli!

When this external system knows me better than I know myself, it is proven that I am nothing but a set of algorithms set up by nature, waiting to be discovered by a superior mind than mine, which is what ‘I’ myself have created as a path of my further evolution.

So, nature works randomly, without purpose or design, and in the process comes upon better algorithms that survive while the useless/weak ones die down. ‘Randomness’ is the new god! And as this randomness ceaselessly carries on its processes, it creates out of itself designs, not-thought of by itself, rather experienced by it in the process of its becoming. How this randomness will proceed is completely pre-determined by the very basic algorithm nature started off with, perhaps from binary 0 and 1 building blocks, out of which everything has and is being generated.

Where does this leave humanity as a thinking, feeling, deciding authority? If everything we are experiencing is the natural becoming of a set algorithm, what it will become tomorrow has already being set in the beginning — we are not deciding or changing anything, just going through the experience of a pre-scripted drama. The only morals to satisfy our guilt of purpose are the probability of survival and probability of reproduction — having the chance of landing in the best stats is the biggest good!

In retrospect, perhaps this extreme insolence and apathy is the natural outcome of a moral algorithm started off with negation of God, whom is the greatest good, and whose grace has bestowed upon us, the inner unity of a soul, the power to think, the decree to make choice, the responsibility of our choices! Between the enormous number of complex algorithms upon which nature performs its so many functions, there has been an abrasion, of filling one living machine with superlative degrees of cognition and ideation, making so many innumerable options in the mind-frame, that ‘choice’ has to become an inevitable consequence — whatever theory you present or practise is a demonstration of your free will — even denial is a demonstration of free will!

We are free, to choose between an algorithm-based materialism, void of soul — or a soul that has received the gift of free will from the unimaginably illimitable, sempiternal codex, from the hallows where the Creator, the Designer, the exerciser of superlative free will resides!

Published in The Express Tribune, February 17^th, 2023.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.