What else could a decision be but the product of a combination of the present state of being, fashioned by the past, and the environment that a person finds themself in? From at least Hume onwards, many philosophers have understood that the only meaningful sense of free will is action free from coercion or force, not action exempt from the causal necessity of the physical world. To that debate, neuroscience adds nothing.
I don’t wish to disparage neuroscience. On the contrary, I am in awe of what is being discovered about the mechanics of mind. But it is simply a philosophical mistake to think that understanding more about the nuts and bolts of the basis of self and identity must add something to our fundamental understanding of what makes us the individuals we are. Some scientists agree. “I don’t think the self is ultimately a scientifically tractable question,” clinical neuropyschologist Paul Broks told me while I was writing The Ego Trick.
The main reason is that the very notion of a science of the self depends on us identifying its subject – the self – from the perspective of first-person experience. Science can correct false beliefs about what sustains that experience, and it can explain what makes such experience possible, but it cannot change what it means to be a self without erasing the very data it depends on.
— Julian Baggini in New Scientist, issue 2803.
I’m still chewing on this very last phrase. It’s like a star I can only see by turning my eye very slightly away.
