Many a time I have found myself stuck with the simple question of “do we have free will?” If you ponder it hard enough (and know enough chemistry/physics/biology/philosophy) it can be a rather hard, even impossible question to answer. For many years I was in the category of “yes we have free will” and as the years have gone by this wall of free will seems to have been slowly eroded. I am not really sure anymore just how “free” our free will is.

The basic argument comes down to the brain. Is the brain simply a machine like any other, reacting blinding (although in a fascinatingly complex manner) to stimuli. Have we been put together by millions of years of natural selection and really only suffer under the illusion of free will. I choose X and not Y because my brain is set up in such a way that I was always going to choose X. Or are we able to truly take in all stimulus from our environment and then make a choice? I choose X and not Y because I want to. Is there any difference?

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There is an interesting article in the Economist.

IN THE late 1990s a previously blameless American began collecting child pornography and propositioning children. On the day before he was due to be sentenced to prison for his crimes, he had his brain scanned. He had a tumour. When it had been removed, his paedophilic tendencies went away. When it started growing back, they returned. When the regrowth was removed, they vanished again. Who then was the child abuser?

His case dramatically illustrates the challenge that modern neuroscience is beginning to pose to the idea of free will. The instinct of the reasonable observer is that organic changes of this sort somehow absolve the sufferer of the responsibility that would accrue to a child abuser whose paedophilia was congenital. But why? The chances are that the latter tendency is just as traceable to brain mechanics as the former; it is merely that no one has yet looked. Scientists have looked at anger and violence, though, and discovered genetic variations, expressed as concentrations of a particular messenger molecule in the brain, that are both congenital and predisposing to a violent temper. Where is free will in this case?

Check the rest out here.