individuality...(utterly butterly crap)

In a way, in our
contemporary world view,
It's easy to think that science
has come to take the place of God.
But some philosophical problems
remain as troubling as ever.
Take the problem
of free will.
This problem's been around
for a long time,
since before Aristotle
in 3 50 B.C.
St. Augustine,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
these guys all worried
about how we can be free...
if God already knows in advance
everything you're gonna do.
Nowadays we know that the world
operates according to some
fundamental physical laws,
and these laws govern the behavior
of every object in the world.
Now, these laws, because
they're so trustworthy,
they enable incredible
technological achievements.
But look at yourself.
We're just physical systems too.
We're just complex arrangements
of carbon molecules.
We're mostly water,
and our behavior isn't gonna be
an exception to basic physical laws.
So it starts to look like whether it's
God setting things up in advance...
and knowing everything
you're gonna do...
or whether it's these basic
physical laws governing everything.
There's not a lot of room
left for freedom.
So now you might be tempted
to just ignore the question,
ignore the mystery
of free will.
Say, "Oh, well, it's just an historical
anecdote. It's sophomoric.
It's a question with no answer.
Just forget about it."
But the question keeps staring you
right in the face.
You think about individuality,
for example, who you are.
Who you are is mostly a matter
of the free choices that you make.
Or take responsibility.
You can only be held responsible,
you can only be found guilty
or admired or respected...
for things you did
of your own free will.
The question keeps coming back, and we
don't really have a solution to it.
It starts to look like all your
decisions are really just a charade.
Think about how it happens.
There's some electrical activity
in your brain.
Your neurons fire. They send
a signal down into your nervous system.
It passes along down
into your muscle fibers.
They twitch. You might, say,
reach out your arm.
Looks like it's
a free action on your part,
but every one of those--
every part of that process...
is actually governed by
physical law:
chemical laws,
electrical laws and so on.
So now it just looks like the Big Bang
set up the initial conditions,
and the whole rest
of our history
the whole rest of human history
and even before,
is really just sort of the playing out
of subatomic particles...
according to these basic
fundamental physical laws.
We think we’re special. We think we
have some kind of special dignity,
but that now
comes under threat.
I mean, that's really
challenged by this picture.
So you might be saying, "Well, wait a
minute. What about quantum mechanics?
"I know enough contemporary
physical theory to know
it's not really like that.
"It's really
a probabilistic theory.
There's room. It's loose.
It's not deterministic."
And that's gonna enable us
to understand free will
But if you look at the details,
it's not really gonna help...
because what happens is you have
some very small quantum particles,
and their behavior is
apparently a bit random.
They swerve. Their behavior is absurd
in the sense that it's unpredictable...
and we can't understand it
based on anything that came before.
It just does something out of the blue,
according to a probabilistic framework.
But is that gonna help
with freedom?
Should our freedom just be
a matter of probabilities,
just some random swerving
in a chaotic system?
That just seems like it's worse.
I'd rather be a gear...
in a big deterministic,
physical machine...
than just some
random swerving.
So we can't just ignore
the problem.
We have to find room in our
contemporary world view for persons,
with all that that it entails;
not just bodies, but persons.
And that means trying
to solve the problem of freedom,
finding room for choice
and responsibility...
and trying to understand
individuality.