SECTION TWO. THE BEGINNINGS OF AN ANSWER

A. Minds, bodies and freedom

1. Because materialism cannot explain minds, the mental property of freedom is a distinct possibility.

We are in a position to search for an answer to the meaning of life having reviewed two widely differing perspectives of the world. One is optimistic, the other is pessimistic. One view regards the world as basically good and embedded with objective purposes having been created by God. The other regards the world as just having occurred --Boom! a brute absurd fact-- with things ending up as they are today through mechanical forces beyond our complete comprehension or control. It is a world of agony of consciously existing in a world of purposeless mechanical activity and cruel mystery. Both views have their believable points.

Siding with the theist, the world does seem to have some purposes beyond mechanical forces. An initial "proof" is that there are minds which generate or conceive of purposes and carry them out. The fact of minds or consciousness is all but impossible to explain by materialism; minds simply cannot be reduced completely to mechanical bodies and bodily action. There may be a very high degree of causal association between minds and bodies, but a complete reduction of the mind to material components defies, as far as I know, all attempts. Mechanism or determinism may be explained by materialism, but materialism fails ultimately to show that there are minds; simply put as a reductio ad absurdum argument, if ALL is material, and if minds are not material, then there cannot be minds --yet, there are minds. Materialism may explain how minds have the kinds of the ideas they have through association with neural processes, but not how or that there are minds with these ideas. A mind with its consciousness and self-consciousness is just something different in kind from material things.

Consider, for example, that the color green does not seem to exist anywhere in the world save in minds. I am not denying that our brains are intimately associated with our minds, only that the brute fact of consciousness is radically different from the brute fact of neural processes. We can be sure that the color green is in our minds, but we cannot be sure that the color itself is in our brains or in the grass of the world which we sense. The same is true of values and intentions. The beauty of the grass is in my mind and may be in the grass. My intention to look at the grass is in my mind, but is not in my brain in the same manner of being.

So, point-blank as Descartes would have it, the world has minds. And through mental events of those minds, intentions, values and purposes.

2. Values, intentions and purposes require free-will.

Given minds and their strange properties, even though the world does seem to be basically mechanistic, mostly consisting of material entities oblivious to the efforts of man, there is more. Our bodies are unquestionably material and mechanistic at least microscopically, which includes the organic nature of our brains. But, since we have introduced intentions and purposes through minds, we may as well introduce the mind's trump card, free-will. Whether or not the ability called free-will is correlated on a one to one basis with brain activity remains to be seen. However, the fact that free-will involves mental activity or consciousness leaves room, albeit small, for causal forces in the world other than mechanical or determinate material causes (other than causality completely derived from mechanical action). My stick-my-neck-out presumption, thus, is that some causes in the world are not strictly determined by antecedent mechanical, material causes or events simply because they originate in something non-material called a mind. The converse is also acceptable; material events, in conjunction with consciousness, are not necessarily mechanistic in nature --they could be causally indeterminate to some extent.

(But, the world certainly is not a "rose garden" as far as the existence of minds go; we may find ourselves with the same history of dinosaurs --wiped out from some mysterious environmental/material catastrophe. Put briefly, we live in a world which is almost entirely mechanistic in character. These mechanisms do not exhibit any long range purposes conducive to the betterment or even survival of man or consciousness; nature is at best neutral to whether or not man, free-will or no, exists in it. The existentialists are right about that.)

(By the way, if you are interested in the “survivability” of minds and their ideas, you might want to check out some items called “memes.” Memes, intellectual viruses which can infect minds, may lead to minds figuring out how to survive or reconstrcut the mechanical world to their benefit.)

I assume then that there are effects in the world which are due to mechanical material causes and to mental causes. Let me also assume that an appeal to the existence of God or even the possible existence of God will not be the grounds for an adequate answer to the meaning of life. (We may need God in the long run, but if we can find something on our own, so much the better for the sake of simplicity.) And, I do think that it is safe to assume that most effects or events in the world derive from material/mechanical causes. However, and here is my radical presumption, there are effects in the world that derive from mental causes some of which are free-will related; there is free-will causality.

3. What free-will is. An attempt at a first definition; it is the power of a ghost in the machine.

These mental causal forces are important. Let me try to explain what they are, by showing what they are not.

There is a radical dualism between mechanical/determinate and free-will forces within us as persons. On the one hand, we can be fairly certain that our bodies are governed by the laws of nature. In terms of physics and biology, if we trip, then we will fall; when we eat, our bodies metabolize the food and grow, but all the while aging according to genetic principles. Further, much of our behavior is mechanical. Our hand moves away from the hot burner before we feel the pain. We tend to act on beliefs which have no more rational foundation than that they were conditioned as a response to certain stimuli. Our bodies and brains are very much biological mechanisms; our breathing, temperature, and heart rate are controlled without our having to be consciously aware of those processes.

Yet, from a radically different perspective, we hold that we have autonomy and moral responsibility associated with the powers of our mental processes, which processes can be considered to be "harbored" in our bodies. We decide to give or not to give to famine relief for reasons which we think are sufficient to justify our choice. We decide, in view of moral principles inculcated in us through society’s influence, to rob or not to rob a bank or tell or not tell a slanderous lie. Again, much of what we are and do is deterministic in nature; that includes a great deal of our beliefs and behavior, especially with respect to judgments, sometimes moral judgments. But some actions and judgments result from an autonomous power (free-choice), and for these actions and judgments we hold ourselves to be morally responsible. Freedom of choice (free-will) is a power which is distinct in kind from the mechanical forces of nature. With mechanical causes the effect cannot be otherwise; with the effect caused by free-will, the result could be otherwise given a different choice. Whereas a great deal of our behavior is strictly determined by mechanical causes, with respect to actions done from free-choice, we may say that we could have done otherwise had we chosen to do so. Thus, not all human action is caused by mechanical forces which are deterministic. Some actions are the result of free choice and are not determined by antecedent material causes.

Here's another way of putting it. I may say something rude to a person whose religious belief is not the same as mine without thinking about the action; I just blurt out a response to their affirmation of faith because I have been conditioned to be skeptical about any religion. My outburst is determined by the beliefs which make up the knee-jerk reactions I may have to religious assertions. My cerebral cortex is programmed to respond in such a manner. This is a classic case of action deriving from deterministic sequencing. On the other hand, I may choose to give money to the Catholic Relief Fund, not because of its religious affirmations, but because there are good reasons for me to do so AND I choose to act on those reasons. The former action of a rude statement is strictly determined, the latter action of giving to famine relief is a free-choice.

What makes the giving to famine relief a free-choice while the other is deterministic? There are the following explanations: 1, I made the free choice; 2, the reasons I used were accepted by me and were essential to my deliberation; 3, had the reasons been otherwise, I still could have made the same choice, but probably would not have (reasons have a lot to do with determining the outcome of a choice, but they are not sufficient for the choice to be made); 4, I willed the choice --it was one which I chose: and 5, the free-choice involved neural networks at a macro-scopic level which contained such complex levels of feed-back interaction that the free-choice was actually unconsciously made and the conscious awareness of the result (the choice) was not the deciding but the outcome (the decision).

Unfortunately, given these criteria, there doesn't look like there is any real difference between a determined choice and a free choice. If my reason for an option are the reasons which cause me to decide for that option, then is it not the case that they determine my choosing the option? Looks like it. And ,in fact, I would have to admit that one cannot know that he is willing or making a free choice, only that the choice is his or appears to be his. So, the bottom line is this: no one can know with certainty that he is making a free choice when he makes the choice. However, the nature of making choices seems to indicate to us that certain choices (free choices) are different somehow from those which we label as determined. How they are different on an abstract metaphysical analysis is very puzzling. For the average lay-philosopher like me, about the best way we may determine that a free choice has been made is to look at the choice not while we are making it, but much later when we can evaluate all the conditions which made it up. In doing that, we may be able to recognize by "examining the decision backwards" while using the criteria we established above that real autonomy was involved.

4. What free-will is. An attempt at a second definition; free-will is related to the electrical “storm” in the brain, but as a mental power, it is more than the sum of the related material parts.

But, what does free-will have to do with us individually? How is it related to our personal identity and the meaning of our lives?

To answer these questions, let me try again to muck out another definition or explanation as to what is this power of free-choice or autonomy within us? Right of the bat, let me say that this is a very difficult problem which has perplexed philosophers for ages? And, I may as well be truthful by saying that as far as can be determined, the best that we can do is to maintain through a kind of pragmatic faith that we have it. Nevertheless, I do have a “backwoods” version of autonomy that I may as well get off the shelf and let fly.

Let me make an analogy to express my conception of free-will. My best guess is that a free-will is something like a covalent bond, where two atoms share an electron in the outer shells of each atom. Covalent bonds are strong and easily formed; that is how proteins with long carbon chains are possible which make up most organic tissue, especially brain tissue. The interesting thing about covalent bonds is that the electron shared belongs to each and yet neither atom. It is as though both atoms have a complete outer electron shell with a complete number of electrons. Amazingly, a covalent bond is one in which two atoms share an electron together and behave as if their outer shells are complete. The whole complex, the two conjoined atoms, are more than their constituents; separate the atoms and there is needed the missing electron for each atom to be complete. Yet, conjoined the two atoms act like regular carbon atoms in a chain while being short one electron. The one electron which makes up the bond whizzes around in such a way to satisfy the nuclear requirements of both atoms; how it does so is a mystery. Imagine a number of one-armed men hanging desperately to a bar over a deep gorge. They are side-by-side. Each man has a strong arm, but individually, that arm is not enough to keep him hanging on the bar. Mysteriously, just by being next to another one-armed man, each man somehow gains the missing arm and is able to keep a firm grip on the bar. It is as though just by being beside another one-armed man, he has gained the whole strength of the missing arm.

Free-will may be the same way with respect to the operations of the brain in conjunction with mental processes. The brain may be deterministic on individual neural levels, but as the complexity of the network advances, information may be utilized in a manner that is not mechanical --in other words, consciousness and the autonomy related to conscious decisions may be other than mechanical, for the information does not belong to one or even a few neurons which on an individual basis behave mechanically, but many different neurons at many different times. Consciousness (and autonomy) may be the "covalent bond" of neural processes. It is something over and above, different from the material constituents that give rise to it: yet, it is no more than the electrical storm in the brain. Consciousness is the electrical "ghost" in the machine (brain), which ghost inhabits parts of the machine in ways such that it is neither here nor there, but in many regions; the mind is the electrical/chemical sweeps throughout the brain. But, and here is the crucial part, decisions are made by the "ghost," not the individual minute parts (individual neurons) of the machine which give rise to the ghost. The mind is constituted by relations among material things, but these relations are more than material themselves, just as a Gestalt picture is more than its material components.

Try a simple experiment to take a closer look at the ghost. Drink a few cocktails and then try to make some free-will judgments. Our mechanical judgments will be altered --no question about that. Speech is slurred, hard to walk in a straight line, the room tends to spin against our will. And there is the crucial item. We cannot will the room to stop spinning. Moreover, the more cocktails we have, the more our ghost and the decisions made by free deliberation slip away from us until the ghost entirely disappears. The mechanisms of the brain are so affected by the alcohol that the electrical sweeps which give rise to the ghosts are debilitated to the point of operating on a "regional" bases alone, in which case consciousness or the ghost disappears while the basic bodily processes continue. The moral of the story is that free-will belongs to a ghost which derives from the electrical sweeps through the brain, which sweeps are, shall we say, effective when the material conditions necessary for them to act normally are themselves normal.

In a nutshell, free-will belongs to the mind (ghost) which inhabits he body. The body constitutes the conditions by which there is a mind at all. The mind is the body's having powers that its components could not have individually, but only collectively. The mind is an affect of the relations established by neural networks. By analogy, a movie is no more than a series of still pictures. But, get those pictures in motion so that they establish a temporal relationship, and you have a movie. Crude analogy, yet I hope the essential message is clear; the mind is the mysterious epiphenomenon that "hangs above" the electrical storm in the brain.

5. Free-will is the power by which we create or paint our selves on the canvas of being.

Let me get a little more specific operationally, yet unfortunately, vague about what we believe free-choice is when we use it personally, when we use it to make decisions about who we are and how we are to live? I want to bring art into the picture, and doing so is always dangerous, but here goes.

Free-choice means making ourselves through uncoerced action, which action does something to the world around us. Let me use an analogy from art as an aid for understanding.

When I put a certain range of colors on a canvas for a portrait, I am deciding what will be the make-up of the image; the person symbolized on the canvas is the making of my efforts based on a free-will decision process. I could have created the portrait otherwise had I decided to do so. The ugliness or beauty of the person symbolized/created on the canvas is a result of my intentionally choosing certain options. Further, as an artist, I must take responsibility for the image. What I have portrayed and when and where I hang it changes the world around it for better or worse, depending upon the beauty or ugliness of the work. No one has forced me to do the painting in a way which I would or would not choose; I am not compelled by internal or external forces to do their bidding. The work of art is a free creation.

When I choose to do certain actions which create my nature, my self, I am constructing not an image, but my real person in the world. My actions in the world create the portrait of myself; every action I do is a brush-stroke on the canvas of my being. I create the very essence of my being with each choice of the "colors" (actions and beliefs) I blend into it. Since each person is the artist of himself, he must bear the responsibility for that portrait. I am the living portrait I paint of myself, which portrait is active in the world; it is not something "hung" on the wall of life which has only a passive effect on its beholders. The world is the gallery on which our portraits act.

Back to art, for a moment. In creating a work of art, the crucial question that faces any artist is, "What constitutes beauty?" Art can be considered "art" from practically any perspective. Someone who throws paint on a wall or drapes a building in material may claim not only to be doing art, but beautiful work. Thus, for artists, what counts prima facie is not whether or not someone likes the work, but whether the work is meaningful to the artist. The work is an extension of the being of the artist --his beliefs, attitudes, emotions, and desires. It is his creative ideas being extended beyond his body. Art is the free-play of free-choice.

But, of course, the work may be ugly --something which the artist may or may not realize or intend. Thus, a critical factor for an artist and his audience is how to determine the beauty or ugliness of the work of art. There is much in the way of aesthetic debate over the controversy of objective value verses subjective value. We know that works of art do something to persons; what is at issue is, is that effect produced by something objectively beautiful or ugly in the work, or is the work aesthetically neutral, and the beauty or ugliness arises from the viewer's perspective?

Now, back to the real world and the truly important question. The correlative, interesting moral question appropriate to ask now is (the previous question's moral counterpart), when a person creates himself through a free action, is that creation objectively good through an objectively right action or is there mere subjectivity such that any creation can be viewed as good (or bad) and any action right or wrong depending upon the perspective? Put more simply, when persons do actions, are those actions objectively right or wrong such that we may say with confidence that the person is really good or bad?

6. The creation or painting of the good self.

I would like to claim that a bad work of art is like a crime well done. The work may have aesthetic value by appealing to audiences, it may be an extension of the artist's nature by being an intended work, it may be technically well done, but bad art produces long term unnecessary suffering in the world. Hitler's Triumph of the Will is a classic example. It is a technical masterpiece of artistic propaganda, but it is a bad work of art. It evokes strong pathological emotions and incorrect beliefs in those who are susceptible to such stimuli. The world created by its being in it is ugly. But, more strongly, the world is made ugly not only by the instrumental badness of the work, but also by its objective ugliness. The work of art is both instrumentally and intrinsically (objectively) ugly; it may appear to be beautiful to the uneducated, but it is in fact a disorder or disharmony in the fabric of the beauty and order of the world.

I would also like to claim that a crime well done is like a bad work of art. A person chooses to do a wrong action, to bring about something that causes unnecessary suffering in the world. The action is clearly instrumentally bad; the canvas of the world is slashed by the mischief. Moreover, the person's character is corrupted along with the world which is disturbed by his action. The portrait of himself which his intentional actions paint is one which harmfully affects the world by its mere presence. Long term, persons in the world suffer needlessly for that action and suffer the presence of a person with a bad character. The action is a crime because of what it does. But, the action adheres to the person who intentionally does it just as the colors and lines of a hideous painting belong to it; the painting is ugly in virtue of its constituents, the person is immoral (morally ugly) in virtue of wrong actions which constitute his moral portrait. Both are damaging, ugly presences in the world.

Let me state presumptively what I take to be a fact about the world. There are forces of good and evil in it. There are also forces of good and evil within us. We have to deal with both. A meaningful life revolves around choosing between good and evil and acting on that choice. Choosing the right option, doing the right action are necessary conditions of being a creative good agent in the world. That is not to say that not choosing the good makes one's life meaningless in a short term sense. There are cases in which persons are morally weak and resort to wrong actions in spite of a knowledge of what is right. The crucial aspect comes when it is time to accept responsibility for those wrong actions and remedy their effects. A good person, as with a good artist, will correct the defects of the portrait painted so that those defects will not go on to produce more bad effects in the world. There is no question that this is a difficult task; it is sometimes much easier to not correct mistakes or passively sit by while wrong doing is going on than to be an agent of right action. Being a moral person is as difficult as being a good artist; there must be an ongoing commitment and practice of value renewal and making right judgments. The person who leaves a wrong action undone is no better than an artist who fails to rectify an ugly work which could bring beauty into the world.

This value renewal and right doing involve the concept of creativity and the joys associated with it. Creativity is the power by which something novel is brought into the world. Of course, mechanical processes can bring something about that is different in the world, but it cannot bring something about that is novel --something that is unexpected or unpredictable from the sum total of antecedent mechanical causes, something that "adds" to the world. A novel and beautiful work of art brings into the world new perspectives from which life may be evaluated. Works of art add to the world things brought about by intention and the free choices necessary to bring about the final result. Beauty comes into being in the world through this emergence of novelty. Along with the beauty comes the enjoyment of it as a work of creativity and the satisfaction of a work well-done. The same is true of moral action.

7. Creating or painting one’s self in being a plan-in-action.

When one is involved in creating himself (his meaning or portrait in the world) through free choices among future options, he is bringing into the world a plan-in-action, something whose end is in the very process of the activity of becoming it. This is a difficult concept to grasp, but it is not a new one. Aristotle speaks of those things which are in becoming which have their telos or end within them. For example, were I to choose to become a physician, the end or telos (being a physician) will be an integral part of the process whereby I become a physician. During that training period, were someone to ask me what I am, I would respond, "I am a plan-in-action to become a physician" --spoken in everyday language, "I'm a med student." What is novel is how I put that plan into action; what it is that I do to make myself a physician. Each option that I choose paints a line on the character or nature of myself as a physician. And each chosen option requires a preceding judgment based on good reasons designed to produce the good end. Cutting corners or deviating from the correct technique, as with art, will produce a finished product with flaws. A product with flaws is likely to produce harm or ugliness in the world. An artist who produces through malpractice a riveting collage of savage movie drama to be shown to young persons on TV will harm these young persons without justification. A physician who has not trained technically and ethically is destined to cause harm through malpractice to unsuspecting persons.

Creativity and the commitment to renew values is a substantial part of the answer for which we are looking. To return to Camus' question of suicide and give an answer to it, we may conclude that suicide is not a moral option, for it is the contrary of creative autonomy. The meaning of life is to see life through, to make oneself in the world (to be a creative artist) and appreciate the associated values which spring from that creation. As I have noted, there are forces of good and evil in the world. Nothing could be more satisfactory to forces of evil than to see a creative agent (and creative agents are the ONLY causes in the world which can bring about novelty and goodness) succumb to their efforts by giving up. Being a moral artist, a good person, is creating a good, beautiful self and world through right action or at least the sincere attempts at right action, even though the fruits of those actions may be thwarted.

There is a commitment to be made by the moral artist, the good person. He is committed to being an agent of goodness and novelty in a world which otherwise would not have it or attempt to destroy it. This commitment requires great courage, for there may be no others to help the moral artist when help is really needed. In the face of unfortunate and unmitigated adversity, the moral agent will see his right actions through; he will not surrender to the dark forces of wrong/irrational action. He will assert the right and be a ray of goodness leaving a star of truth rather than retreat and leave a sludge trail of despair.

What we are is constituted by our beliefs, some of which (the important ones) we have chosen; who we are is constituted by our actions based on these beliefs, especially the actions which are the result of deliberation and free-choice. The WHO we are is constituted by the different beliefs that make us individually unique; no other person has the same beliefs another person has --sort of like fingerprints; we have them but each person has prints that uniquely distinguish him/her from anyone else. WHAT we are is these beliefs in use via the "hardwire" of our bodily systems so that the actions produced are specific to us. Our GOODNESS is the measure of value of our beliefs and the actions which follow from them as they affect the world; our PERSONAL IDENTITY is the history of our beliefs and actions, plans-of-actions through time.

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