Review of Chris Nunn's "De La Mettrie's Ghost"
De La Mettrie's
Ghost seeks to provide a scientific
explanation for free will. The books author, Chris Nunn, argues that "stories,"
recorded in memory, provide the nexus for choice. Unfortunately, this argument,
almost from the beginning, veers toward a sort of cultural determinism. The only
freedom that his account of human decision making allows for is an individual's
haphazard choice of which stories—i.e., which culturally determined
objects—are to dominate his life.
Nunn's argument is unconvincing for the simple
reason that he is not able to think outside the box of methodological
determinism. At some point, champions of free will have to admit that freedom is
not explicable within the methodological framework of mechanistic science. Nunn
appears to sympathize with panpsychism, but it is only through epistemological
dualism that the solution to the problem of free will can be found. Most of the
confused ideas about freedom and determinism that arise from science have their
source in the failure to distinguish between the terms and symbols and metaphors
in which the objects of science are described on the one side and the actual
physical objects or processes on the other. Quantum mechanics is particularly
prone to such confusions, as it is assumed that the symbols appropriate to
describing quantum objects must be analogous to the symbols describing the
objects of sense. But this viewpoint makes the mistake of assuming that every
aspect of the universe exists for the convenience of the human mind. Only by
acknowledging that the universe exists on a different plane of reality from the
mind and that different aspects of reality must have thier own unique systems of
metaphors and symbols in order to achieve an apt representation within human
consciousness can we ever hope to begin to understand freedom within the total
context of our knowledge.
Posted: Sun - June 17, 2007 at 06:31 PM