The Paradox of Free Will Strikes Again!:
Some time after I finished the last book I met a physicist at a party. He was talking to someone about the What the #$*! Do We Know?! movie. The person he was talking to liked it, but he hated it, and said that every physicist he knew who saw it hated it too. He had the same problem with it I did; only for him it was a lot more personal. According to the movie, human consciousness is the most fundamental unit of reality. I thought that was bullsh*t for the reasons I gave the last book, and he agreed. He said that the reason people can get away with that explanation so easily is because physicists can’t come up with a better explanation that the public can understand. In his words, “They’re invoking human consciousness as a supernatural force, and when you start invoking supernatural forces, you’re no longer talking about science.”
Basically, the pursuit of subatomic physics has reached the boundaries of consciousness, where physicists have broken the universe down into such small components that their own consciousness— including their methods of observation—makes up such a large proportion of the observation process that nobody can figure out how to separate their own consciousness from their observations well enough to yield useful data anymore. Essentially, back in the beginning, they asked, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?” Now they’ve identified exactly which tree is going to fall and they know everything there is to know about the tree and the ground it’s going to land on, but they still can’t determine whether or not it’s going to make a noise if they aren’t there when it falls. I don’t know quite how good of an analogy that is, but I think that’s the general idea. Basically, physicists have pushed the boundaries of physics to the point that humans don’t possess the mental equipment they would need to go any further. Or even if they haven’t reached that point yet, they’re bound to reach it eventually.
The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity presents the same problem. If I define all human behavior by the efficient expenditure of energy, it functions as a scientific theory, even though the components it’s made of don’t officially qualify as science. If I define all human behavior as the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her, then essentially I disprove free will. If the theory disproves free will, then it renders itself useless, because it prevents anyone from being able to decide how to use it.
As my physicist friend said, there’s a warning among subatomic physicists: “Don’t try to make sense of any of this, or you’ll dig yourself into a hole that no one has ever climbed out of.” I’d heard that saying before. Long ago the field of subatomic physics reached the point where physicists could use their science to generate numbers, and they could use the numbers to make accurate predictions and build nuclear power plants that worked and things like that, but what the numbers actually meant was so far removed from anything our consciousness was equipped to deal with that I guess some physicists have actually driven themselves insane trying make subatomic physics make sense to them.
So I’ve basically discovered the same problem applied to evolution. In the last book I showed you observable evidence that disproved your free will in four different ways. Now I’ll use the effective preservation of DNA explanation to do it again. Watch this:
All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her. If you can see two possible choices, and one of them obviously offers you a more effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA, there is no choice to make. You’ll do whatever you perceive to preserve the survival of your DNA most effectively. If I offered you a job and told you I could either pay you eight dollars an hour or ten dollars an hour, and it made no difference to me or anyone else, and you could think about it for as long as you wanted, you’d take the ten dollars an hour. You wouldn’t be making a choice, and therefore you wouldn’t be using free will. The only reason you’d take eight dollars an hour would be if you thought there was some sort of catch I wasn’t telling you about. And I can already predict why you’d make that choice, so it still isn’t free will.
If you can see two possible choices and they both look equally attractive at first, and you have to think about them both before you choose one, you still aren’t using free will. Suppose I offer you the choice between doing a job for eight dollars an hour with benefits, or ten dollars an hour without benefits. The only thing that’s changed here is that at first you can’t perceive which one offers you the most effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA, so you have to think about it until you do perceive one or the other to offer you the most effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA. And once you do that, you choose the one that you perceive to offer you the most effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA. So you still aren’t using free will.
You still don’t believe me though, do you? I’m sure that after reading the first book a few of you out there even burned yourselves with cigarette lighters or hit yourselves in the heads with boards or did things that were equally stupid, just to prove you could make that choice. Hopefully some of you have been applying your free will to your lives more than you were before. But that still doesn’t prove anything, because I made that happen by placing information into your brain, and now that’s affecting your decision-making process, and that proves… oh, forget it.
My point is, you don’t possess the mental equipment that believing in your own lack of free will would require, so it’s pointless to write a scientific theory that disproves your free will, because it wouldn’t mean anything to you.