Free Will Denialism Is the Worst Type of Denialism

Free will denialism is when someone denies that humans have free will. A typical free will denialist claims that you do not have free will, because all of your choices are determined by events in the brain.  Were that true, you might not be responsible for your decisions. 

Free will denialism is morally poisonous, because it tends to weaken or destroy any sense of shame or guilt a person might have. Free will denialism offers an excuse (a kind of “get out of jail free” card) for any evil thing that you might do. If you believe that you have no free will, and that everything you do is completely mandated by the particles and electricity in your brain and the laws of physics, you may kill, maim or rape without feeling any sense of guilt at all. Why feel guilty about your conduct, if your neurons and brain chemicals and brain electricity made you do it? A person should only feel guilty about anything if there is free will.

Thankfully, there is a way to completely undermine the insanity of free will denialism, to make it melt into the ground like the Wicked Witch of the West after Dorothy threw a bucket of water on her. We can make the specter of free will denialism melt away in our minds by simply discarding the unwarranted doctrine that the human brain generates the human mind.  Free will denialism is entirely predicated on the dogma that the mind is generated by the brain. But if our minds are not generated by our brains, there is not the slightest reason to doubt our free will. If your mind is some spiritual reality or soul reality or some mental reality that is not generated by my brain, then if you do something evil you can't blame your neurons or some chemical reactions or electricity in your head; you can only blame your self.

The fact that we can defeat the mind poison of free will denialism and preserve a belief in free will is a practical reason for believing that the brain does not make the mind. But such a practical reason is only one of many reasons for believing that minds do not come from brains. They include the following:

• the fact that there are many dramatic cases in the medical literature of people who had more or less normal minds even though large fractions of the brain (or most of their brains) were destroyed due to injury or disease, including super-dramatic cases of people with good minds but less than 15 percent of their brains;
• the fact that there is no scientific understanding at all of how brains or neurons could be producing consciousness, thought, understanding or abstract ideas (mental things that are very hard or impossible to explain as coming from physical things);
• the fact that there is no plausible account to be told of how brains could possibly be storing memories that last for fifty years, given the high protein turnover in synapses, where the average protein only lasts a few weeks;
• the fact that there is no scientific understanding at all of how brains or neurons could produce any such things as choices or decisions;
• the fact that there is no understanding of how brains could achieve the instantaneous recall of distant, obscure memories that humans routinely show, given the lack of any coordinate system or indexing in a brain that might allow some exact position of a stored memory to be very quickly found;
• the fact that there is no understanding whatsoever of how concepts, visual information, long series of words, and episodic memories could ever be physically stored by a brain in any way that would translate all these diverse types of information into synapse states or neuron states;
• the fact that the microscopic examination of very many thousands of brains of recently deceased people (and the microscopic examination of endless samples of brain tissue extracted from living people) has never produced the slightest trace of learned information, something that would have been discovered in brains 50 years ago if brains stored memories and brains are the source of the human mind;
• the fact that human brains (all very severely handicapped by cumulative synaptic delays and unreliable synaptic transmission) are way too slow and way too noisy to explain the wonders of human best mental performances, which include endless wonders of blazing fast calculation, blazing fast precise recall, blazing fast memorization,  and the recitation with perfect accuracy of very long bodies of text consisting of hundreds of pages;  
• the fact that for more than 50 years numerous people have reported vivid near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences occurring after their hearts stopped and their brains were inactive, during times when they had no brain waves, and they should have had no consciousness at all (under "brains make minds" assumptions), with many of the observation details they reported seeing during such brain-inexplicable should-have-been-utterly-unconscious experiences being independently verified (as described here);
• the fact that humans have very many types of well-documented experiences that are inexplicable under any claim that the brain is the source of the human mind.  

So while there is a practical moral reason for believing that minds do not come from brains, what we may call a reason of convenience, there are many more evidence reasons and logic reasons for thinking such a thing, reasons that hold with equal strength even if we pay no attention to practical consequences.

Do not fall victim to the madness that is free will denialism. You are a person with free will and moral responsibility. Nothing could be more obvious, and the fact that some deny this fact so obvious merely shows that humans can believe the silliest things. If you do some evil thing, you should feel guilt, because it is your self who made the bad decision, not your neurons. 

Avoid arguing with a free will denialist on some tiny little evidence matters he prefers to discuss, such as what exactly went on in some murky little experiment. Instead, turn the argument into a larger discussion of whether it makes sense to believe that brains produce minds. Learn well the facts and reasons for rejecting "brains make minds" dogma, and you will have the best defense against the cancer of free will denialism. 

Holocaust denialism is stupid, but not a tenth as stupid as free will denialism. The Holocaust denier claims that the Nazis were not so guilty, while the free will denialist would have us believe that the Nazis were not guilty at all, on the grounds that they were controlled by their brain chemistry.  

Sowing the seeds of immorality and wickedness, free will denialists lie like crazy. A careful study of their claims will help reveal the lies they so often tell. Free will denialists tell lies like those I list in my post here. I recently read a well-known scientist who revealed himself to be a free will denialist. I have followed the person's writings for years, and I know him to be a frequent liar. You should never be the least bit surprised to learn that a free will denialist is lying, and you should not be surprised if you learn such a  person committed some very bad crime.  We should expect that a person who believes that someone is not to blame for his actions will tend to act in ways that are shameful, whenever he thinks he can get away with such actions. 

Free will denialism is the nadir we might expect from materialism, which has always been a program aiming to dehumanize and depersonalize humans, to try to make humans sound like something more easily explicable as some accident of nature. 

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