Are we just sacks of meat?

Shirley asked:

Is “free will” just a comfort for those who want to believe, or are we electrified sacks of meat tenderized with hormones, memory, and survival instincts?

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

I’ll start with a picky point. The question you posed isn’t an alternative, as it first appears to be. What you are asking is whether we are just ‘sacks of meat’, in which case what we term ‘free will’ is merely a ‘comforting belief’.

My answer is, No.

You could start by reading my answer, Free will and creative reverie where I explain why a free will worth having requires that determinism be false. This is a point on which I have changed my mind, as I once held that it made no difference whether determinism holds or not. My bad!

This time, rather than going through the same argument, I will illustrate my answer with an actual example, which explains what I mean by ‘creative reverie’.

Recently, I started writing songs. This is something no-one who knew me could have predicted, and indeed if I’d been given a glimpse into the future just two months ago, I would have been astonished. However, as a self-termed ‘philosophizer’, it now seems to me perfectly reasonable to express and communicate my philosophizing using the medium of songwriting.

This is how it came about. One of the things I do when I am bored is browse the listings on eBay. One day, around two months ago, the idea came into my head (from I don’t know where, although I’m sure there is an explanation) to look at the listings for electric guitars. Suddenly I knew that I wanted one. I already have steel string and nylon string acoustic guitars, and even went so far as to buy an electric pickup and amplifier for one of my acoustics. But now I knew, absolutely and without a shadow of a doubt, that I wouldn’t be happy until I had an electric guitar to add to my collection.

I found one, a Washburn modelled the much more expensive Gibson Les Paul. It was a nice price, looked good. I made an offer which was accepted. And that was it.

As I experimented with the different luscious sounds from the twin humbucker pickups, I found myself playing a chord progression, and I thought, ‘This could be a song.’ A short while later, the song was composed, recorded, and posted on YouTube. Three more followed. And now I’m working on a fifth.

And my question: Is it really credible that these songs have existed for all time, that they were ‘determined’ by the way the BIg Bang banged? Or are they genuine novelties, new additions to the universe, that it took a chain of seemingly unlikely circumstances to bring into being?

I think the latter. But now, an extra finesse. My song, the one I can’t quite finish, is about zombies. And your question gave me the prefect chorus, for which I am extremely grateful. All I need now is a melody with a ‘hook’. So here goes:

    Zombie Dream

    It aint so sweet (etc.)

You notice that I substituted ‘bags of meat’ for ‘sacks of meat’. It’s only a small change but ‘bags’ just sounds better to me than ‘sacks’. In the process of songwriting you make myriad decisions like this, and each decision is an ‘act of will’. It’s a creative process.

Of course, all sorts of ‘influences’ come into play. There’s a pop song from the 50s which goes, ‘Aint that sweet, see her walking down the street…’. The cracked mirror wasn’t just my invention, it’s a familiar movie trope. That was kind-of the point. And so on.

To sum up: It is extraordinarily difficult to explain, in theory, what we want in wanting ‘free will’. But when you look at actual examples of human decision making, it’s simply obvious. Every moment of every day I am adding something new to the universe, to reality. How that is possible may seem a mystery, but then so is the fact that anything exists at all.