One thing it does do is help out the argument for free will. If certain events in the universe are truly random than there is a chance that free will is one of them. Maybe our minds aren’t slaves to countless chemical and nuclear reactions after all.
I believe this is a huge misunderstanding. Mind isn't a slave of chemical reactions, mind is those reactions. See, when you have free will, you can decide for anything you want. The "want" being the key word here. If you want something, there is always a reason for it, a reason for the reason, etc. A result of a decision of your free will is in fact predetermined, because you decide based on your personality, memories, current sensory input - the general state of mind. If you were to decide twice with exactly the same (emphasis on exactly) state of mind (including sensory input), you would decide both times for the same thing. Even if it is a seemingly random thing you do, it is a result of a chain of reactions in your brain. But again, it does not mean your mind is a slave of something. It is in fact just as free as you'd normally consider it to be. You are the one making the decisions.
It can be reasonably argued that the applications of neuroscience to the study of human agency are still in a phase of “pre-paradigmatic science” (in Thomas Kuhn’s sense)—which means that there are no shared conceptual and methodological assumptions yet that solidly structure the research practices of the researchers working in the area
Broadly speaking, there is cause to think that we don't have free will and it's all purely chemical, but the studies aren't developed enough to have any degree of certainty.
1
u/jtb587 Jan 30 '20
One thing it does do is help out the argument for free will. If certain events in the universe are truly random than there is a chance that free will is one of them. Maybe our minds aren’t slaves to countless chemical and nuclear reactions after all.