Solipsis: Escape from the Comatorium (10 page)

“
Please
ask yourself which is more likely. A series of mechanical connections
creating nothing but ones and zeroes is all it takes to produce a
person, all of their memories, their hopes and dreams, their inner
beauty, their everything, the human being is just this lump of gray
matter, this series of switches. Or is it more likely that the most
complicated, and capable thing in the entire universe, the human
being, is a combination of things and cannot be reduced to only the
physical processes that
current
scientists have been able to pin down. Perhaps the character of our
souls influences our DNA. Perhaps the depth of our character is
manifested in our brain waves. Perhaps our choices to do good or
evil, are made by something deeper, bigger, or beyond the limited
concept of consciousness my opponent laid out.”

“
I
told you I would give you a competing view of free will and here it
is. The universe is test. God has put us here to test our character,
to judge our souls. Why? We cannot know. Nobody can know or
understand God's mind.” Dr. Lazarus pauses to let his words
sink in. “I don't know which is worse, admitting to a
conference of neuroscientists that you're a psychopath or that you're
a Christian.” The audience laughs tensely.

“
Let
us suppose that my opponent is right, and that we can be
indoctrinated, our physical brain can be manipulated into making us
do anything, and we have no control of it. Now let us suppose that we
go around teaching everyone, forming in their minds the circuitry to
go along with this notion, that there is no free will. Wouldn't that
create a self-fulfilling prophecy? If everyone believed that they
weren't in control of their actions, then they wouldn't have to
justify anything, they wouldn't think twice, they'd rape, murder,
steal, etc. Clearly this idea wouldn't be good for civilization. And
yet my opponent is up here trying to plant the circuit in our minds
that tells us we aren't in control and our decisions don't matter.
This is clearly not something we should be teaching people. Even if
it were true, I think we all agree that we'd be better off not
knowing it, just as the world may have been better off not
discovering the secrets to atomic weaponry.”

“
That
doesn't make sense,” Renee whispers to Nellie as she takes
notes.

“
Why?”

“
He's
not arguing about facts, he's just trying to say that his ideas seem
nicer,” Renee says.

“
You
want to go up there and tell him that?” Nellie asks.

“
What?”

“
Yeah,
go ahead and go up there.”

“
I
can't do that,” Renee insists.

Dr. Lazarus finishes up a point
and takes his seat. Renee's wide eyes hope desperately that Nellie
takes the podium. They sit silently in an agonizing battle of wills.
Finally Nellie stands up. Renee breathes a huge sigh of relief.

“
I'm
joined on the stage by my daughter Renee. She's here at this debate
because she's being punished. So if you want to call me a hypocrite
for arguing that free will doesn't exist, and then punishing my
daughter, you've got a fair complaint. However, she just made a point
I found interesting, so I'd like her to come up here and say a few
words. Please don't go easy on her, remember, she's being punished.”

Renee tries to find a worm-hole
she can slip into and disappear from that stage. The entire audience
looks to her frightened face. She has no choice, she stands up and
puts one foot in front of the other.

“
Hi,”
Renee says quietly into the microphone. Her words echo of the pyramid
ceiling and bounce around the atrium a dozen times. “I hate my
parents.” Renee tries to back away from the podium, but Nellie,
standing at her side, holds her shoulder and keeps her from leaving.

“
I
just want to say that Dr. Lazarus's arguments are not based on the
facts,” Renee pauses, the silence is excruciating. Part of her
wants to just stop right there. “He's not trying to convince us
that the facts support his theory. Instead, he's trying to convince
us that the world would be better off if he's correct.” The
words come much more easily now, “It might be unsettling to
realize that we're not in control of ourselves, but there's no law of
the universe that says we have to like the truth. Just because we
might want to believe we'll be reunited with our dead loved ones when
we die, it doesn't make that likely to be true.”

Renee takes a step back from the
podium. Nellie pats her on the back and says, “keep going.”

“
I
don't know what else to say,” Renee insists, pulling away.
Nellie relents, taking the podium.

“
She
just turned sixteen, can you believe it?” Nellie announces.
Renee tries to bury her face in the table. “A moment ago Dr.
Lazarus appealed to probability,” Nellie says at the podium in
the center of the atrium. “He asked if it was likely that a
human being is nothing more than physical matter, ones and zeroes.
Since we're playing the likelihood game, Dr. Lazarus, ask yourself
which is the better explanation. That free will is an illusion and we
are the product of our genes, environment, upbringing, and luck. Or
is it more likely that an all-powerful god created a universe fifteen
billion years ago so that he could have human civilization on one of
the trillions of planets for a few thousand years, just so he could
play some parlor game of judging whether some souls are good or bad?
Keeping in mind that an all-powerful god both created these souls in
the first place, and therefore is more responsible for their
character than the souls are, and he doesn't need to run his
experiment to judge the souls, since he's all-knowing and could
foresee how we would be judged. So then he grants us free will so
that it makes sense to judge us, only to have our free will dependent
on prior causes which we don't control.”

“
On
one hand we have an all-knowing, all-powerful god who runs poorly
controlled experiments for dubious reasons so he can reward or punish
creatures that he made for being exactly how he made them. On the
other hand we have a materialistic universe where everything happens
because of a prior cause, one after another in an unbroken chain back
to some beginning. The only thing we can't explain is just how this
all got set into motion, and we can't travel back in time or out of
the universe to examine the first cause. Other than that one event,
fifteen billion years ago, we can pretty much explain everything
else. We scientists are quick to say that we don't know how or why
that happened, or even what exactly it was, though we know to some
extent. But Dr. Lazarus somehow knows who was responsible for that
event, why it occurred, and what the meaning of all of it is. How?
Where do you get the evidence that the universe is a moral experiment
to allow a supernatural being to judge our soul? We can't find the
soul, we can't find the free will, and we can't find this god. So
whose story is more likely? The one based on scientific evidence, or
the one based on bronze age superstitions-”

Dr. Lazarus leaps to his podium,
“I find this offensive! Right there, madam, you have
demonstrated the arrogance of science. First of all, we aren't
debating theology, cosmology, eschatology, or anything of the sort.
You've attacked me not for what I say, but for my beliefs which are
unrelated to the topic of this discussion.”

“
But
it is relevant to the topic. You brought up your theology a few
moments ago in defense of your views on free will.”

“
That
was a tangential point, not the thesis of my theory. If you're going
to attack me, attack my argument, not my beliefs.” Most of the
audience roars in support.

“
I
didn't attack your belief-” Nellie tries to defend herself, but
her words are met with boos from the audience.

“
You
called Christianity a bronze age superstition, you better believe
that is an attack. Now I believe it's my turn to speak, so move
along,” he patronizingly waves his hand at her. Nellie takes
her seat.

“
See,
I told you this wouldn't be boring,” Nellie whispers to Renee
with a smile. Renee listens intently as Lazarus delivers a sermon on
the arrogance of secular science and how offensive many of Nellie's
claims were. His tone grows increasingly hostile.

Dr. Rendrow interrupts the
passionate sermon to allow Nellie to give a final statement.

“
Dr.
Lazarus finds it offensive that I would even mention his religiosity.
However, if you look at the human brain the way I do, then it's clear
to see that Dr. Lazarus's thinking and his arguments and theories are
influenced by his environment, his upbringing, genetics,
epi-genetics, indoctrination, and so on and so forth. From my
perspective, Dr. Lazarus believes free will exists not because he
examined it objectively and found that it does. He believes that it
exists, and that belief is apparently unshakeable. This is the
problem with religious beliefs and faith. Faith asks you to believe
in something despite a lack of evidence, or even evidence to the
contrary. In religious circles, as many of you know, faith is a
virtue. It's made virtuous to distrust hard evidence and scientific
theories, and to instead just have faith in an idea because it must
be true. Dr. Lazarus's
worldview
breaks down if free will doesn't exist. Humans are naturally
resistant to the idea that we are wrong. We don't want to wake up and
realize that we've wasted our lives pursuing the wrong goals for the
wrong reasons. Instead of being objective, taking in all the
evidence, and making a truly informed decision, many humans do
something very counter-productive.”

“
This
phenomenon is called confirmation bias. If you were raised by an
overly-involved mother who told you every day that you were an
amazing singer and really convinced you that you had the best singing
voice in the world, and then you went off to a competition and
finished dead last, you would be very resistant to the idea that you
lost because you aren't talented. Confirmation bias is a bias in
which we search for every bit of information that affirms what we
believe, and then we dismiss any bit of information that suggests
that we're wrong. Go to any talent audition and you'll find that many
of those who are dismissed will have all kinds of excuses for why the
judges are wrong. Many of these people, it's hard to believe they
ever thought they had any talent in the first place, and you think,
surely they must have been told. Where are their friends to tell
them, come on, you can't sing, or you dance like some kind of
meth-addicted zombie? But the reason they haven't objectively made an
accurate estimate of their talent is that they've ignored all the
information that goes to the other side, looking for all the little
bits and pieces of information that agree with them.”

“
Any
scientifically trained person who looks at anything to do with the
science offered up for intelligent design, will find an encyclopedia
of confirmation bias. Pick up one of these textbooks and you'll find
that the bulk of their argument is based on the flimsiest of
evidence. Then they address the scientific argument, which has the
weight of literally billions of years worth of evidence, and they'll
dismiss all of it because of a few contradictions or mistakes. They
point to the times when a scientific theory needed to be changed, or
to the few cases of forged or misunderstood evidence. Essentially,
they've latched on to very flimsy evidence that agrees with them, and
have reached for the moon for excuses to dismiss the evidence that
doesn't agree with them.”

“
This
is insulting! Offensive, shame on you!” Dr. Lazarus shouts from
his chair.

“
Remember
what
my daughter said, the truth isn't required to be pleasing.”

Dr. Lazarus jumps up and grabs
the microphone at his podium, “Who's looking for excuses to
dismiss their opponent now? Don't tell me I'm the one with
confirmation bias.”