ON THE MATTER OF FREE WILL (Or Part One Of A Triptych In Which Miss Dreamy Can Be Observed Reading From Her Book...)

If mind is a property of the brain, and human behaviour a result of cultural conditioning, can there be such a such a thing as free will?

The idealist is necessarily affirmative: he avers the possibility of more or less fundamentally defying constraint and substituting human determinism for an act of volition. The realist acknowledges an encoded process of
development which he is powerless to change. To him a human being is a finite and dependent being: He cannot fly, he cannot make it rain on demand, he doesn’t get to decide if it’s day or night, he doesn’t even chose the language he’s
going to be born into.

If physical reality, then, can only be predicted by invoking the
mathematics of probability, human behaviour, too, in terms of probability, can
always be predicted en masse. As has already been noted, it is an intriguing and
inexplicable fact that - in the matter of spontaneous nuclear disintegration -
there is no criterion for deciding which atom, on an unprompted impulse, is
going to decay. For while observation has shown that the time it takes for a
given quantity of radioactive material to decay is precisely that predicted by
theory, by any measurement we can make, the process itself is random. And
admittedly, on the basis of mere supposition, this aimlessness hardly seems true
of the individual human activity. No collective rule or pattern seems quite to
apply. We may speak of a baby-boom, or a suicide-wave, but only by the
deliberate resort to free will, the reasoned determination of persons pursuing
their own fate, can one define individuality.

And yet, the supposition is wrong: collective behaviour displays
symmetry with a rate of conformity proportional to numbers!

In their aggregate capacity, when large collections of people are
considered, free will plays none but a statistical role. Human behaviour is
fundamentally pattern-forming. Indeed, as soon as one begins to look into the
subject, one is confronted with the idea of co-ordination of human activity by
means of systems of impersonal or collective patterns, within which alone
spontaneous situations may arise. Beyond that, the question of free will does
not admit of a single exception. And once this is realized, it is difficult to
avoid the conclusion that single events, by the inevitable pressure of numbers,
must occur with a predictability so close to certainty as to appear an
inevitability.

Dreamy