Its coming: The most ground-breaking revolution in social history

Your father’s sperm carried one half of a set of instructions. Your mother’s egg carried one half of a set of instructions. When they fused the full set of instructions required to make you came into being. Picture that fertilised egg. It is only one cell - and yet there you are. Everything that will occur in your body, including every thought and feeling, will be enabled by what is in that one cell.

Sometime within the next two decades, each of us will have a printout of what was is in that one cell. This will be your own unique genome. For rational people, that printout will make it still harder to resist the conclusion that we are no more than mechanisms and that a human brain works as a mechanism: as does all other organs which are totally subject to inviolate physical laws governing the movement of every particle (atom and molecule) in them.

But, the way the cells in your plastic brain are ‘wired up’ will significantly depend on your life experiences. An experience is the feedback between you and your environment. That feedback causes the architecture of the wiring in the brain to be as it is. No two people have exactly the same life experiences and what you have experienced will determine the choices you make because you can only make a choice if there is the specific neural network supporting the thought. What control have you had over the experiences you have had, that is, the networks you have and the thoughts you are now having?

Until you ceased to be supported by your parents, your experiences have been determined by how they related to each other, how they related to you and how you and your siblings related to each other. The people you related to outside of your home depended on where your parents could afford to live. In other words, you were at the mercy of circumstances. So, you are not responsible for those neural networks you gained up to the time you left home.

But the decisions you make from then on are made looking through the window created in your first 18 years. By then your sense of right and wrong has been established. By then you will have known if your genetics have determined if you are naturally timid or aggressive. Your personality and moods, which are out of your control to change, will play a dominant role in the decisions you make.

Moods which are out of your control are built-in to your neural-endocrine system. They cannot be built-in to a computer. A computer answering on the other end of a phoneline which is indistinguishable from another human will never be invented.

As this century unfolds, advances in neuroscience will be reinforcing over and over again that the experience of exercising one’s free-will is no more than a feeling. When, we may ask, will the average person come to realise that punishment is undeserved? While we must remove career criminals from the mainstream, there is no justification for making their lives miserable while incarcerated.

But, if there should be no punishment, there should be no reward for decisions which could not have gone any other way. There should be no sporting heroes put on pedestals and no million dollar executive salaries. When we finally face facts, there will be the most ground-breaking social revolution in history.

Those desperate to hold back the onslaught by science on the existence of free-will, point to the uncertainty in quantum physics where events are definitely not pre-determined. The behaviour of individual particles as small as electrons can only be described in terms of probabilities. But if many millions of these tiny particles are involved in a decision, an average outcome can be determined with certainty. Quantum physics does not support the existence of free-will.