What if...

In my previous entry I wrote about a fascinating conversion about free-will which I had with Bob and Lori.
I had to admit that Bob has a strong point: Humans really do know that they have a brain, which has neruon cells, which move around electrical charges by means of chemical reactions, which trigger themselves other chemical reactions in subordinate cells, which trigger something else within the cells, and so long...

So, say I claim there is a soul with free will that somehow drives the brain, what mechanism could possibly allow that to happen? shouldn't neurons, gray matter and whatever composes the brain be of a completely different kind of physical beast?

After our conversation Lori told me that Bob is a reduccionist: he believes that, if there is a steady and long line of reasoning accompanying a truly deep aggregated model of physical reality, then by neccesity any new idea must follow, by logical inertia so to speak, the same path. Thus, any sufficiently large model can be presummed to extrapolate directly beyond its actual boundaries.

In our case that means that if there is no evidence of free will at the cosmic level, nor is it at the local natural level, or the atomic level and not even at the quatum level, then free will is just nowhere to be found and that's it.

But Lori told me that she sees a problem with reduccionism when taken to extremes: it becomes like the human vision system: once most of an image is processed, the rest is just made up, unless you actually care the really see the detail. The same happens with a fanatic reduccionist approach to radically new ideas, it fails to identify and acknowldege the many gaps that permeate a model and which could allow the idea to nicely merge into without disrupting it.

So I wondered.. it seems unlikely that a single "free-will agent" (a soul) could single-handedly drive a brain to get a leg moved, OK, I give you that, but what if there are more (much more) spiritual beings involved in building up a human body?
I would imagine, for example, a similarly structured spiritual counterpart of the physical components. That is, at the organ level, cell level, molecular level, atomic level and so on.


Now of course I know what Bob would say: That adds nothing... you could have a "spiritual electron" along with a real one, but, so what? the behaviour of the electron (the real one) is proven to be driven by its interaction with other physical particles, so the model remains the same.

Now I can't wait to meet Bob again for I have an idea about how to respond to that:

what if the physical particles themselves (or whatever is the fundamental building block) had free will?? That is, what if, ultimately, there is just one and only one closed system instead of two fundamentally disjoint realities?

Let's see what he has to say...