Re: Brain - Mind - Soul.

Murphy (gmurphy@imperium.net)
Mon, 02 Sep 1996 11:58:33 -0400

Howard Taylor wrote (INTER ALIA):
> Most of us seem to agree there could be no free will if our decisions
were
> simply the result of electrical - biochemical processes in the brain.

There may be such widespread agreement but the claim is
questionable. Its truth would be obvious only if electrical-biochemical
processes were known to obey a strict Laplacian determinism, but quantum
mechanics and "chaos" theory strongly indicate that this is not the
case. (One needs especially to note an appropriate combination of the
ideas of "chaos" applied to CLASSICAL mechanics and quantum theory.)
This neither refutes all types of determinism nor proves free will, but
it does make clear that materialism and free will are not necessarily
disjoint.
George L. Murphy