The Thermodynamics of Free Will

The scientific discoveries of the last centuries have disenchanted human existence in many ways: once living in a world full of spirits and gods and primeval forces beyond understanding, our place in the universe was moved from its center right to the fringes of one among unimaginably many galaxies in an unbelievably large, mostly empty space.

We were equally thrown from the throne of creation: Darwin showed that we are just animals with a particularily large brain which is, while having the potential to write fugues and build cars in its free time, still mostly concerned with thinking about the four F’s: fighting, fleeing, feeding and reproduction.

In the genes, we discovered the blueprint for all living structures.

The magical life force, the Pneuma of the Ancient Greeks, the Prana of India, the spiritus of the Latin world, the élan vital of Bergson, was found, after slight adjustments to the theory, to be better explained by oxidation driving the ADP/ATP cycle within our cells.

Life was reduced to its biochemical mechanisms, and thus Life can now be seen as to emerge from lifeless matter without any magic left.

And then Cartesian and Leibnizian dualism with their assumption that the mind is something wholly different from the world of matter and the rationalist creed that our reason was quasi-divine and able to understand the true nature of the world through insights (in the Platonist sense, as “methexis”of the realm of Ideas: in the allegory of the…