1957 Geloof en Wetenschap : Orgaan van de Christelijke vereeniging van natuur- en geneeskundigen in Nederland - pagina 32

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DONALD M. MACKAY

organism is a system which is sensitive to, and altered by information reaching it. To be more specific, we are so constructed that any would-be prediction of our voluntary actions becomes for us merely an invitation to choose how to act. This is not theory, but empirical fact. If anyone predicts to you that you are about to choose porridge rather than prunes, no matter how scientific the basis of his statement, you can easily verify from experience that he is simply giving you a fresh opportunity to make up your mind. Whether you decide to fall in with his would-be prediction or to contradict it, you know — and he knows — that it has lost any scientific validity by being offered to you. Nothing that I have so far said removes the possibility that if your brain were a physically determinate system, your decision could in principle be predicted by our super-observer, as long as he kept quiet about it, so that you were not affected by his activities. He would have to know, of course, not only the details of your brain-workings but also every physical factor in the world that could influence them up to the moment of your choice. But given this information and unlimited powers of calculation, he could in that case make an accurate forecast. THE VALIDITY OF CHOICE Now it may well be that the brain is not a determinate system in this sense. Nobody knows. But even if it were, would this possibility throw any doubt on the validity of your choice? I don't think so. If you had no power to falsify the prediction, of course it would. But there is no doubt here that you have the power. Our super-observer is only denying you the opportunity. It is difficult to see why in such a case you should be held any less responsible for the choice you make, since you can defy anyone to predict to you how you will choose. As we have seen earlier, a close connection between your choice and the brainstate just preceding it is to be expected in any case if your choice is a rational one. We might even say that it would nail down more firmly your responsibility for the choice, by guaranteeing that the ,you' that makes the choice is the same as the ,you' who weighed up the pros and cons. All this may sound as if I have after all come down on the determinist side of the classical fence; but is is not so. What I have contended is not that the brain is physically determinate, but that physical mdeterminateness would not help to validate human choices.

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