given all of that, that kind of free action must surely be true

FOR THIS NEXT TO LAST post on Denis Noble's short lecture The Chemistry of Life Begins With Water, I'll comment just a little on his summary of why he believes that the actual, detailed molecular chemistry of life supports concepts of free will that the old-fashioned, cartoonish view of DNA and even cruder concepts of life and reproduction and evolution are used to actively refute in service to the ideology of materialist-atheist-scientism.  Not that I couldn't point out the relevance of many of his points to what I'm interested in, political, legal and social implications of this but I'll wait to do that seeing how I must have strained your tolerance for that in my last couple of posts.   Later, I might risk posting my transcript of his talk without my commentary some time in the future along with a link to the video in which you can compare what I've typed out to what he said and, don't forget, his, for once, extremely useful slides.    

Nerve cells are densely packed with ion channels in their membranes.  And those channels are also continuously jiggling around in a stochastic dance.  Nervous systems are almost designed to be harnessing chance. Just as the immune system can distinguish between the forms of DNA variation to enable it to latch on to a new virus or a new bacterium so our nervous systems can latch on to the neural mechanisms that satisfy the criterion of social choice.  This is not a new idea incidentally, it was originally formulated by Gerald Edelman who won the Noble prize in 1972 for his discovery of the structure of the immune system's immunoglobulin proteins.  He went on to suggest the same harnessing of chance could be operating in the nervous system. He even called it "neural Darwinism" in a book he published many years ago.

So, I've pursued this question together with my brother zoologist and philosopher Raymond Noble to ask the question, does that enable values to influence physiology?  The choice of what we should do.  And where, in those articles, I argue that conscious organisms have the ability to match up their behavioral routines with the constraints of social interactions.  Including, for example, the concepts of fairness and for many other values for which we all live our lives.  If that is so then we have a process by which natural stochasticity, chance can be harnessed, that is used to enable us to act with what philosophers call the only free will worth having.  But can conscious choice influence our biochemistry?  Can it control the genome that way?  

Passing up the temptation of the phrase "neural Darwinism" in line with my skepticism about the existence of natural selection, I'll point out that this series of posts really began back with my posting of Thomas Merton's short essay "What is Liberty?"  in which he defined the basic level of liberty, freedom as being the ability to choose what was good over what was evil.  Certainly, in my context of political, social and legal use of freedom as a good thing, opposed to the kind of libertarian freedom which, under "liberal democracy" holds that all kinds of evil actions and oppression and even killings are permissible as "liberty,"  that IS the most important question. 'Liberal democracy" as it is encoded in most political and legal systems facilitates individuals to harm others, other People, other animals, the environment we all depend on as "liberty."   Egalitarian democracy depends on our choosing to restrain our inner two-year-old brat to allow others to live a decent, safe life.  But even more than that is under attack from the ideological choices and decisions of many influential People presented to us by the publishing media and industry.   As I will never stop pointing out, the kind of denial of the possibility of free thought, "free will" that is all the rage among materialist-atheist-scientistic academics and babblers and scribblers is rightly seen as a basic and direct attack on democracy as much as anything the billionaires, especially those with political control of some of the largest and richest countries on Earth are financing, today.  

Considering the use of "twin studies" by those whose Darwinism turns to eugenics and scientific racism, concentrating on seemingly uncanny similarities in twins separated a birth, this use of more detailed studies of twins by Denis Noble is very welcome.  

Now I come to a very interesting study that physiologists have done over many years looking at identical twins.  Identical twins have nearly identical genomes.  There are small differences but they're very slight.  Now imagine that one of them is brought up in an environment that leads him to choose to train as an athlete and the other does not.  Not surprisingly, as shown in the photo here, the body builds are completely different.  And in an extensive study of such cases of identical twins, physiologists have been able to identify the control RNAs in the athletic ones that enable their muscle proteins to grow so much.  So, the decision to train as an athlete, provided that decision is implemented in practice, leads to precisely those changes at the molecular level that enable the athlete to succeed.

Now, what is impressive about this study is that it identifies the small RNA molecules that control the genome.  And, in fact, this is happening all the time.  Our decisions to do whatever we do are inevitably controlling our genomes because similar physiological processes must be involved.   There are armies of small RNAs, of control RNAs wait to do just this.  

Now, is this what we call free will?  What I have shown is the harnessing of stochasticity, the use of stochasticity or chance clearly enables a form of creativity in behavior that allows social constraints the ideas of value and judgement that go with them to influence the physiology of our bodies.  But why should we call this "free will?"   Doesn't it mean that,  after all, we are determined but just by social interaction processes rather than physical processes?   

Well, yes, that's true in a sense. But what surely would disturb us as a challenge to our ability to choose would be a demonstration that there we are always impelled to do what we do by purely physical processes.  "My Genes Made Me Do It" is even the title of a book.  

So, being physically compelled and socially influenced are very different forms of determination.  Being influenced, even feeling compelled by the social influences of shared values and judgements surely does not worry us in the same way.  We can even observe the same processes in other species.  Packs of dogs illustrated in my image here, and groups of monkeys have both been shown in careful studies to be capable of discriminating against the members of the pack who are not cooperating.  These distinctions, therefore, between the physical and the social influences are surely the basis for what many philosophers   refer to when they talk about the kind of free will worth having.

You see, as the person, Denis Noble, I'm not worried by the fact that my upbringing and my social interaction has greatly influenced my values and, therefore, my actions.  Why ever should I wish it to be otherwise?

So, social freedom is the form of freewill worth having.  Furthermore, influence by social factors does not imply compulsion.  Social factors and the reasons we may give for our actions are what philosophers call defeasible.  Meaning, that in retrospect we may give the reasons for what we do.  Legal processes in our law courts illustrate that process all the time.

The concept of defeasibility was developed as a legal concept as well as having a philosophical basis.  

Now, clarifying what kinds of free will are worth having is, indeed, a philosophical question.  But what I hope I have done is to outline a way in which physiological processes, dependent upon the stochastic properties of water and, in turn, the stochastic properties of all the molecules that are in and dissolved in or suspended in water can exist and enable that kind of free will to occur.  Indeed, I would go further.  Given what we know of the chemistry of life, of its dependence on these interesting properties of water and the ability of water to give us the variability that we need to make choices, given all of that, that kind of free action must surely be true.

All of this is certainly welcomed by an egalitarian democrat like me because it gives a physical mechanism by which we can exercise free thought, free choice and it should be welcomed by anyone who has any esteem for human thinking, human reasoning, the long and large academic heritage and, even in its frequently decadent and self-destructive forms current in academia today, it defeats the simplistic, cartoon of physical determinism that is the default ideology imposed by the social and intellectual coersion that has hegemonic control of academia, the media and, increasingly, the legal and political mainstream.  Even those hardest of hard core physical determinists, and almost all of them are some species of materialist-atheist-true believer in scientism, don't want the logical conclusions of their ideological holdings because, as I've pointed out, it can't but help undermine any esteem that their professional product is held in.  

I don't, however, think that what Denis Noble says goes far enough, though as a scientist he is properly keeping in bounds with what his profession can honestly say about any of this.  You might have noticed that in the beginning of this section of his talk, Denis Noble said, "Nervous systems are almost designed to be harnessing chance."   In that "almost" is the formal reticence of a scientist who knows his science cannot determine if even something so reasonably concluded to have been a product of design because the design would require a designer.  Whether that designer is in line with the traditional concept of God, the Creator or if it is the design of an individual, overseeing living mind that does what he attributes to the molecules and cells and systems of cells in the body, harnesses the physical properties of water and fats and other molecules to do things toward an end, witnessing such a process makes it intellectually allowable, maybe even respectable to conclude that someone is in control of it all just as someone would have to make the choice above even the social influences and coercions, in the end.  

Having been steeping myself in the late plays of Eugene O'Neill during this same time as I've been doing this series, plays in which addition to alcohol and opiates are at the center of the tragedies he presented, plays about his family members and himself, we aren't only given one set of social influences to choose among, we are not compelled to choose one or another even on that level.  And the choices we make are not determined by our environments, those are defeasible as well.  We can reject or accept what our families and communities present as a better choice.   Listening to Long Days Journey Into Night, I heard the excuses the mother gives for her remaining addicted to morphine and recognized every excuse that the alcoholics in my family gave for not giving up alcohol.  I have said here before that when my brother refused to try AA because he "rejected a higher power" I could tell him he had chosen a higher power in the form of the ethyl alcohol molecule, that was his higher power to which he had sacrificed his health, his mental health, his job, his family, his home and car and everything else.  It's a rather bitter joke to me that ideological atheists have adopted a cartoon picture of an atom as the equivalent of a cross or star of David or a crescent moon.  To me that choice says everything there is to know about the choice that they have made and why it is incompatible with life.  

Though it isn't directly relevant to my use of Denis Noble's lecture, I will try to get around to typing out the last five or so minutes in which he makes a highly moral and laudable choice to concentrate on the politics, laws and social aspects of the provision of clean water which is as much in danger as egalitarian democracy is under the various gangster legal regimes from the worst dictatorships to the less corrupt liberal democracies which allow millionaires and billionaires to buy "water rights" and deprive People of the very basis of life, itself.  I think it's telling about the limits of traditional biology that this is the first time I've heard or read an in-depth analysis of that fact, that our bodies are mostly water, the substance that all of my previous reading in biology and related sciences just considered as if it was there to fill up space while the larger, more complex molecules operated independent of it.  Such a basically simplistic and incompetent view of life has been what has dominated the culture of biological sciences in my experience.  For that alone, this is a landmark lecture in my understanding of science.