Semi-brute humans claiming free-will?

http://www.readwhere.com/read/c/6290497

Teotonio R. de Souza
If you break a law you can be punished, even if you claim that you were unaware of the law
you broke. The law determines that ignorance of law does not exempt its violator from owning
moral responsibility of his / her action. In the lingo of the jurists: Ignorantia legis neminem
excusat. It is presumed that every adult citizen has an obligation of knowing the laws.
This raises doubts about the free-will as believed to be based on fully informed decision, and
not on potentially knowable information. Obviously the Justice department may consider a
review of the case and mitigate the punishment depending upon the level of consciousness
involved on the part of the violator of a law. But until then a citizen may be subjected to many
inconveniences and injustices, including irreversible damage to reputation, besides material
damages of various kinds.
Philosophers, theologians and scientists have debated this issue of free will during past many
centuries till date, without reaching any consensus. Central to the debate is precisely the
sufficiency or insufficiency of knowledge and options available for deciding. Incidentally, we all
start on the way to freedom since our birth in a country and in a family that we never chose.
They are thrust upon us and they condition or determine many, if not most of our decisions
along life. What we call free-will is reduced by evolution in progress to a joke of the past?
We will all admit that problems about free-will are essentially linked with the limitations
affecting all humans in a varying degree, depending upon places, times and individual social
and economic conditions. Hence, it is illusory and ridiculous to measure everybody with an
essentialist yardstick. Therein lies the root cause of most historical conflicts, to which the
religions have unfortunately and ironically contributed in a large measure.
The leaders of the societies that gained dominant positions have often tended to ignore the
inhumanity to which they have subjected many fellow humans in their own societies and
elsewhere on the earth, adding thereby insult to injury. African slavery, Church Inquisition and
the Jewish holocaust are only a few better known tragic illustrations of man reducing men
and women to vile servitude and helplessness in the recent history of the so-called Western
modernity and arrogant claims of civilizational mission.
Just as there is always food and comforts for some, the free-will and life of multiple choices
remains a privilege of some, but a luxury to most others. Hence, it is criminal to impose the socalled equality before justice to punish millions of human beings living in misery to which they
have been willfully reduced. It was not uncommon during the colonial times to hear about the
lazy Africans or Asians, but their white masters were blind to the fact that they were exploiting
them to enrich themselves. If free-will implies choices for ones betterment, the colonial
subjects could have no motivation to work only for the betterment of their masters.
Those who rely upon scientific and evolutionary explanations of free-will of the humans have
contributed to a better understanding of the genetic and other natural determinants of human
actions, taking us far away from the traditional Christian belief about man created in the image
and likeness of God. Such a belief also assumed fraternity of men, but in real life the Church
promoted crusades and other violent conflicts by its missionaries backing colonial-imperial
projects of Europe across the globe.

The evolutionists have helped us to understand that the process of humanization is

determined by the survival of the fittest, not by any idealistic beliefs. My past reflections on
this issue have not ruled out, but even emphasized positively, the influence of cultures, based
largely on religious and philosophical inputs. Cultures have enabled humans to take some
control of the evolution by enabling many to survive the natural selection and join the
mainstream of the fit, if not the fittest. This is a specificity of the human species.
I am inclined to believe that the traditional religious terminology of sin needs to be redefined.
Even the more acceptable understanding of it, namely as lack of admission of ones
responsibility as befitting an adult, rather than a mere violation of a commandment or
precepts of the Church, falls short of the reality of the evolutionary process and constant
human resistance to its demands. Hence, what is really happening are sins against evolution.
The call of evolution is for the humans to behave according to the dictates of reason, rather
than giving in to the pulls of the natural instincts that continue within them. Failure to respond
to this challenge of evolution is sinning against nature. Grabbing the natural resources at all
costs for ones own benefit is certainly not a response to the call to rise to the level of
rationality. Subjecting the fellow humans to the rapacious natural instinct in the name of law is
a degradation of rationality and humanity.
Ray Kurzweil, a secular transhumanist, may be consulted for the concept of evolutionary
complexity and singularity which will transform us, still semi-brute humans into super-humans
with cosmic intelligence. We can expect our crude version of free-will to become a serious joke
of the past. The Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin had reflected on this, but was
quickly silenced [http://jetpress.org/v20/steinhart.htm].