Talk about strange bedfellows!  You will never find any ideas supported by a more diverse following than “free will.”  What is free will?  Allegedly, it’s the ability to “freely” be in charge of one’s own thoughts and actions.  It’s the ability to be “in control.”  And as I pointed out here, there is almost nothing human beings fear more than being out of control.

It all gets very interesting, however, when you juxtapose the concept of “free will” with the concept of determinism, the belief “that every event, including human cognition and behavior, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.”  A few years ago, a friend of mine panicked when I started telling her of some of the recent findings of cognitive science.  These were findings that substantiated that humans are animals that are subject to natural laws. She panicked because I was telling her more than she was able to consider (I wrote another post mentioning this episode).  She wanted to believe in “free will,” but the incredible sameness and predictability of human cognition demonstrated by cognitive science caused her to fear that she might be a robot–a machine that utterly lacked freedom. 

Admittedly, there is not yet any way for scientists to precisely predict human behavior in all situations.  Nonetheless, my friend panicked because science appears to be headed in that direction.  In fact, if the more people considered what cognitive scientists were up to more carefully, they …