“What You Can Touch Is Mere Appearance”: Does Science Refute Free Will?

In The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom there was, among other things, a discussion of "the recurrent claim that science 'proves' that free will is an illusion." In an article in The Weekly Standard, "The Heretic," Andrew Ferguson reviews Thomas Nagel's analysis of the same issue in his recent book Mind and Cosmos. "Contemporary philosophers," Ferguson writes,

have a name for the way you and I see the world, a world filled with other people, with colors and sounds, sights and sensations, ... Philosophers call this common view the “manifest image.” Daniel Dennett pointed out at the conference that modern science, at least since the revelations of Darwin, has been piling up proof that the manifest image is not really accurate in any scientific sense. Rather science—this vast interlocking combine of genetics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, particle physics—tells us that the components of the manifest image are illusory.

What this means, Ferguson continues, is that as geneticist Francis Crick wrote, “ ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”

Does this sound familiar? In a previous post we cited a liberal philosopher of science:

“In Parmenides and in Plato, we shall even find the belief that the changing world we live in is an illusion, and that behind it lies a more real world which does not change.” - Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies

Plato's Realm Of Forms states, "this material world ... can only present appearances, which lead us to form opinions, rather than knowledge." The “manifest image” doctrine relegates human experience—including free will and, as we shall see, ethics—to the realm of illusion. It is the anti-science of Plato—his rejection of the material world of human experience and of scientific experiment—masquerading as science.

The contradiction requires a certain amount of double talk:

["Cognitive scientist" and "philosopher of mind"] Daniel Dennett ... [cautioned that] we run a risk when we let this cat, or robot, out of the bag. If we repeatedly tell folks that their sense of free will or belief in objective morality is essentially an illusion, such knowledge has the potential to undermine civilization itself, Dennett believes. Civil order requires the general acceptance of personal responsibility, which is closely linked to the notion of free will. Better, said Dennett, if the public were told that “for general purposes” the self and free will and objective morality do indeed exist—that colors and sounds exist, too—“just not in the way they think.” They “exist in a special way,” which is to say, ultimately, not at all.

The idea of the "noble lie" has characterized elite intelligentsia esotericism ever since Plato: the people's naive belief in a moral order is to be encouraged on consequentialist grounds, says a brighter class of people who are too sophisticated to believe in such outmoded notions. (As always, the retreat to consequentialism suggests a weakness in the principle it shies away from.)

Ferguson adds:

The neo-Darwinian materialist account offers a picture of the world that is unrecognizable to us—a world without color or sound, and also a world without free will or consciousness or good and evil or selves or, when it comes to that, selflessness. “It flies in the face of common sense,” [Nagel] says. Materialism is an explanation for a world we don’t live in.

It leads to a reductio ad absurdum:

[Nagel's] working assumption is, in today’s intellectual climate, radical: If the materialist, neo-Darwinian orthodoxy contradicts common sense, then this is a mark against the orthodoxy, not against common sense. When a chain of reasoning leads us to deny the obvious, we should double-check the chain of reasoning before we give up on the obvious.

One of the things which make science wonderful is that science does not have the concept of heresy. A scientist may advance a hypothesis which is new and unorthodox if he or she can back it up. Reproducible experiment has moved our science well beyond Newtonian science, for example. But as Ferguson notes, materialism "is a premise of science, not a finding."

The Dissenter previously argued, "Science seeks those areas of reality which are deterministic. When successful, this approach produces valid predictions. But nothing about this approach proves that all of reality—and behavior—is deterministic." Ferguson makes a related argument:

Scientists do their work by assuming that every phenomenon can be reduced to a material, mechanistic cause and by excluding any possibility of nonmaterial explanations. And the materialist assumption works really, really well—in detecting and quantifying things that have a material or mechanistic explanation. Materialism has allowed us to predict and control what happens in nature with astonishing success. The jaw-dropping edifice of modern science, from space probes to nanosurgery, is the result.
But the success has gone to the materialists’ heads. From a fruitful method, materialism becomes an axiom: If science can’t quantify something, it doesn’t exist, and so the subjective, unquantifiable, immaterial “manifest image” of our mental life is proved to be an illusion. 

It is not surprising that these proudly immoralist materialists don't walk the talk:

Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it’s lived. As colleagues and friends, husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense. A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath.

And finally there's that problem of the missing reproducible experiment. Is there an experiment which proves that free will (and by implication the possibility of choosing to do good rather than evil) is an illusion? What would such an experiment look like?