Free Neuropath by R. Scott Bakker Page A

genuinely troubled. Thomas had seen the same look on a thousand undergraduate faces, the look of a brain, Neil would have said, at odds with itself—one whose knowledge could not be reconciled with its experience.
    The brain, it turned out, could wrap itself around most everything but itself, which was why it invented minds… souls.
    'But that can't be…' Sam started. 'I mean, if we don't really make choices, then how could…'
    Thomas grimaced in sympathy. 'How could anything be right or wrong? Good or evil?'
    'Exactly. Morality. Doesn't morality mean we have to have free will?'
    'Who said morality was real?'
    She worked her bottom lip for a moment, then added, 'Bullshit. It's gotta be…'
    A crimson eighteen-wheeler roared down the street outside the window, hauling who knew what to who knew where. Its diesel roar faded into the sound of a crowd cheering through the tin of television speakers. The Braves, a canned voice said, were on the warpath once again.
    'I mean, I make decisions, all the time.'
    She was arguing now, Thomas realized, not simply entertaining academic claptrap for the purposes of tracking down Neil. The Argument had a way of doing that to people. He could remember the horror it had engendered in him years ago in Skeat's class. The sense that some kind of atrocity had been committed, though without date or location. More than a few times he and Neil had made the mistake of debating it while catastrophically stoned—a mistake for Thomas, anyway. He had simply sat rigid, crowded by paranoias, his eyes poking and probing the tissue that had once been his thoughtless foundation, while Neil had laughed and chortled, pacing the room as if it were a cage. Thomas could see him, hair askew, ducking to peer into his face. 'Whoa, dude… Think about it. You're a machine —a machine!—dreaming that you have a soul. None of this is real, man, and they can fucking prove it.'
    Thomas rubbed his eyes. 'In controlled circumstances, researchers can determine the choices we make before we're even conscious of making them. The first experiments were crude and hotly contested—pioneered by a guy called Libet. But over the years, as techniques improved and the fidelity of neuro-imaging increased, so did the ability to pin down the precursors of decision making. Now…' Thomas trailed with an apologetic shrug. 'What can I say? People still argue, of course—they always will when it comes to cherished beliefs.'
    'Free will is an illusion,' Sam said in a strange tone. 'Even now, everything I'm saying…'
    Thomas swallowed, suddenly apprehensive. He had been carefully folding his napkin as he talked; now he set it like a tiny white book on the table before him. 'Only a small fraction of your brain is involved in conscious experience, which is why so much of what we do is unconscious. The bulk of your brain's processing falls outside what you can experience; it simply doesn't exist for your consciousness, not even as an absence. That's why your thoughts simply come out of nowhere, apparently uncontrolled, undetermined… Yours and yours alone.'
    Samantha yanked her hands out in a warding gesture, shook her head. 'Come on, professor, this is just too crazy.'
    'Oh, it goes deeper, trust me. Everything falls apart, Agent Logan. Absolutely everything.'
    Sam watched the streamers of bubbles in her beer. 'So it has to be wrong, doesn't it?'
    Thomas simply watched her.
    'Doesn't it?' she repeated, her tone somewhere between wonder and irritation.
    He shrugged for what seemed the hundredth time. 'Free will is an illusion, that much is certain. As for other psychological staples like the now, selfhood, purpose, and so on, the evidence that they are all fundamentally deceptive continues to pile up. And if you think about it, perhaps this is what we should expect. Consciousness is young in evolutionary terms, a jury-rigged response to a perfect storm of environmental circumstances. We're stuck with the beta-version. Less even. It only