in chapter eight dr. egnor discusses the concept of free will that accrued from dr. wilder penfield’s vast surgical experience. I include excerpts:
“for over eleven hundred patients, penfield never once encountered a situation where he stimulated a patient’s brain and the patient believed that the mental and physical activity he stimulated had been freely willed by the patient himself. that is, penfield was never able to find a ‘will’ center in the brain that, when stimulated, evoked a patient’s sense of will. penfield inferred that this meant that the will does not come from the brain, but is a power of the immaterial mind, and by its immateriality, the will is free [and functions through probabilities. . . . free will is real and not wholly determined by brain activity. the will seems to have a separate existence, independent of the brain. that convinced penfield that free will is real.
“the will and the intellect are immaterial powers of the spiritual human soul. the will is not determined by matter [and cannot be reduced to the physical functions of the brain’s synaptic networks]. in fact, it cannot be determined by matter, because it is spiritual, not material. the will can move matter as a final cause, a purpose, just as the intellect moves matter as a formal cause, an idea. the natural goal of the human intellect is the pursuit of truth, and the natural goal of the human will is the pursuit of the good.
“we have the free capacity - the spiritual capacity - to choose good or evil. . . . we are free to make choices in our lives.”