I think that's right, but for the possible exception of people like Sam Harris, who took a lot of psychedelic drugs and claims to not have any feeling of free will. Sometimes he talks about politics, and seems to have no voluntary control over his opinions. On the other hand, he seems to like meditation because it lets him imagine that he has free will.
His New Year's Message argues that the Apocalypse is near, as evidenced by the likelihood that the J6 protesters would have hanged Mike Pence, if they had the chance. No, I do not believe that. They were unarmed, and did not appear to want to harm anyone. Some did use force to get into the Capitol building, but only to protest a defective electoral system.
Chomsky says science cannot answer whether we have free will. I think that is correct. Opinions about free will today are not much different from those of ancient Greek philosophers.
He says it is puzzling how smart people can act as if they have free will, and yet deny it.
Chomsky is not a mind-body dualist, and says that there must be a mechanical explanation for whatever the mind is doing, but free will might be beyond our understanding.
I guess his point is that he believes in free will, but leaves open the possibility that there is no free will, but it is a mysterious limitation of the human brain that we have to believe in it anyway.
For a contrary view, Robert Sapolsky argues against free will. He says that if you really had free will, you would be able to somehow show that your decisions were independent of the socio-economic status of your parents, and everything else that may have influenced your past and brain. He denies this, so he says that it makes no sense to reward or punish anyone for anything. He rejects our criminal justice system, as well as everyone else that keeps our society orderly.
He seems sincere, but he also appears to be trying to convince us that he is right. Why bother, if we have no free will? So I think Chomsky is right, and Sapolsky behaves as if he has free will, in spite of everything he says.
Evolutionist Jerry Coyne denies free will in humans, and in other life as well
This is the third and last of a series of posts on the misguided concept of “agency and purpose in biology,” which one can take as the statement that “organisms have goals, and guide their own development and evolution towards those goals”.He goes on to denounce research in the subject, as an unscientific waste of money. He does not quite say it, but he appears to believe that only a religious bigot would think anything so silly.
I do not know whether dogs have goals. I am just confident that I have free will; that most humans say they have free will; that all humans act as if they have free will, at least occasionally; and possibly some people like Harris, Sapolsky, and maybe some schizophrenics do not.
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"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please."
According the superdeterminists, If you were in a burning building, it would not be free will if you decided to exit said burning building. It isn't that free will isn't affected by surrounding environmental factors, it's that the individual decides for themselves to act upon their situation. Most individuals would act to preserve their own lives, this isn't a lack of free will, just a desire to keep breathing and awareness that staying in a burning building leads to predictable undesirable outcomes not favorable to continued breathing.
The good news is, if the physicists who are pushing the whole 'meat puppet' outlook are correct, it would be proper and fitting to ignore them entirely since they are preprogrammed meat puppets as well and thus are incapable of actual thought or discovery or being scientists for that matter, as they are just following their predetermined programming.
Experts often seem to think themselves above the misery they would create with their own actions. History is replete with examples of disasters that ensued from putting blind faith in them instead of a dose of healthy skepticism.
I guess it follows that such people would like to live in a world where they can never be held accountable.
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