This is a really nice read and an interesting article that I will link here partially and you can read the rest with the link provided.
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Does Neuroscience Refute Free Will?
by Lucretius
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, — often the surfeit of our own behavior, — we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc'd obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. --William Shakespeare
In the above quote from King Lear we find a description of those who, throughout human history, deny free will and personal responsibility, instead blaming their wrongdoings on interventions divine and planetary. In a recent article, Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen join the believers in the "divine thrusting on."[1] This being the scientific age, and our authors being card-carrying neuroscientists, the divine thrusting on becomes a neuroscientific thrusting on, the brain playing the role of the stars above.
The divine thrust of their argument is that we have no free will because there is neuroscience, though our laws have yet to take this into account:
What are these ramifications? To begin with, the concept of personal responsibility is obsolete. Since all actions are determined by the "preexisting state of the universe," we have no choice in the matter. As they put it: "Given a set of prior conditions in the universe and a set of physical laws that completely govern the way the universe evolves, there is only one way that things can actually proceed." Thus we can logically trace everything back to the Big Bang that blasted the universe into existence. Should you ask why I had bagels rather than bananas for breakfast this morning, for example, I can refer you to the Big Bang theory of human action.
But if there is already the Big Bang, why do we need neuroscience to reveal our lack of free will? According to Greene and Cohen, for ages "scientific" philosophers, i.e. philosophers of their determinist camp, had argued against free will, but because the mind was then a black box, it was easy for the deluded religious people, the soft humanists, and other dim-witted souls to cling to the illusion of free will.
Now that we have neuroscience, however, the mind is a black box no more — it is high time for the rest of us to wake up from our dogmatic slumber and smell the deterministic universe. In short, while the Big Bang provides the big picture, neuroscience supplies the details, which will make it abundantly clear, even to the lay public, that we are literally puppets in a deterministic universe after all.
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Does Neuroscience Refute Free Will?
by Lucretius
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, — often the surfeit of our own behavior, — we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc'd obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. --William Shakespeare
In the above quote from King Lear we find a description of those who, throughout human history, deny free will and personal responsibility, instead blaming their wrongdoings on interventions divine and planetary. In a recent article, Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen join the believers in the "divine thrusting on."[1] This being the scientific age, and our authors being card-carrying neuroscientists, the divine thrusting on becomes a neuroscientific thrusting on, the brain playing the role of the stars above.
The divine thrust of their argument is that we have no free will because there is neuroscience, though our laws have yet to take this into account:
… the law's intuitive support is ultimately grounded in a metaphysically overambitious, libertarian notion of free will that is threatened by determinism and, more pointedly, by forthcoming cognitive neuroscience…. The net effect of this influx of scientific information will be a rejection of free will as it is ordinarily conceived, with important ramifications for the law.[2]
But if there is already the Big Bang, why do we need neuroscience to reveal our lack of free will? According to Greene and Cohen, for ages "scientific" philosophers, i.e. philosophers of their determinist camp, had argued against free will, but because the mind was then a black box, it was easy for the deluded religious people, the soft humanists, and other dim-witted souls to cling to the illusion of free will.
Now that we have neuroscience, however, the mind is a black box no more — it is high time for the rest of us to wake up from our dogmatic slumber and smell the deterministic universe. In short, while the Big Bang provides the big picture, neuroscience supplies the details, which will make it abundantly clear, even to the lay public, that we are literally puppets in a deterministic universe after all.
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