The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

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BidenPresident

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A growing chorus of scientists and philosophers argue that free will does not exist. Could they be right?

“This sort of free will is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics,” says one of the most strident of the free will sceptics, the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne. Leading psychologists such as Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom agree, as apparently did the late Stephen Hawking, along with numerous prominent neuroscientists, including VS Ramachandran, who called free will “an inherently flawed and incoherent concept” in his endorsement of Sam Harris’s bestselling 2012 book Free Will, which also makes that argument.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/27/the-clockwork-universe-is-free-will-an-illusion?
 
We probably react to what people do as if they had free will because we ourselves do not have free will to do otherwise.

From what I can deduce, the entire universe [and all that occurs within it] is probably just the random confluence of sub-atomic particles in infinite space.
Anything that follows the basics of atomic chemistry can happen and probably does an infinite number of times.
 
NiftyNiblick said:
We probably react to what people do as if they had free will because we ourselves do not have free will to do otherwise.

From what I can deduce, the entire universe [and all that occurs within it] is probably just the random confluence of sub-atomic particles in infinite space.
Anything that follows the basics of atomic chemistry can happen and probably does an infinite number of times.
Click to expand...


I don't buy the deterministic argument. But even if it is true, does not prove we do not have some freedom in our actions.
 
BidenPresident said:
I don't buy the deterministic argument. But even if it is true, does not prove we do not have some freedom in our actions.
Click to expand...

It's just one of a multitude of theories.
None of us know for sure.
When everything else is demonstrably cause and effect, however, free will is exceeding hard to explain in scientific terms.
 
BidenPresident said:
A growing chorus of scientists and philosophers argue that free will does not exist. Could they be right?

“This sort of free will is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics,” says one of the most strident of the free will sceptics, the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne. Leading psychologists such as Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom agree, as apparently did the late Stephen Hawking, along with numerous prominent neuroscientists, including VS Ramachandran, who called free will “an inherently flawed and incoherent concept” in his endorsement of Sam Harris’s bestselling 2012 book Free Will, which also makes that argument.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/27/the-clockwork-universe-is-free-will-an-illusion?
Click to expand...

Are you saying Conservatives/Liberals were born stupid and there is nothing we can do to change that?
 
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