Max Planck Scientists Agree With Me That Free Will Is An Illusion
Posted on 04. Sep, 2009 by Cameron Reilly in free will
I’ve been trying to explain to people for 20 years that free will is an illusion. I’ve covered the subject on a few podcasts, including this one and this one with Dr Susan Blackmore. I even mad a simple flowchart explaining why it must be an illusion. Now, finally, some neuroscientists have agreed with me.
According to Wired:
Long before you’re consciously aware of making a decision, your mind has already made it. If that’s the case, do people actually make decisions? Or is every choice — even the choice to prepare for future choices — an unthinking, mechanistic procedure over which an illusory self-awareness is laid? Those questions are raised by a study conducted by Max Planck Institute neuroscientists and published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience. Test subjects chose whether to push a button with their right or left hand; seven seconds before they experienced making the choice, their brain activity already predicted their final decisions.
(via Cameron Collie via Is Free Will an Illusion? | Wired Science | Wired.com)
You may say “who cares?” Well you should. It’s incredibly important to understand. It’s easily as important as understanding that the Earth orbits the Sun and not the other way around. It will change your life. At least, that’s been my experience and the experience of lots of people I know.
Free Will Is An Illusion (like God) – by Susan Blackmore
Posted on 28. Jun, 2009 by Cameron in free will
Excerpt:
So why do we feel as though we are having a single stream of conscious experiences? Perhaps it was useful for our past survival to have a false model of ourselves, to attribute our body’s actions to an inner self, and to see the world in terms of spiritual forces and non-physical agents, when there are no such things. Perhaps it is possible to give up these illusions by practising watching the mind.
Susan was a guest on G’Day World talking about free will back in May 2008.
Read the rest of her recent article in The Guardian here.
G’Day World #332 – Peter Singer, The Great Ape Project
Posted on 03. Jul, 2008 by Cameron in climate change, future makers, Podcast
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My guest today is Peter Singer.
He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), University of Melbourne. Outside academic circles, Singer is best known for his book Animal Liberation, widely regarded as the touchstone of the animal liberation movement.
I invited him onto the show to talk about the recent news from Spain that they will soon probably extend basic legal rights to all non-human hominids, an idea that has been driven by an organization that Peter co-founded, The Great Ape Project. We also talk about the basic ethics of utilitarianism and how the best thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint is to stop eating meat.
The G’Day World theme music:
Conquest
“Secrets of Life” (mp3)
from “End of Days”
(Dark Star Records)
More On This Album
