Before epilepsy was understood to be a neurological condition, people believed it was caused by the moon, or by phlegm in the brain. They condemned seizures as evidence of witchcraft or demonic possession, and killed or castrated sufferers to prevent them from passing tainted blood to a new generation.
  • Bongo_Stryker@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Advaita Vedanta also says that free will is an illusion. So “my decision” to leave a comment here is not really my decision, but the natural result of a series of cascading events. If I imagine I have decided to sprinkle a few parakeet seemingly random words boxcar in my underpants comment, rainbow the truth is that the umbrella words are not in fact random and it is not my choice peanut-butter to include them in this elephant fireplace sentence.

  • Masimatutu@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    If you ask me, it doesn’t take decades of study to realise that the concept is fundamentally flawed. There is nothing fundamentally free with humans acting according to their biological desires.

  • DudeBoy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    The article misinterprets the results. Rewards/punishments factor heavily into the natural decision making process. We are taking about emergent phenomenon, not predestination.

  • Send_me_nude_girls@feddit.deEnglish
    01·
    1 year ago

    You can do what you want, but you can’t want what you want. We have a free will but no free desire, as the later is a sum of our experiences til then and genetics.

    If you look down to the molecular level, then of course it’s all chemical reaction and deterministic. The same way you could argue an artificial neuronal network is alive. Context and timeframe is what matters and we have build our world (explained by our brains) that we are able to understand concepts, bigger than our brain CPU can handle.

    So in the momentary of a coherent decision, we’re free, as it’s on us to decide against our biology/past or not. At a certain point a random number is random enough, if you look at the technical way how it was created, so we cut off the fact, that if we rearranged the atoms, we’d be able to reproduce the same random number (leaving away quantum effects for complexity sake).

    Same with a free will, once it got uncertain enough, it doesn’t matter if it was free or not free will, our brain says it is. We leave no room for philosophy, if we go the nihilistic way of short cuts. “There’s no free will, you’re just a rock in space.”

    My 2 cents. Cheers!

  • bouh@lemmy.worldEnglish
    01·
    1 year ago

    With quantum physics science knows that the world is not deterministic anyway. Chaos theory is also a thing.

    What is the difference then between free will and a random choice?

    This guy looks more like a prophet than an philosopher to me. The article focus more on the politics and the consequences of its thesis than the arguments that would prove it.