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#18 Do We Really Have Free Will?
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When was the last time you made a significant decision in your life that you regretted later? If you were to backtrack your life today to that very same moment you made that decision, do you think you would have made a different decision?
This is the question Stanley and I are addressing today looking into how human mind operates on the issue of Free will.
Do we really have the freedom we think we have? After all, you made that decision to eat a fruit for snack, and not a cookie, out of your freewill, right? Well, it might be a little bit more complex than that.
If a person's choice to commit a crime is determined by a certain pattern of neural activity, which is also the product of prior causes, bad genes, a dramatic childhood, lost sleep, or even cosmic-ray bombardment that mutated one of his genes, can we really say that his will was “free” when he committed that crime?
We understand an average person's basic intuition is wanting to punish criminals. But before we jump into that conclusion lets listen to this conversation. This might completely change your attitude towards criminals and make you more compassionate towards people who make bad choices in life.
Episode hosts: Stanley Samuel & Bino Manjasseril
References:
Sam Harris's Book on Free will
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Will_(book)
Sam Harris's article on Illusion of Free will
https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-illusion-of-free-will
Does Benjamin Libet's finding's prove that the action of lifting the hand were caused by the readiness potential?
https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.dartmouth.edu/dist/9/2172/files/2020/01/C11.pdf
A paper by Miller and Trevena (2009) show that the RP may only be the brain's preparation to make a conscious act, rather than a cause for it.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19736023/
An article from the popular press debunking Libet's experiment as a proof against free-will
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/
Laplace's Demon - his take on the deterministic nature of the universe, derived from classical mechanics occurs in his book A philosophical essay on probabilities (1814): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/58881/58881-h/58881-h.htm
A critique of Sam Harris book on Free will by John Horgan:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/will-this-post-make-sam-harris-change-his-mind-about-free-will/
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