EXPLORING THE ILLUSION OF FREE WILL 
 
 

George Ortega,
Producer

Nick Vale

Chandler Klebs

Nomi

Creating a world without blame and guilt

The world's first, and already successful*  initiative, including two TV shows, to popularize the refutation of free will 

*How it happened 

Our World's top four minds, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein each rejected the notion of a human free will.

John Searle, the13th ranked post-1900 philosopher, says that our world overcoming the free will illusion "would be a bigger revolution in our thinking than Einstein, or Copernicus, or Newton, or Galileo, or Darwin -- it would alter our whole conception of our relation with the universe." 

The Washington Post, The New York Times, Psychology Today, Los Angeles Times, The Huffington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, USA Today, The Telegraph, Time Magazine, Scientific American, NPR Radio, The Economist, and Science Magazine  all affirm that free will is an illusion.


DOWNLOADS:
PDF of EXPLORING THE ILLUSION OF FREE WILL, SECOND EDITION and PDF of FREE WILL - MOVING BEYOND THE ILLUSION: SCREENPLAY FOR A DOCUMENTARY BY George Ortega

 

Exploring the Illusion of Free Will is two TV shows - WHITE PLAINS NY TV and NYC LIVE CALL-IN TV,  several books - Mine and  Enel's,  and Chandler's one meetup - NYC, this website, Internet video and audio -  YOU TUBE  iTUNES AUDIO PODCAST  PUBLIC DOMAIN VIDEOS & MP3s, and a blog - EXOGENOUS AGENCY

 
Quick Links to the YouTube Episodes: 01-10  11-20  21-30  31-40  41-50  51-60  61-70  71-80  81-90 91-100  101-110  111-120  121-130  131-140  141-150  151-160  161-170  171-180  181-190  191-200  201-210  211-216
 

Quick Links to the 2013 Exploring the Illusion of Free Will, 2nd Edition Chapters: ( by titleIntro. to 2011 edition  Intro. to 2013 digital edition 1  (2 omitted)  3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   Epilogue  Books Refuting Free Will...

 

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Free Will Refutations in Major Publications

 

Free Will Refuted in the Blogs

 

Free Will Refuted on YouTube

 

Recent books for the public and academia refuting free will

 

Edited and Revised Transcripts of the First Eighteen Episodes

 

Quotes Disaffirming Free Will and Affirming Determinism by the Famous

 

Absurd Free Will Defenses by Major Institutions and Publications Who Should Know Better

 

Claiming credit for public awareness that free will is an illusion

 
 

More Featured Episodes

10. Why Change as the basic Universal Process Makes Free Will Impossible

13. Overcoming Blame, Guilt, Envy and Arrogance by Overcoming the Illusion of Free Will

16. Overcoming the Illusion of Free Will as an Evolutionary Leap in Human Consciousness

17. Revitalizing Religion through Transcending the Illusion of Free Will

26. Because Essential Elements of Every Decision are Stored in Our Unconscious, Free Will is Impossible.

38. The Messenger and I Have Evolved Human Consciousness

50. Freud Popularized the Unconscious.  Ortega is Popularizing Unconscious Will

60. Ten Ways to Refute Free Will

 
 

Landmark Coverage Refuting Free Will

 

USA Today - "Why you don't really have free will by Jerry Coyne January 1, 2012

"The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they're finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion."


Time Magazine - "Think You're Operating on Free Will? Think Again" by Eben Harrell July 2, 2010

"In an intriguing review in the July 2 edition of the journal Science, published online Thursday, Ruud Custers and Henk Aarts of Utrecht University in the Netherlands lay out the mounting evidence of the power of what they term the 'unconscious will.'...John Bargh of Yale University, who 10 years ago predicted many of the findings discussed by Custers and Aarts in a paper entitled "The Unbearable Automaticity of Being," called the Science paper a "landmark — nothing like this has been in Science before."


The New York Times - "Your Move: The Maze of Free Will" by Galen Strawson July 22, 2010

"Some people think that quantum mechanics shows that determinism is false, and so holds out a hope that we can be ultimately responsible for what we do. But even if quantum mechanics had shown that determinism is false (it hasn’t), the question would remain: how can indeterminism, objective randomness, help in any way whatever to make you responsible for your actions? The answer to this question is easy. It can’t."

The Atlantic - "The Brain on Trial" by David Eagleman July/August 2011

"In modern science, it is difficult to find the gap into which to slip free will—the uncaused causer—because there seems to be no part of the machinery that does not follow in a causal relationship from the other parts."

The Telegraph - "Neuroscience, free will and determinism: 'I'm just a machine'" by Tom Chivers October 12, 2010

"The philosophical definition of free will uses the phrase 'could have done otherwise'... "As a neuroscientist, you've got to be a determinist. There are physical laws, which the electrical and chemical events in the brain obey. Under identical circumstances, you couldn't have done otherwise; there's no 'I' which can say 'I want to do otherwise'."


The Guardian - "Guilty but not responsible?" by Rosiland English May 29, 2012

"The discovery that humans possess a determined will has profound implications for moral responsibility. Indeed, Harris is even critical of the idea that free will is "intuitive": he says careful introspection can cast doubt on free will. In an earlier book on morality, Harris argues 'Thoughts simply arise in the brain. What else could they do? The truth about us is even stranger than we may suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion'"


Psychology Today - "Free Will Is an Illusion, So What?" by

If you think carefully about any decision you have made in the past, you will recognize that all of them were ultimately based on similar—genetic or social—inputs to which you had been exposed. And you will also discover that you had no control over these inputs, which means that you had no free will in taking the decisions you did.

Complete List

 
 


A brief history of determined vs. free will ideas

Cause and Effect – At about the 5th century BC, in his work On the Mind, the Greek Philosopher Leucippus penned the earliest known universal statement describing what we today understand as determinism, or the law of cause and effect

“Nothing happens at random, but everything for a reason and by necessity.”

Human Will – The concepts of will and free will are actually Christian in orgin. It was Saint Paul in his Letter to the Romans, which is dated at about 58 A.D., who first discovered this thing we call human will. He came to it by recognizing that he could not often do as much right as he wanted. Saint Paul wrote in Romans 7:15 that:

“I don’t understand myself at all, for I really want to do what is right, but I can’t.” I do what I don’t want to – what I hate.” (Translation – The Living Bible)

Free Will -- Nothing new was said on the matter for the next few hundred years until St. Augustine grappled with the concepts of evil and justice. Saint Augustine wrote in his book De Libero Arbitrio, 386-395 A.D., (translated as “On Free Will”)

“Evil deeds are punished by the justice of God. They would not be punished justly if they had not been performed voluntarily.”

The problem he saw was that if human beings do not have a free will, it would be unfair for God to arbitrarily reward or punish us. St. Augustine concluded that God could not be unfair, and so he created the concept of a human free will, whereby we earn our reward or punishment by what we freely do.

Scientific concepts relating to the determined will vs. free will question

Classical Mechanics -- In 1687 Sir Isaac Newton publishes his “Laws of Motions” that mathematically describes the physical universe as acting in a mechanistic manner according to the principle of cause and effect.

Classical Mechanics is a completely deterministic theory

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle -- In 1925 Warner Heisenberg describes mathematically that…

We can measure the position of a particle or the momentum of a particle (momentum meaning its direction and velocity), but we cannot simultaneously measure the position and momentum of a particle.

Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics -- Niels Bohr and others make the following assertions;

1) Particles do not have a simultaneous position and momentum.

2) Elementary particles behave indeterministically, and are not subject to the principle of cause and effect.

Believers in free will saw the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics as providing a possibility for free will to exist. They asserted that if elementary particles behave indeterministically, they are not subject to the principle of cause and effect that prohibits free will.

But, as noted above, it eventually became apparent that indeterminism also prohibits free will.

 

Exploring the Illusion of Free Will, 2nd Edition Chapters

Intro. to the 2011 1st. edition 

Intro. to the 2013 2nd. edition (digital version)

1 How I came to see my causal will

2 Proving causal will in real time (omitted)

3 Morality within a causal will perspective

4 What it all means

5 We Do Not "Experience" Free Will

6 How the Hedonic Imperative Makes Free Will Impossible

7 How the Unsolicited Participation of the Unconscious Makes Free Will Impossible

8 Asking When a Child Gains it Illuminates the Incoherence of the Concept "Free Will"

9 Overcoming our Reluctance to Overcome the Illusion of Free Will

10 Why Change as the Basic Universal Process Makes Free Will Impossible

11 The Absurdity of Varying Degrees of Free Will

12 Why the Concept of Free Will is Incoherent

13 Overcoming Blame, Guilt, Envy and Arrogance by Overcoming the Illusion of Free Will

14 Why Both Causality and Randomness Make Free Will Impossible

15 Why Frankfurt's “Second Order Desires” Do Not Allow for a Free Will

16 Overcoming the Illusion of Free Will as an Evolutionary Leap in Human Consciousness

17 Revitalizing Religion through Transcending the Illusion of Free Will

18 Why Humans Cannot Circumvent Natural Law to Gain a Free Wil
l

Epilogue: How Refuting Free Will Went From  Academia to the Public Spotlight – with hyperlinked  articles in major publications – 2004-2012

Books Refuting Free Will and  Fundamental Moral Responsibility
 

 

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Chapters of the 2013 Exploring the Illusion of Free Will, Second Edition

 

Chapter 7.  How the Unsolicited Participation of the Unconscious Makes Free Will Impossible

In this chapter, we’re going to explore how our unconscious, which we all have, is constantly involved in every decision we make. We can’t avoid this influence; its participation is unsolicited. We don’t ask our unconscious to work. In fact, the reason we term the unconscious the unconscious is that we’re literally not conscious of it. We’ve determined we have an unconscious through various indirect means, some of which I’ll go into later in the program. But this unconscious never sleeps. It is always active, retains all of our memories – what we’ve learned – and it takes part in every decision we make.

In science and reason, there is the principle of causality. Nothing is uncaused. If something happens, there is always a reason, or a cause, (or causes) for it to happen. There is also a principle in science and philosophy of sufficient and necessary cause. For example, if I want to lift the table in front of me, I might grab it with my right hand, and lift it. The cause of the table rising would, therefore, be my right hand and arm lifting it. But, what if while I’m reaching for it with my right arm, I am also reaching for it with my left arm, and lift it with both arms and hands? In that case, I can no longer say that my right hand was the sufficient and necessary cause of the table rising. The left hand was also involved in the lifting. So, it is actually a combination of these two causes that results in the table rising.

Let’s now apply this principle and reasoning to the unconscious. Our right arm and hand will represent our conscious mind. It says, “I’m going to decide to lift this table.” But our left arm and hand is our unconscious. Again, we are not even perceptually aware of it in real-time, but it is always active. It takes part in our every decision. Consider also that even if our unconscious were not taking part in every single decision we make, we could never know with any degree of certainty whether or not it was participating in any given decision. Actually, the truer and more precise reality is that although our conscious mind believes it is making the decision to lift the table, it is actually our unconscious mind that is making that decision, and allowing our conscious mind to be aware of the decision. If the conscious mind and the unconscious mind are involved in the decision to lift the table, we cannot say that the decision was consciously and freely made. We cannot say that the decision was free of the participation, in this case, of the unconscious. If our unconscious never sleeps, and our conscious mind simply ceases to be conscious during sleep, our dreams must all originate at the level of the unconscious. Our unconscious occasionally allows our conscious mind in on the content of what it has dreamed.

How do we know we have an unconscious? How do we know that this unconscious is actually making the decisions that we ascribe to our conscious mind? One way is through hypnosis, and what is known as post-hypnotic suggestion. Medical hypnosis has been around for over 200 years. You can hypnotize people, and when they’re in that hypnotic state, you can give them the post-hypnotic suggestion that when they wake up, they will do something. For example, you might tell a hypnotized person that when the phone rings, he will get up from his chair, get on his hands and knees, and crawl a few paces. This is not just theory; this is fact. Psychologists have done the experiment. The subject, indeed, hears the phone ring, and crawls on his hands and knees in fulfillment of the post-hypnotic suggestion. How does this relate to the question of whether or not we have a free will, and whether the unconscious mind really is an unsolicited participator in thoughts we wrongly ascribe to a freely willing, conscious mind? Well, the psychologists then ask the subject “What are you doing?” He may respond with something to the effect that he is just admiring the pattern on the carpet, that, he may add, he finds interesting. Or he might say “I don’t know; I just felt the need to stretch a bit.” The idea is that the subject will make up a reason that he thinks is the actual reason he chose to get up and crawl across the floor. That is a perfect example of how the unconscious exists, and actually makes decisions for the person.

Priming is a hot and intriguing area of research. John Bargh, a Yale University professor, has done important work with this. Priming is similar to hypnosis, but the subject is completely awake. In one experiment, there are two groups – the target group and a control group. The target group is asked to take some words and make sentences with them. They are given the words “bingo,” “gray,” “cane,” and other words that connote being old, or the concept “elderly.” The control group is given arbitrary words that do not have any strong or implicit connotation. The subjects from both groups complete the task, and they think that the experiment is over. But, it is not, because during the last part of the experiment they are observed walking from the experimental area to the elevators to leave the building. Interestingly, the target groups that had been primed with words connoting elderly walk more slowly to the elevators than do the control groups. Naturally, that tells you that the target group is consciously walking to the elevator, but their unconscious mind is participating in how they perform that action. This is a perfect example of the collaboration that takes place between conscious and unconscious activity, completely hidden from the subjects of the experiment. The subjects are not aware that the priming is the reason they are walking more slowly.

There’s another priming experiment that demonstrates this quite interestingly. It’s the same kind of word task as in the “elderly” experiment. The target group is given words like “rude,” “abrupt,” “impolite,” and “hasty.” The second target group is given words like “polite,” “respectful,” and “patient.” As, with the other experiment, the subjects in both groups think that they have completed the experiment by doing the word task. They are told that when they are done with the task, they should go to a nearby colleague, and hand them their completed task. They do that, but the colleague is a part of, – a cohort in – this experiment. The colleague has been instructed to be engaged in dialogue with a third cohort for ten minutes. What happens is that the subjects in the experiment generally want to wait until this conversation is over so as not to interrupt. What the experimenters find is that the subjects in the group that had been primed with words like rude and abrupt tended to interrupt the cohorts’ conversation sooner than did the subjects who had been primed with words like polite and patient. The second part of this experiment demonstrates that these kinds of decisions that we attribute to our free will – that we think we’re making completely on our own – are actually made at the level of the unconscious. The subjects are then asked why they waited as long, or as short, as they did before interrupting. Again, very curiously, the subjects invent reasons. “Well, I’ve always been taught to wait until somebody is done with the conversation,” or “I don’t know; I just felt like it.” They will invent reasons, but none of the subjects in either group are aware that what determined, in part, the time it took them to interrupt was the priming.

There are many experiments that demonstrate how the unconscious is actually making the decisions that we generally attribute to our conscious mind. There is another kind of experiment that demonstrates this decision-making at the unconscious level far more clearly and strongly. Beginning in the 1980s, Benjamin Libet and others researchers hooked subjects up to imaging machines like electroencephalograms (EEGs) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imagers, (fMRIs) that measure brain activity and EMGs, (electromyograms) that measure muscle activity. It turns out that before the conscious mind is aware of its decision, in these experiments a simple motor movement like flexing a finger, the unconscious has already made the decision. More recent experiments, by Chun Siong Soon and his colleagues have, in fact, detected decision-related activity in the unconscious as far back as ten seconds before subjects were aware of their decision to perform the act. So, we have an unconscious that’s either taking part in whatever decisions we make, as in the table-lifting example, or making the decision entirely, as with the imaging case.

Before Freud and the mesmerists did their experiments with hypnosis, there wasn’t a way to empirically demonstrate that we humans have an unconscious. Now, the results are irrefutable that we do. When you think about the unconscious, think about all that is happening in your body – your heart beating, your organs functioning, your lungs breathing in and out. All of this is part of the autonomic nervous system, which basically doesn’t rely on our conscious direction. In other words, we don’t have to think about it; it basically works on its own. Actually, that is another way of understanding the pervasive role that the unconscious has in not just our decisions, but also on our basic biological makeup and functioning. Because we have an unconscious that is always awake and active, we can never claim to any degree nearing even 50 percent certainty that we make decisions that the unconscious takes no part in at all. Such claims are also mistaken because, again, we are not even aware of our unconscious mind in real-time.

Another way to understand how this unconscious participation works is through mood and feelings. If it’s overcast or raining, we will feel differently than on a bright, sunny, and warm day, and that difference will lead to different decisions. There are many other ways to understand how and why free will is impossible, but even if we leave aside causality as the fundamental process of the universe that nothing escapes, and even if we don’t consider the hedonic, moral and other imperatives, and even if we don’t consider the effects of our upbringing and past experience, and we simply consider that we all have an unconscious that is constantly at work, then we can understand why free will is impossible. It is mind boggling that our civilization has been under this delusion of free will for millennia. If we’re so fated, and the causal past and our unconscious determine that we’re going to wake up from, and transcend, this illusion of free will, that means that we will have evolved a distinctly new consciousness, and an entirely new way of perceiving our reality and ourselves. That is a huge step in evolution.

Next chapter

 

List of Chapters

 
Intro. to 2011 edition  Intro. to 2013 digital edition 1  (2 omitted)  3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   Epilogue  Books Refuting Free Will...


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