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George
Ortega,
Producer |
Nick Vale |
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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 |
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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
Raj Raghunathan, Ph.D.
May 8, 2012
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.
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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.
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Chapters
of the 2013 Exploring the
Illusion of Free Will, Second
Edition |
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Introduction to
the 2011 1st. Edition (revised)
For we
who appreciate speedily arriving at
the heart of a matter, here’s how to
disprove any free will
argument in two easy steps: 1. Ask
the free will believer to give an
example of a choice they consider to
be freely willed. 2. Ask the free
will believer to say whether or not
that choice was caused.
Congratulations; you’ve just won! If
the free will believer says the
choice was caused, the ensuing
causal regression makes free will
impossible. If the free will
believer says the choice was
uncaused, the choice cannot
rationally be attributed to a human
will. You can easily apply this
two-step refutation to any, and
all, free will arguments. That’s
the long and short of it; now for
the details.
When
asked by British psychologist Susan
Blackmore to comment on the prospect
that free will is an illusion,
American philosopher John Searle
exclaimed, “That 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.” What do
top philosophers conclude? In his
1943 book Physics and Philosophy,
British physicist, astronomer and
mathematician Sir James Jeans
writes,
Practically all modern philosophers
of the first rank – Descartes,
Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Kant,
Hegel, Mill, Alexander, as well as
many others – have been determinists
in the sense of admitting the
cogency of the arguments for
determinism, but many have at the
same time been indeterminists in the
sense of hoping to find a loophole
of escape from these arguments.
Often they conceded that our
apparent freedom is an illusion, so
that the only loophole they could
hope to find would be an explanation
as to how the illusion could
originate.
Presented here are the edited
transcripts of the first 18
half-hour episodes (Note: episode
two has been omitted from the Second
Edition) of the world’s first
television series and dedicated
dissemination initiative on the
causal and unconscious nature of
human will, Exploring the
Illusion of Free Will. What
follows is also a powerful tool by
which you, the reader, can move from
clearly understanding the causal
nature of our human will to
integrating this evolutionary new
causal consciousness into your
worldview, and, to the extent you
succeed, substantially overcome the
personal attributes of blame,
arrogance, guilt and envy that
inevitably result from a free
will-based consciousness. Following
the format of the television
episodes, at the beginning of most
chapters, I review what we mean by
the term free will, why such a will
is impossible, and how correcting
our mistaken conclusion that we have
one can help us create a happier,
more intelligent and compassionate
world. Throughout the book, I also
reiterate key themes and concepts.
Because many of us are just vaguely
familiar with such concepts as free
will, choice, causality, randomness,
indeterminism, etc., re-describing
them within different contexts can
help the reader more fully
understand their meaning and
implications. This review is similar
to the constant repetition and
review necessary when learning
mathematics or a new language. For
many, in fact, this repetition will
likely prove not just helpful, but
quite necessary. Repeating key
points and facts also facilitates a
more thorough understanding of the
book’s main themes, and helps the
reader overcome the cognitive
dissonance, or emotional discomfort,
that arises when one’s strongly held
beliefs are challenged by evidence
and arguments one hadn’t previously
considered, or sufficiently
appreciated.
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