On 3/11/2010 1:26 PM, m.a. wrote:
*Bruno and John,*
* The confusion is my fault. I copied the
URL from a Kurzweil page heading when I should have gone to the
article itself, so the wrong feature appeared. This is the one
I requested comments about:*
*http://www.physorg.com/news186830615.html*
(Excerpts)
*PhysOrg.com) -- When biologist Anthony Cashmore claims that the
concept of free will is an illusion, he's not breaking any new ground.
At least as far back as the ancient Greeks, people have wondered how
humans seem to have the ability to make their own personal decisions
in a manner lacking any causal component other than their desire to
"will" something. But Cashmore, Professor of Biology at the University
of Pennsylvania, says that many biologists today still cling to the
idea of free will, and reject the idea that we are simply conscious
machines, completely controlled by a combination of our chemistry and
external environmental forces.*
**
*To put it simply, free will just doesn’t fit with how the physical
world works. Cashmore compares a belief in free will to an earlier
belief in vitalism - the belief that there are forces governing the
biological world that are distinct from those governing the physical
world. Vitalism was discarded more than 100 years ago, being replaced
with evidence that biological systems obey the laws of chemistry and
physics, not special biological laws for living things.“I would like
to convince biologists that a belief in free will is nothing other
than a continuing belief in vitalism (or, as I say, a belief in
magic),” Cashmore told /PhysOrg.com/. *
**
*There seems to be an evolutionary rightness and inevitability to the
idea that free will is taking its place as just another illusion like
vitalism, religion, aether, absolute time and space, geocentric
universe, single-galaxy universe and so on. But I think people will
have an even tougher time dealing with the implications of strict
determinism. It's an idea that could tear through the entire fabric of
society even though acceptance needn't change one's behavior in the
slightest respect. marty a.*
But it's certainly not a deterministic universe.
_http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/0604/0604079.pdf_
Brent
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