----- Original Message -----
From: Brent Meeker
To: [email protected]
Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2010 4:38 PM
Subject: Re: Free will: Wrong entry.
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.
It looks like Cashmore would disagree about that.See above: "completely
controlled by a combination of our chemistry and external environmental forces."
_http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/0604/0604079.pdf_
Brent
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