Or denying free will. Contrary to what is claimed here.
A vivid cross-section of what makes us human.
Based groundbreaking new research, We Are Our Brains is a sweeping biography of the human brain, from infancy to adulthood to old age. Renowned neuroscientist D. F. Swaab takes us on a guided tour of the intricate inner workings that determine our potential, our limitations, and our desires, with each chapter serving as an eye-opening window on a different stage of brain development: the gender differences that develop in the embryonic brain, what goes on in the heads of adolescents, how parenthood permanently changes the brain.
Moving beyond pure biological understanding, Swaab presents a controversial and multilayered ethical argument surrounding the brain. Far from possessing true free will, Swaab argues, we have very little control over our everyday decisions, or who we will become, because our brains predetermine everything about us, long before we are born, from our moral character to our religious leanings to whom we fall in love with. And he challenges many of our prevailing assumptions about what makes us human, decoding the intricate “moral networks” that allow us to experience emotion, revealing maternal instinct to be the result of hormonal changes in the pregnant brain, and exploring the way that religious “imprinting” shapes the brain during childhood. Colour emphasis added.
Note the continued obsession with denying free will and explaining away religion. There is nothing controversial about that stuff either.
Yet another wagon joins the Circus That Never Leaves Town. It can’t leave town, actually, because the clown car in the lead is full of methodological naturalists, who are leading the circus parade round and round in a circle on the town square. And now, yet another wagon joins the parade, as soon as a gap forms.
When I started this beat maybe twelve years ago, I wondered if they would indeed come up with something significant. Now I know they won’t because they can’t. They can only make room for another wagon, widening the circle. The God of the Gaps, I presume. – O’Leary for News
News: Don’t the folks who make such assertions see that not only are they circular but self-referentially incoherent? If “Far from possessing true free will . . . we have very little control over our everyday decisions, or who we will become, because our brains predetermine everything about us, long before we are born” then the argument that asserts such is a case in point and fatally undercuts itself, for just one instance. KF
I would have to agree at least that most people do not employ free will beyond setting a course and turning on the autopilot.
WJM, go with the flow is easy, and to have a capacity and an opportunity are not to be confused with actually making the most of it. KF
In the Netherlands – Dick Swaab is Dutch – the title of the book ‘We Are Our Brain’ (We Zijn Ons Brein) did not cause any controversy; not the slightest ripple. The reaction by the public on the title was:‘what else is new?’ – as if Swaab was stating the obvious.
This guy sounds like Dennett on steroids. And what is his ground breaking research? We don’t know the origin of human consciousness and he presumes to deny free will? I guess he was born to write his book, just as I was born to be a physician. We are all robots in the grand plan, run by whom or what? Faith in nothing produces empty thought.
We are our brains makes no sense.
Maybe I am your brain and my brain is you?
Why not?
I wonder who my body belongs to.
If free will truly did not exist, and we were ‘deterministic’, then the following experiment would be impossible. The following experiment is a recent variation of Wheeler’s Delayed Choice experiment, which highlights the ability of the conscious observer to effect ‘spooky action into the past’, thus further solidifying consciousness’s centrality in reality. Furthermore in the following experiment, the claim that past material states determine future conscious choices (determinism) is directly falsified by the fact that present conscious choices are effecting past material states:
In other words, if my conscious choices really are just merely the result of whatever state the material particles in my brain happen to be in in the past (deterministic) then how in blue blazes are my choices instantaneously effecting the state of material particles into the past?,,, I consider the preceding experimental evidence to be a vast improvement over the traditional ‘uncertainty’ argument for free will, from quantum mechanics, that had been used, for decades, to undermine the absurd deterministic belief of reductive materialists:
In fact, free will and consciousness are now “considered axioms (founding principles) of standard quantum physics theory.”
Moreover, quantum theory can never be improved above what it currently is by removing consciousness and free will as axioms to it,
Now this is completely unheard of in science as far as I know. i.e. That a mathematical description of reality would advance to the point that one can actually perform a experiment showing that your current theory will not be exceeded in predictive power by another future theory is simply unprecedented in science! In my personal opinion, the preceding experiment should have generated a lot more attention than it seems to have done for the milestone it represents in science!
Of related note, people who do not believe in the reality of free will are shown to more unethical than people who do believe in it:
Of note: since our free will choices figure so prominently in how reality is actually found to be constructed in our understanding of quantum mechanics, I think a Christian perspective on just how important our choices are in this temporal life, in regards to our eternal destiny, is very fitting:
Verses and Music;
From the OP:
Except when we change our minds.
So no criminals can ever be rehabilitated? Except the ones that have been rehabilitated, of course.
So we’re religious or nonreligious. Except for those who convert to Christianity (or another religion) or those who lose their faith.
The more they deny free will, the sillier their arguments become.