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Free will “touches everything we value” – yet it is an illusion?

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Free Will

At New Scientist, Graham Lawton explains, re new atheist Sam Harris’s latest screed, against free will,

Free will touches everything we value – law, politics, relationships, morality and more. And yet it is an illusion. We either live in a deterministic universe where the future is set, or an indeterminate one where thoughts and actions happen at random. Neither is compatible with free will.

Well, that is a good reason not to believe the creed New Scientist is dedicated to, right?

Having laid this out, Harris tries to salvage something from the wreckage. In the process he ends up rowing back to a position not unlike the “compatibilists” who argue that free will can be reconciled with the laws of physics, a notion he has earlier attacked.

Own your own wreckage, okay? Don’t try to pretend it is everyone’s wreckage.

Comments
"Well, that is a good reason not to believe the creed New Scientist is dedicated to, right?" Only if we have a choice in the matter!Jon Garvey
March 26, 2012
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