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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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Emails
To Philosophers and Psychologists
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Is a
free will moral, and worth having?
A
simple proof of our determined human
will.
by George Ortega
June 9, 2009 |
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Dear
Dr....
The
question of whether our human
thoughts, feelings, and actions are
freely chosen or are the result of
causes ultimately outside of human
control can be answered relatively
quickly and easily by starting with
the premise that if we human beings
freely chose our thoughts, feelings
and actions for no reason other than
because we wished them, this kind of
free choice, absent any purpose,
does not appear to be worth having,
at least as it relates to morality.
Since
the question of free vs. determined
human will is most salient to issue
of morality, let us explore this
question of unpurposeful vs.
purposeful human choice within a
moral context; to steal or not to
steal? A person who has freely
chosen to not steal would, by
definition, have made this choice
completely independent of any cause
or reason other than the desire to
not steal. As such, this freely
willed choice could not be
considered a moral choice because it
could not have considered morality
as a basis or reason for the choice.
On the
other hand, having chosen to not
steal because one considers it wrong
to steal renders such a choice the
direct effect of this moral
reasoning, which was, of course, the
direct cause of the choice. However,
once one has made a choice for a
reason, indeed for any reason, the
choice becomes completely and
immediately deterministic. At this
point, the question of whether
elementary particles behave
indeterminately or not is rendered
completely inconsequential; the
choice to not steal was definitively
and directly caused by the moral
belief that stealing is wrong.
Once
we have ascertained any reason for a
choice, in this case a moral
aversion to stealing, we have
sufficiently and completely
demonstrated that the choice was
deterministic, and therefore subject
to a reverse chain of effect and
cause that must stretch back to a
cause that lies completely outside
of the control or will of the
individual. For example, the choice
not to steal was caused by a moral
aversion to stealing. The moral
aversion to stealing was caused by
having learned from one’s parents
the immorality of stealing. Since
this learning was clearly not chosen
by the person, the person’s choice
to not steal is demonstrated to have
been not freely chosen, but the
complete and direct result of his
parent’s morality.
It
does the defender of human free will
no good to say the person could
easily have chosen otherwise. If the
person chose to steal, such a choice
would be equally either free, or
completely arbitrary and for no
reason, or determined and for some
purpose. Again, if the act of
stealing was freely chosen for no
moral or other kind of reason, it is
an act without purpose, derived from
a free will that does not seem worth
having as it relates to morality.
And if the act of stealing was a
choice determined by past events or
causes, the act could in no literal
sense have been freely willed.
So,
the question of whether humans have
a free will or a determined will, at
least relative to morality, amounts
to a question of whether humans have
a will that makes choices for no
other reason, including moral
reasons, than because it desires to
make the choice, or whether humans
have a will that always makes moral
choices for reasons and with
purpose; choices subject to a causal
chain of events that will always
lead to events over which the person
had absolutely no control.
Sincerely,
George
Ortega
cc:
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Owen Flanagan
Bruce Waller
Stephen Morse
Susan
Blackmore
Melissa
Ferguson
V.S.
Ramachandran
Irving Kirsch
John Bargh
John Horgan
Saul Smilansky
Daniel Wegner
Paul Breer
Robert Kane
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