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Originally Posted by din155
...I wish there was some more time devoted to questions on free will from a scientific point of view but probably that's a more of a philosophical question than scientific one....
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As I recall, the author came down on the side of free will, which surprised me.
As yes, here is his statement:
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Ultimately, I think free will probably does exist, but it is not the free will envisioned by rugged individualists who claim they are complete masters of their fate. The brain is influenced by thousands of unconscious factors that predispose us to make certain choices ahead of time, even if we think we made them ourselves. This does not necessarily mean that we are actors in a film that can be rewound anytime. The end of the movie hasn’t been written yet, so strict determinism is destroyed by a subtle combination of quantum effects and chaos theory. In the end, we are still masters of our destiny.
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Rather a surprising conclusion, especially considering the now famous experiment in 1985 by Dr. Benjamin Libet he mentioned earlier in the book that revealed how EEG scans show that the brain appears to make decisions about three hundred milliseconds before they register in the consciousness. Combine that with experiments with split-brain patients who, when one side is asked why it performed a certain action that the researchers had requested of the other side of the brain, always comes up with an explanation that make it appear it was their choice based on factors that had no play in the decision, the conclusion seems inescapable that we are the masters of our fate only insofar as our minds weave a narrative that convinces us we are in control.
Quote:
Originally Posted by din155
2001 by Arthur C Clarke was mentioned so many times that I have bumped it up in my tbr.
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I was amazed in reading this book that, with one or two exceptions, every book and every movie the author mentioned, I've read or watched. That's so not the case normally when people in general ask me if I've read a certain book or seen a certain movie. Maybe my off-center tastes are part of what makes me so strange.