I feel it is important to publicise refutations of extraordinary claims widely.
The media generally loves to publish the extraordinary claims. especially ALIENS!! but is silent when the results comeback as "Sorry, they were wrong."
This guy seems to be a bit confused about what free will is.
Does he mean to suggest that he was helpless in writing an entire book on the subject of free will? Does he mean to suggest that because I can't alter my own physical needs such as breathing, eating, and sleeping that I am somehow unable to WANT to change them? The article mentions his religious upbringing. I wonder if he would reach the same conclusion if he was raised in a different environment?
My read on it is this: when we construct ideas in our minds we often create shortcuts to help us process new information faster. In everyday life these shortcuts are quite useful. When considering philosophical questions like free will, we need to recognise that those same shortcuts can be harmful to our ability to consider broader possibilities. This person seems to have forgotten that.
maybe i’m just not smart enough for this, but the idea of free will as a concept has always seemed pretty poorly constructed in the first place. like, what would it even mean to have the will to act freely while existing conditional to your environment? we are placed into chaotic and uncertain circumstances, and have evolved the ability to navigate those circumstances through cognition. simple as that. there is no future that is “pre-determined” for us to follow, just chaos that we must navigate through until we die. i feel like the idea was kind of borrowed from theology and we’ve been ruminating on it ever sense, but its just never been a very compelling thought to me. like, of course our decisions are shaped by our environment and physiology, how else could it possibly work?
i feel like, for the people who argue for free will, its kind of like arguing for the existence of an afterlife. they’re motivated to continue advocating for it because it seems scary not to have it, but nothing about the way we work requires us to be able to make meaningful decisions that are out-of-context to our conditions, just like nothing about how we work indicates we continue to exist outside our physical conditions. if we free willed ourselves to do something that wasn’t constrained by our physical bodies, the stuff we know about the world, and the immediate sensory input we’re receiving, that would look like fucking magic or something, and if it is constrained by that stuff, then its just another word for cognition.
Behave is a great (if fucking beefy) read on a broad variety of influences on human behavior (it's 1B to Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow on my nonfiction list), but one expert's opinion on something as inherently unmeasurable as free will doesn't warrant a news story.
While our lives are largely dictated by situation and environment, this doesn’t equate to a complete lack of free will. We are constantly making decisions based on reacting to information we receive.
Even if we don’t actually have free will, it’s not really a useful argument to make. It just feels like an excuse to dismiss the problems of humanity and ignore opportunities to learn and change.
This article mentions scientific studies that support its myriad factual claims but doesn't cite any of them. There is a lot of low-quality, tentative research about the health benefits of various diets. A serious discussion would need to include the limitations of such studies for the food in question.
This post seems to have little to do with science at best. At worst it invokes pseudoscience "superfood" health nonsense.
Given what we know about the infectivity of Omicron, the combinatjion "Omicron was around in 2020" seems pretty astonishing. Combine this with "Omicron variants were formed by an entirely new mechanism that cannot be explained by previous biolog" and I'm going to suggest that the most likely explanation is that they cocked up their data somewhere.
I'm not qualified to peer review this - and it looks like no-one else has yet.
Researchers used statistical methods to adjust for confounding variables. “We found that about half of the excess risk with red meat consumption was explained by excess body weight,”
Fun fact: there's a name for the phenomenon of instantly recognizing the number of objects when it's fewer than five. It's called "subitizing."
There's a pretty interesting overview of what we know about math on the brain (or at least knew as of its writing) in the book "Where Mathematics Comes From" by Lakoff and Nuñez.
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