Whether or not we have free will and whether this whole existence is pre-calculated, I'm going to go all meta-Pascal's wager on it and suggest that we try to act like we do have free will and try not to think about it.
Maybe I was always going to come to that conclusion. Doesn't matter.
Maybe this makes about as much sense as Wile E. Coyote staying in the air until he actually realises he has run off a cliff. Doesn't matter.
Be the Road-Runner able to run into a painting of a tunnel as if it is real and remain as happy as possible about it.
Yep. On the grand scale it doesn't matter if this comment was pre-determined or if I genuinely made the free choice to write it. What matters is that, to me, the illusion of free will is complete. There is nothing other than my belief that I am free to affect my own existence.
As Rush once said, even if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
Assuming his hypothesis is true I find this rediculous from the article:
"The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over," Sapolsky said. "We've got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn't there."
How is it made more so. We have no free will over how we reward or punish people. If the world is screwed up and his hypothesis correct then its exactly as screwed up as its supposed to be and our lack of decision neither make it worse or better. It just is.
That is a very good point. It seems like his argument is that, since we have no free will, we should stop trying to do anything to control others' actions... which in itself is suggesting to control others' actions. Furthermore regardless of whether we have free will or not, however you want to define it- punishing bad behavior discourages it and provides better outcomes for the world at large. It's like he's saying people just blindly act according to some non-free-will principle without taking in any environmental input, which just seems ridiculous. And implying that specifically applies only to bad behavior, which just seems like he's being smugly pessimistic as a gotcha. "Ha ha, the world is bad, if you disagree with me you're just a hopeless optimist" sort of thing.
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.
So, basically, ammonium chloride tastes sour if I got this right. I would not classify this in the same league as sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami, as it is not a separate flavor, just a new molecule that bonds.
Compare this to the thousands of different molecules considered “bitter”.
I skimmed the actual publication (the Nature Communications link in the article) and from what I saw they made no claims about a ‘new flavor,’ just explained the exact mechanism the body uses to detect it, the potential reasons animals are sensitive to it, and a taste preference test with mice.
This is probably 100% university PR department fluff. It’s a very common complaint that these departments trying to advertise and drum up prestige for the university don’t really understand the research the scientists that work there are doing, and either accidentally or intentionally misrepresent it. People in the field roll their eyes and read the paper instead of the press release, and it impresses some people who don’t know anything about it.
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,”
I suppose it's not too bad. People typically use their wage as they get it, paying for rent/food/utilities. Many of these costs would be covered by the programme, which means they can potentially come out of it a year later with the full 60k.
Well which neurons immediately decide to shove it off to the 4 or less neurons or the 5 or more neurons? Because they must be the ones running the show.
Talking out of my ass here but I guess the initial information from the eyes goes to many pathways and reaches both and more. It's just a question of which ones react.
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