You may think you chose to read this, but Stanford scientist Robert Sapolsky would disagree. He says virtually all human behavior is beyond our conscious control.
Yea the article doesn’t seem to be philosophically literate enough it seems to speak at that level, unfortunately. IME, neuroscientists and psychologies do a poor job of being aware of when they’re venturing into philosophical territory and then doing a good job of covering their bases. Often times they are cringey about it in how self-conscious they are about their lack of knowledge. But I’d guess it also goes the other way too.
Something I personally took from the article was that the counter provided in favour of free will from a Neuro perspective seemed pretty embarrassing. Neurological variation, ASFAICT, doesn’t necessitate free will, and for that to be the case would require neuroscience to have a complete theory/account of consciousness. Otherwise, all neuroscience would have is a source of randomness coupled with priming by history and state and a pile of complexity that makes the output function tricky/chaotic.
Determinism is about 3,000 year old philosophy.
What is he really adding here? It was my impression that most scientists are either determinists or compatiblists already.
Yea the article doesn’t seem to be philosophically literate enough it seems to speak at that level, unfortunately. IME, neuroscientists and psychologies do a poor job of being aware of when they’re venturing into philosophical territory and then doing a good job of covering their bases. Often times they are cringey about it in how self-conscious they are about their lack of knowledge. But I’d guess it also goes the other way too.
Something I personally took from the article was that the counter provided in favour of free will from a Neuro perspective seemed pretty embarrassing. Neurological variation, ASFAICT, doesn’t necessitate free will, and for that to be the case would require neuroscience to have a complete theory/account of consciousness. Otherwise, all neuroscience would have is a source of randomness coupled with priming by history and state and a pile of complexity that makes the output function tricky/chaotic.