My latest volley in a very long discussion about free will… — Explain to me the flaw in the following deductive argument: Outcomes are determined by the laws of physics (randomness included) We don’t control the laws of physics Therefore we don’t control outcomes As a result, any sensation we experience of controlling outcomes must be an illusion…
Archives for June 2013
The Deterministic Nature of Real-world Randomness
“Quantum physics makes predictions to 14 decimal places,” Doyle says. “It’s the most accurate of all mathematical physical theories.” Randomness and even free will, it appears, are fully compatible with some highly precise determinations.via Philosopher and scientist Robert O. Doyle has a new model of free will | Harvard Magazine Sep-Oct 2012. Someone tell me how we’re getting…
Losing a Belief in Free Will is Like Losing Religion
There’s much talk about recent evidence showing that people losing their belief in free will adversely affects their behavior. Basically, the experiment told two groups of people differing things about reality: the first group learned that their choices were their own, and the second group that everything was out of their control. The group who got the “lack…
Losing English Majors Costs Us Clear Thinking/Writing
What many undergraduates do not know — and what so many of their professors have been unable to tell them — is how valuable the most fundamental gift of the humanities will turn out to be. That gift is clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature.Maybe it takes some living to find out this truth.…
The Connection Between Superman, The Matrix, and Jesus
I’m fairly stupid for Superman. Always have been. And when Matrix came out I was absolutely enthralled. One thing that’s fascinated me since The Matrix was how many ways it ties in with Superman, and, oddly, how much they both tie in with Jesus. Here are a few connections that I know of, and hopefully readers will have…
Why It’s Dangerous To Call Whistleblowers Heroes
Exposing blatant criminal activity is generally a good thing. This is especially true when it’s being financed by, and wielded against, the same group–e.g., the American people. The Manning and Snowden cases are dissimilar in a number of ways, but in both situations they are being labeled both heroes and traitors. Neither label is good, while both probably…
Predictions and Inevitabilities
This will be in a highly unedited format. Please pardon the writing. Paid to Be Good Citizens The jobs are going, and they’re not coming back. Right now they’re going overseas, but the reality is that they’re going away permanently. Machines are taking them. Computers are taking them. Technology is taking them. Essentially, technology makes it so fewer…
The Difference Between Wiretapping from Bush and Obama
There are many people who are asking us long-time Obama supporters why we’re not just as upset about PRISM as we would have been if this program had come from Bush. It’s an absolutely fair question. It reeks of emotional bias and an intellectually-compromised double standard. I’ve spent some time thinking about it. I think I have an…
Obama Owes us an Apology and an Explanation
Mr. President, I have been with you all the way, and if you have a reason to OVERTLY break your promises on security to us–with the blatant monitoring of Americans, with the failure to close Gitmo, with the expansion of the Patriot Act–then tell me. Say it. Say the words. Give me an explanation. You owe us one.…
Two Things I Learned in my Thirties
I’ll be 40 in July, and I’ve never felt more alive. I want to reflect on two life-altering lessons I learned in the last year. It’s a bit stunning, and sad, that I didn’t learn these until age 39, but I’m thankful that I did learn them, and hopefully someone younger will read them and learn them earlier.…
The Post-employment World
As Gregory Ferenstein points out, technology may be destroying jobs, but it’s also creating wealth; and as I’ve argued before, the endgame of all this wealth creation, some generations hence, isn’t a world of full employment. Instead it’s a post-scarcity world of no employment, as we understand the word. Fewer and fewer jobs coexisting with more and more…