According to Robert Sapolsky, human free will does not exist

[steve_bank]

Novel Written by Hard Determinism Wins Pulitzer Prize

IIDB (Internet News Service) — A novel written by the illustrious novelist Hard Determinism has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The novel, The Gallant Gallstone, was entirely cribbed from the novel The Fountainhead, also written by Mr. Determinism via the meat robot Ayn Rand. Therefore there was no question of plagiarism.

The novel tells the story of a gallstone that thinks it has free will but then is dissolved by castor oil, proving somehow or other that free will is an illusion.

“I couldn’t be more hard-determined honored by this hard-determined award,” Mr. Determinism told a gaggle of hard-determined reporters who were hard-determined to ask Mr. Determinism stupid hard-determined questions. “I only wish that I actually knew how to write.”

Mr. Determinism said his next project was to take dictation from the Big Bang without the slightest clue what he was going to write about.

“The Big Bang will let my (His) fingers do the talking,” Mr. Determinism said, adding that “Hard Determinism — that is, me — will permit no alternate choices.”

Now you have done it pood, you have crossed the line.

You can step on my blue suede shoes, but you can't step on Ayn Rand.

Randism, a blast from the past.

I thought Rand was uber free will. In Fountainhead the architect and creative free will versus the restrictive system.

 

[WAB]

Novel Written by Hard Determinism Wins Pulitzer Prize

IIDB (Internet News Service) — A novel written by the illustrious novelist Hard Determinism has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The novel, The Gallant Gallstone, was entirely cribbed from the novel The Fountainhead, also written by Mr. Determinism via the meat robot Ayn Rand. Therefore there was no question of plagiarism.

The novel tells the story of a gallstone that thinks it has free will but then is dissolved by castor oil, proving somehow or other that free will is an illusion.

“I couldn’t be more hard-determined honored by this hard-determined award,” Mr. Determinism told a gaggle of hard-determined reporters who were hard-determined to ask Mr. Determinism stupid hard-determined questions. “I only wish that I actually knew how to write.”

Mr. Determinism said his next project was to take dictation from the Big Bang without the slightest clue what he was going to write about.

“The Big Bang will let my (His) fingers do the talking,” Mr. Determinism said, adding that “Hard Determinism — that is, me — will permit no alternate choices.”

Now you have done it pood, you have crossed the line.

You can step on my blue suede shoes, but you can't step on Ayn Rand.

Randism, a blast from the past.

I thought Rand was uber free will. In Fountainhead the architect and creative free will versus the restrictive system.

Yes, Rand rejected all forms of determinism, and was a proponent of free will.

 

[pood]

Novel Written by Hard Determinism Wins Pulitzer Prize

IIDB (Internet News Service) — A novel written by the illustrious novelist Hard Determinism has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The novel, The Gallant Gallstone, was entirely cribbed from the novel The Fountainhead, also written by Mr. Determinism via the meat robot Ayn Rand. Therefore there was no question of plagiarism.

The novel tells the story of a gallstone that thinks it has free will but then is dissolved by castor oil, proving somehow or other that free will is an illusion.

“I couldn’t be more hard-determined honored by this hard-determined award,” Mr. Determinism told a gaggle of hard-determined reporters who were hard-determined to ask Mr. Determinism stupid hard-determined questions. “I only wish that I actually knew how to write.”

Mr. Determinism said his next project was to take dictation from the Big Bang without the slightest clue what he was going to write about.

“The Big Bang will let my (His) fingers do the talking,” Mr. Determinism said, adding that “Hard Determinism — that is, me — will permit no alternate choices.”

Now you have done it pood, you have crossed the line.

You can step on my blue suede shoes, but you can't step on Ayn Rand.

Randism, a blast from the past.

I thought Rand was uber free will. In Fountainhead the architect and creative free will versus the restrictive system.

She was unber free will. The Gallant Gallstone her parody of the idea that we lack free will.

 

[pood]

The point is that in The Fountainhead, The Gallant Gallstone was a shitty novel written by a hack writer and heavily promoted by the book’s villain, a newspaper columnist deliciously named Elseworth Toohey. The novel within the novel promoted the idea that we lack free will. Rand was employing the book as a prop to argue for total free will. Even though she was an atheist, she strongly doubted the theory of evolution because she disliked its implication that we come ready made with suites of instincts and proclivities. She thought everyone was born at birth as blank slates and had to make themselves by sheer force of will.

 

[steve_bank]

I had completely forgotten Rand. Maybe I misinterpreted your post.

At the end of the movie version the architect(Gary Cooper) is standing on the top of a tall building with his hair bowling in the wined. Below the woman(Patrica Neil) gazes upward longingly.

Free will versus forced conformity.

 

[pood]

That’s how the novel ends too. The fictional architect, Howard Roark, is a towering self-made hero and the woman, Dominique Francon, is Rand’s idea of the ideal woman, a wealthy layabout who gets raped by Roark and then falls in love with him and submits to him cuz he’s a real man’s man, you know. Go figure.

 

[steve_bank]

To summarize for myself

Hard determinism (or metaphysical determinism) is a view on free will which holds that determinism is true, that it is incompatible with free will, and therefore that free will does not exist. Although hard determinism generally refers to nomological determinism,[1] it can also be a position taken with respect to other forms of determinism that necessitate the future in its entirety.[2]

Nomological determinism is the most common form of causal determinism and is generally synonymous with physical determinism.[citation needed] This is the notion that the past and the present dictate the future entirely and necessarily by rigid natural laws and that every occurrence inevitably results from prior events. Nomological determinism is sometimes illustrated by the thought experiment of Laplace's demon. Laplace posited that an omniscient

Compatibilism(soft determinism) is the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent.[1] The opposing belief, that the thesis of determinism is logically incompatible with the classical thesis of free will, is known as "incompatibilism".

Hard determinism would say all things are predestined, even our neurons firing meaning no free will. And tere can be no mrality.

Compatibilism is a compromise. We can have physical causality as in Newtonian physics along with free will.

I think most people are compatabilst without knowing it. That we have free will is ingrained in culture, along with the general understanding of Newtonian causation in the daily macro world.

 

[pood]

OTOH in her novel Atlas Shrugged she makes a woman, Dagney Taggert, head of an entire railroad while her brother is a simpering, whiney jerk. In that novel she propounds the serious daft notion that the American railroads were built by swaggering individualist he-men who came from nothing. Taggert’s ancestor, we are told, was a penniless drifter who came out of the woods in the mid-19th century and built with his own bare hands the railroad empire that she inherited. How that actually happened is never explained. Of course the true hero of the novel is a white man, the swashbuckling John Galt, to whom naturally Taggert eventually submits because that is what ideal women are supposed to do, even when they run railroads,

 

[steve_bank]

That’s how the novel ends too. The fictional architect, Howard Roark, is a towering self-made hero and the woman, Dominique Francon, is Rand’s idea of the ideal woman, a wealthy layabout who gets raped by Roark and then falls in love with him and submits to him cuz he’s a real man’s man, you know. Go figure.

I read the book circa 1970s and forgot about Rand. As I remember publicly she was a hard core capitalist so to speak, strong anti communist /socialist. But not averse to using government welfare when she was down on her luck.

I thought she was a fraud after looking at her history..

 

[pood]

Supposedly her social worker had to talk her into taking government benefits. Yeah, right. It’s doubly hypocritical because in The Fountainhead she has the character of a social worker who is a worthless shrew who likes lording it over the unfortunate because supposedly it made her feel superior. Rand was definitely weird.

 

[Jarhyn]

The point is that in The Fountainhead, The Gallant Gallstone was a shitty novel written by a hack writer and heavily promoted by the book’s villain, a newspaper columnist deliciously named Elseworth Toohey. The novel within the novel promoted the idea that we lack free will. Rand was employing the book as a prop to argue for total free will. Even though she was an atheist, she strongly doubted the theory of evolution because she disliked its implication that we come ready made with suites of instincts and proclivities. She thought everyone was born at birth as blank slates and had to make themselves by sheer force of will.

Rand is, in some respects, exactly what I mean in discussing how Libertarianism is really just solipsism, and the belief a person is themselves God hiding in plain sight and that all things and actions are justified for them. Perhaps this is where I get my first inking that both Libs and HDs have ulterior motives for breaking free will in whichever way they break it.

I really do think that beliefs in fatalism will harm people no matter whether they believe the world fatalistic or "libertarian".

 

[pood]

Yeah, Rand’s superheroes (white heterosexual males all) can pretty do anything they want because, well, they are superheroes. Roark can rape a woman and she falls in love with him. In Atlas Shrugged, the penniless drifter Taggert throws a government agent down a flight of stairs when he finds him annoying. The uber publisher Gail Wynand does the same thing in The Fountainhead. Rand seems to have had something about throwing people down stairs, perhaps even some kind of sexual fetish. She never got into defenestration fortunately.

 

[steve_bank]

If you want to get the image of the American libertarian look at the old western movies.

John Wayne sitting on the porch with a riffle gazing out over a vast land he owns. He makes his own laws and rules. Justifies independence on his rand by clamming he built it all by himself beholding to no one.

Voluntary cooperation between land owners. No civil laws, government or services.

'A man's home is his castle'

Absolute free will. The mythical free roaming cowboy.

To libertarians property ownership and rights begins in the 1800s with homest6eadntg, ignoring Native Americans.

 

[WAB]

Yeah, Rand’s superheroes (white heterosexual males all) can pretty do anything they want because, well, they are superheroes. Roark can rape a woman and she falls in love with him. In Atlas Shrugged, the penniless drifter Taggert throws a government agent down a flight of stairs when he finds him annoying. The uber publisher Gail Wynand does the same thing in The Fountainhead. Rand seems to have had something about throwing people down stairs, perhaps even some kind of sexual fetish. She never got into defenestration fortunately.

Well, there's Dagny from AS. And Kira, from Rand's novel We The Living. That was an early one and was actually very good. It was a lot more Russian. Of course it takes place in Russia. Characters were more realistic and well-rounded. Have you read it?

But you're point is true...

 

[bilby]

Yeah, Rand’s superheroes (white heterosexual males all) can pretty do anything they want because, well, they are superheroes. Roark can rape a woman and she falls in love with him. In Atlas Shrugged, the penniless drifter Taggert throws a government agent down a flight of stairs when he finds him annoying. The uber publisher Gail Wynand does the same thing in The Fountainhead. Rand seems to have had something about throwing people down stairs, perhaps even some kind of sexual fetish. She never got into defenestration fortunately.

The Daylight Atheist blogged an excellent chapter by chapter review of Atlas Shrugged between 2013 and 2016, which is at:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/series/atlas-shrugged/

(ETA That page seems to be broken; links to the various chapter reviews can still be found at the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/2019021.../blogs/daylightatheism/series/atlas-shrugged/)

The review reveals the utter insanity of Rand's vision, and the contradictory way in which the novel's world reacts to events based on the character's status - the heroes only make decisions that lead to glory, the villains only make decisions that lead to disaster, even when they make the exact same decision.

 

[pood]

Yeah, Rand’s superheroes (white heterosexual males all) can pretty do anything they want because, well, they are superheroes. Roark can rape a woman and she falls in love with him. In Atlas Shrugged, the penniless drifter Taggert throws a government agent down a flight of stairs when he finds him annoying. The uber publisher Gail Wynand does the same thing in The Fountainhead. Rand seems to have had something about throwing people down stairs, perhaps even some kind of sexual fetish. She never got into defenestration fortunately.

Well, there's Dagny from AS. And Kira, from Rand's novel We The Living. That was an early one and was actually very good. It was a lot more Russian. Of course it takes place in Russia. Characters were more realistic and well-rounded. Have you read it?

But you're point is true...

I am aware of We The Living but have not read it. I will try to find it online.

I have a certain soft spot for Rand because I think The Fountainhead was an important and even great novel in a number of ways. It was brilliantly plotted, and its theme of the integrity of the individual, especially the creative artist, resonated with me. She wrote this before she completely went around the bend and wrote AS, which is a massive polemical tract masquerading as a novel.

 

[pood]

I also approve of the fact that she despised Ronald Reagan.

 

[pood]

Yeah, Rand’s superheroes (white heterosexual males all) can pretty do anything they want because, well, they are superheroes. Roark can rape a woman and she falls in love with him. In Atlas Shrugged, the penniless drifter Taggert throws a government agent down a flight of stairs when he finds him annoying. The uber publisher Gail Wynand does the same thing in The Fountainhead. Rand seems to have had something about throwing people down stairs, perhaps even some kind of sexual fetish. She never got into defenestration fortunately.

The Daylight Atheist blogged an excellent chapter by chapter review of Atlas Shrugged between 2013 and 2016, which is at:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/series/atlas-shrugged/

(ETA That page seems to be broken; links to the various chapter reviews can still be found at the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/2019021.../blogs/daylightatheism/series/atlas-shrugged/)

That first link works fine for me. I look forward to reading this review.

Atlas Shrugged was a hot mess. As I recall Rearden started work as a child in a steel foundry. Same thing in The Fountainhead — Howard Roark began work at the age of 10 in the building trades. Apparently Rand approved of child labor, without any regulation. Just bizarre.

Someone else — maybe the same writer — did a chapter by chapter review of The Fountainhead which was hilarious. But I stick to my opinion that The Fountainhead was an important work.

 

[Jarhyn]

Yeah, Rand’s superheroes (white heterosexual males all) can pretty do anything they want because, well, they are superheroes. Roark can rape a woman and she falls in love with him. In Atlas Shrugged, the penniless drifter Taggert throws a government agent down a flight of stairs when he finds him annoying. The uber publisher Gail Wynand does the same thing in The Fountainhead. Rand seems to have had something about throwing people down stairs, perhaps even some kind of sexual fetish. She never got into defenestration fortunately.

The Daylight Atheist blogged an excellent chapter by chapter review of Atlas Shrugged between 2013 and 2016, which is at:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/series/atlas-shrugged/

(ETA That page seems to be broken; links to the various chapter reviews can still be found at the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/2019021.../blogs/daylightatheism/series/atlas-shrugged/)

That first link works fine for me. I look forward to reading this review.

Atlas Shrugged was a hot mess. As I recall Rearden started work as a child in a steel foundry. Same thing in The Fountainhead — Howard Roark began work at the age of 10 in the building trades. Apparently Rand approved of child labor, without any regulation. Just bizarre.

Someone else — maybe the same writer — did a chapter by chapter review of The Fountainhead which was hilarious. But I stick to my opinion that The Fountainhead was an important work.

I feel in the same way Libertarianism shrugs towards Solipsism, Hard Determinism may shrug towards Nihilism and recklessness or even dreamless resigned subservience.

What were your thoughts on Voltaire and Candide?

 

[DBT]

Again, given that it is compatibilists that give their definition of free will in relation to their definition of determinism, and incompatibilists, accepting the given definition of determinism, point out the flaw in the compatibilist definition of free will......where exactly does the modal fallacy lie?

There is no flaw in the compatibilist definition of free will. There is a flaw in the INCOMPATIBILIST definition of free will.

The flaw in the compatibilist argument is, as pointed out, it's failure to account for the nature of the means of producing thought and response.


To reiterate;

''An action’s production by a deterministic process, even when the agent satisfies the conditions on moral responsibility specified by compatibilists, presents no less of a challenge to basic-desert responsibility than does deterministic manipulation by other agents. '


Definition of freedom
1: the quality or state of being free: such as
a: the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action - Merriam Webster

Given necessity - yes necessity - determinism does not permit freedom of will.