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Must I? Perhaps you can find contentment in the simple joy of providing me so many opportunities to say true things. I know I do.

I'd find that explanation more convincing if we'd heard it before he started fumbling.

Jesus, if only... But of course, that would just mean she was constantly at odds with the houses of Congress... It's funny how conservatives genuinely believe that one of the most painfully impotent factions in the Legislative branch is secretly ruling it, just because politicians occasionally...

No, but they are a disadvantaged class that white women were afraid to see in their changing room. Like trans folks. The racists of your childhood didn't say "I hate blacks and that's why I want to discriminate against them". They said things like "I have nothing against Ne---s personally. We...

This is a feeling, not an observation. What does it mean to be "free to do as you please"? How would a universe in which the God's favorite primates are "free to do as they please" look demonstrably, measurably different from a universe in which no primates were "free to do as they please"?

Do I? Compatiblism will need to make a clear and cohererent claim before it "has problems" with anything.

We did indeed! Clever, clever monkeys. But if you do encounter a person or book with knowledge of quantum mechanics, you should embrace it as the next step in better understanding the universe, not reject it because late medieval chemistry was good enough for your grandpappy. If you reify a...

Except that the person who used too much Glen-20 when cleaning the room that morning had a lot more to do with it than Steve did, or even you did. If they didn't overdo it with the damn disinfectant, none of it would have happened. You didn't "choose" to be irrationally angry at Steve, and Steve...

It isn't, though. It absolutely requires inputs from beyond your body in order to function at all. A brain without external stimuli and nutrients is just a lump of carbon slowly decaying into the soil, not even salvageable let alone functional. We look back on our day and think "I was mad at...

I think that's an excellent analogue, but not for the reasons you think. That claim, "I know that pushing the right hand pedal makes it go faster" is only a reasonable position insofar as it is deduced from a pattern observed in the real world. It also isn't strictly true. Sure, it will get you...

Because you are defending free will, or claiming to. Have you really never read any of the literature on free will at all? I get that you think you can discuss Sapolsky without reading Sapolsky, but you haven't even read the fundamental literature on your own side of the debate? Yes, free will...

That doesn't even make sense. The brain is the hub of a complex neural network, and the purpose of that network is to process information from the environment; if you cut it off from the body, it dies instantly. If you disable its senses, it cannot function.

This is a statement of faith, not reason. "Whether or not I understand this phenomenon, I am certain I am right in my absolute claims about it" is an emotional, not rational, stance.

Kind of? Self is a complex concept and a discussion in and of itself. You construct your sense of "you" to some degree, but it is also constructed by others, is a component of a culture larger than yourself, and responds to environmental factors well beyond your control. And like "choices", it...

Actually, what do you mean by "compatible"? What is compatible with what? Because unless you are lying or deluded about your views on the deterministic universe, your views are no more compatible with the original theological doctrine of Free Will than Sapolsky's are. Orthodox Christians...

What, precisely, do you mean by the word "free"? What, precisely, do you mean by the word "will"? Both of these words strongly imply, if they do not outright require, magic.

A dubious claim at best, but even if it were so, "we" are not free in any reasonable sense of that term.

That is simply not true, though. Your brain "decides" what to have for dinner, and your conscious mind generates an explanation for it post facto. That, at least, is the current conclusion of neuroscientists, based on the preponderence of the data we now possess. This, interestingly enough, is...

As for the far right engine that fuels the Trump grift game, they have firmly opposed law and order ever since it started to protect blacks as well, and nothing has changed. They just come up with new excuses to avoid accountability. The "undecided middle" are honest idiots, though. Literally...

I thought the whole conservative fantasy was that we "don't see color" anymore so it's always wrong to accuse a white woman of being racist? When they call the police on a black woman in the changing room at the country club these days, it's because she "looked shifty" and they "thought she...