Jaltcoh

Jaltcoh t1_j8v04ra wrote

I don’t know what you mean by “that decision was made as soon as you are aware of the choice.” It’s not clear to me that that’s true, or that it would disprove free will if it were true.

Also, you seem to be assuming that “all our decisions can be traced back to genetics” and other things outside our control. Well, those things clearly contribute a lot to our actions, but that isn’t the issue. That just means we don’t have total freedom, which should be obvious even to believers in free will. When people argue against free will, it often seems like they’re setting up two extremes: either no freedom ever, or a magical, supernatural “ghost” roaming around our bodies. Framing it like that makes the second option sound so ridiculous as to suggest that the only serious answer for any educated person in the modern world is to deny free will in absolute terms. But I like the article’s suggestion to reconsider how we think about free will. We might not have all the relevant knowledge yet, and the debate doesn’t need to be constantly boiled down to two cartoonish extremes.

The article does a good job of subtly refuting the Libet experiment, after it was more bluntly debunked by John Searle in his book Rationality in Action over 20 years ago.

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Jaltcoh t1_j5boc13 wrote

Make your close friends a top priority. Stay in touch with them, make time for them, get together with them one on one, and never let them down. At 16 you might feel like having a lot of friends is a natural and easy part of life, but it’ll seem harder before you know it. “The best time to make friends is before you need them.”

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