Today my guest is Mike Snyder (@mambomike282), a listener of the show who owns a security firm in Washington state. As a Christian, he wanted to challenge me on the subject of evolution and religion, and so we went for it. 🙂
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I’ve been trying to explain to people for 20 years that free will is an illusion. I’ve covered the subject on a few podcasts, including this one and this one with Dr Susan Blackmore. I even mad a simple flowchart explaining why it must be an illusion. Now, finally, some neuroscientists have agreed with me.
According to Wired:
Long before you’re consciously aware of making a decision, your mind has already made it. If that’s the case, do people actually make decisions? Or is every choice — even the choice to prepare for future choices — an unthinking, mechanistic procedure over which an illusory self-awareness is laid? Those questions are raised by a study conducted by Max Planck Institute neuroscientists and published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience. Test subjects chose whether to push a button with their right or left hand; seven seconds before they experienced making the choice, their brain activity already predicted their final decisions.
(via Cameron Collie via Is Free Will an Illusion? | Wired Science | Wired.com)
You may say “who cares?” Well you should. It’s incredibly important to understand. It’s easily as important as understanding that the Earth orbits the Sun and not the other way around. It will change your life. At least, that’s been my experience and the experience of lots of people I know.
Yet another Catholic leader turns out to be a paedophile – Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado. The only problem is that he’s dead and he escaped punishment. He also apparently had an affair with a woman, fathered her child, and misused funds.
Maciel was the founder of the Catholic congregation called the "Legion Of Christ", which claims to have 70,000 members.
Tim Freke is the co-author (with his writing partner Peter Gandy) of many books about the Jesus myth – including THE JESUS MYSTERIES and THE LAUGHING JESUS. I chatted with him recently about one of their books “The Gospel of the Second Coming”, a marvelous book that manages to combine humour and insight – it explains the Jesus myth as a Gnostic parable. As Tim points out during our chat – nobody really thinks there was an historical “good Samaritan” or “prodigal son”. They are understood to be parables. Tim explains that the whole Jesus story is a series of parables wrapped up in another parable – the parable of Jesus himself.
Click on the above image to order your copy today from BookDepository (free shipping!).
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Excerpt:
So why do we feel as though we are having a single stream of conscious experiences? Perhaps it was useful for our past survival to have a false model of ourselves, to attribute our body’s actions to an inner self, and to see the world in terms of spiritual forces and non-physical agents, when there are no such things. Perhaps it is possible to give up these illusions by practising watching the mind.
Susan was a guest on G’Day World talking about free will back in May 2008.
Read the rest of her recent article in The Guardian here.
Scott Adams tells us about the illusion of time:
People keep sending me links to articles about how time is an illusion and not a quality of the universe. Apparently that is the common view of physicists. Scientists prefer concepts such as warped space-time and whatnot. I won’t pretend to understand any of that. The point is that science doesn’t recognize time — in the way we understand it — as a quality of the universe.
You might say time has something in common with God. Most people have a sense that both time and God exist, and they need both concepts to understand their own existence. Atheists and dyslexics (who experience time out of order) are the minority.
Given that science can’t find evidence for either God or time, it takes a leap of faith to assume either one exists. Therefore, anything in our daily life that depends on either God or time is built on a foundation of faith and not science.
I’ve often thought that time is a property of memory. If you damaged the part of your brain that manages memory, to the hippocampus or surrounding cortices – say a combination of retrograde amnesia and anterograde amnesia – what would your experience of time likely be? If you couldn’t remember what happened five minutes ago – and you couldn’t use your memories to predict the future – wouldn’t your experience be just what’s happening right now? Strangely enough, this is what gurus have been telling us for a long, long time: "What’s wrong with right now?"