Let’s pick some low-hanging wisp-pated bug-minded bug-eyed bugman fruit in the form of the “entity” labeled Yuval Noah Hariri.
This is not an insult! Hariri himself tells us he is an entity: I merely repeat his mind. Which made him say, in The Guardian, “‘free will” isn’t a scientific reality. It is a myth inherited from Christian theology.”
Theologians developed the idea of “free will” to explain why God is right to punish sinners for their bad choices and reward saints for their good choices. If our choices aren’t made freely, why should God punish or reward us for them? According to the theologians, it is reasonable for God to do so, because our choices reflect the free will of our eternal souls, which are independent of all physical and biological constraints.
Best that can be said of this is that it is Reddit-level history. But never mind. What interests us is entity-Hariri’s view of itself:
Humans certainly have a will – but it isn’t free. You cannot decide what desires you have. You don’t decide to be introvert or extrovert, easy-going or anxious, gay or straight. Humans make choices – but they are never independent choices. Every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself…
This is not abstract theory. You can witness this easily. Just observe the next thought that pops up in your mind. Where did it come from? Did you freely choose to think it? Obviously not. If you carefully observe your own mind, you come to realise that you have little control of what’s going on there, and you are not choosing freely what to think, what to feel, and what to want.
You have the idea. We are mere “entities” who only seem to make “choices”, such as (Hariri’s example) what to eat, but you don’t really choose, because the choices are governed by events outside your control, such as your genes.
Not constrained, which is obviously true—you can’t choose to eat a trilobyte, because there ain’t none—but governed, which we observe is false.
Our bugman grants that the idea of free will was once useful: “It emboldened people who had to fight against the Inquisition, the divine right of kings, the KGB and the KKK.” How?He never says. He cannot say.
In any case, “belief in ‘free will’ [now] suddenly becomes dangerous.” Why? Because those who believe in free will might make the wrong choices!
Even scarier, “If governments and corporations succeed in hacking the human animal, the easiest people to manipulate will be those who believe in free will.”
This has already happened, Hariri says, because he has discovered some react to click bait. Doing so proves, to him, “you have been hacked.” Who chooses to create the click bait? Russia. So only Russian trolls have free will? He never says.
Now I often joke that these anti-free will articles all boil down to this pronouncement: if only people realize they didn’t have free will, they would make better choices.
Entity Hariri makes the joke himself:
For starters, realising that our thoughts and desires don’t reflect our free will can help us become less obsessive about them. If I see myself as an entirely free agent, choosing my desires in complete independence from the world, it creates a barrier between me and all other entities…But if we understood that our desires are not the outcome of free choice, we would hopefully be less preoccupied with them, and would also feel more connected to the rest of the world.
Here comes the punchline. Entity begins its article by asking itself pre-ordained questions. “Should scholars serve the truth, even at the cost of social harmony? Should you expose a fiction even if that fiction sustains the social order?” And many more like it, all with the theme, Should I, an amazing entity who has broken free of the constraints of the universe, dare to choose to tell the world that it cannot make choices?
And here is how Entity answers itself (my emphasis): “I eventually chose free discussion over self-censorship, thanks to my belief both in the strength of liberal democracy and in the necessity to revamp it.”
See what I mean? The same joke in all these things, over and over.
A man believes he has come to supreme enlightenment—he never says how—and has escaped the ravages of free will. He has come to deliver salvation.
It’s no surprise the WEF, the Midwit Pinnacle Of NGOs, as its representative.
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