Work Ethic – John Malcolm

By James Lewis | June 18, 2012 | American Thinker

In a perverse way this is the most utopian administration in American history. That’s after all what Marxism comes down to, a stubborn fantasy that the world will flip into utopian perfection as soon as all the evil capitalists are in Siberian labor camps. The Soviet Union spent seven decades trying to eradicate capitalism at home and abroad, along with religion, family values and individualism. As a natural consequence, they ended up destroying hard work and agriculture, and every five years the Kremlin kept wondering what could have gone wrong with their “scientific” policies this time around.

Today Vladimir Putin kneels down with the Patriarch of Moscow in the Kremlin Chapel, surrounded by magnificent bling going back to the Byzantine Empire.

So much for eradicating human nature.

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Do people have free will?

By Matt Cockerill | 04/09/2012 | The Daily Caller

Owing to the fact that “[free will] cannot be made conceptually coherent,” Harris holds the idea is not only an illusion, but a transparent and vacuous one. The logical problems with free will are glaring and obvious. One’s choices are a manifestation of one’s desires. One can choose to act upon whichever one of his desires he prefers at a given moment. However, he cannot choose his desires. The mechanisms of the brain, which both determine one’s desires and adjudicate between conflicting ones, are either “determined by prior causes” or “the product of chance.” Neither case, concludes Harris, leaves room for self-authorship.

The scientific critique of free will is as effective as the logical one. Science has demonstrated that a person’s decisions are made in her brain prior to her conscious experience of “deciding.” In this regard, Harris references a study conducted by the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin, which asked subjects to press one of two buttons. Utilizing Functional Magnetic Resonance Technology (FMRI), the researchers “found two brain regions that contained information about what button subjects would press.” By examining these regions, they were able to predict, with astounding accuracy, what button people would press 7 to 10 seconds before they consciously “chose” to press it.

In view of these findings, Harris asserts that everything which humans intend “is caused by events in the brain that we do not intend,” and indeed lack any awareness of. To his mind, this utterly discredits any notion of free will. Nor can the (occasional) randomness of the brain’s physical processes make space for free will. Randomness is sheer chance, over which one has no control. Asks Harris, if a random release of neurotransmitters compels him to drink an extra cup of coffee this morning, does this really constitute a genuine expression of free will?

In my view, Harris’s argument easily exposes “free will” as illusory. Contemporary neuroscience aside, the arguments for free will are simply incoherent. As Arthur Schopenhauer put it, “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.” I do as I will. But what I will is a byproduct of the physical processes of my brain, processes I did not author and don’t even consciously experience.

Read the full article here.