The idea that the electromagnetic radiation can exert pressure is an interesting idea that I taught in my physics courses. As an example, the idea of using the pressure from solar radiation to power a spacecraft has been around for a long time, and I used to give this as a homework problem.
It looks like it has finally come to fruition. Japan used one to fly by Venus in 2010 and now NASA has deployed one to orbit the Earth. Plans are underway to use one to fly to Jupiter later in the decade.
Some of you may be aware that many parents are not giving their children the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine out of fears that it may cause autism. These fears were generated by a paper published in 1998 by the British medical journal Lancet by Andrew Wakefield and others suggesting such a link. The findings were challenged but the journal only withdrew the paper in 2010.
The British Medical Journal has now published a detailed investigation and concludes that all of the twelve original cases reported had had their data misreported or altered in order to make the link.
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Of all the arguments that are used by religious people against evolution, the most fraudulent is that there are no transitional forms between species. People who say this either willfully ignore the evidence that does exist or think that a transitional form must be a hybrid between two currently existing species.
Do you think that no one could be that stupid? Behold the infamous crocoduck argument.
Critics of evolution sometimes try to argue that the mechanism of natural selection works too slowly to produce the world we now have in the time that was available. P. Z. Myers shows why that argument is wrong.
… and can thus work together for good or bad. Fascinating.
I came across this video of how Libet’s experiments, that started the serious empirical testing of free will, were done.
(For previous posts in this series, see here.)
According to the writer Isaac Beshevis Singer, “We must believe in free will, we have no choice.” It is a funny line because of its paradoxical nature and yet also profound because of its multiple layers of meaning. On the one hand, it could be interpreted as saying that belief in free will is likely hardwired in our brains and we are thus compelled to believe in it, whether it is true or not. On the other, it implies that the idea of free will is so important to our sense of self as autonomous agents and to the way that our society is organized that even if we realize it is a fiction, it is a fiction that we must adopt because to abandon it might lead to cognitive confusion and social disarray. This series of posts has tried to show that this fear is unwarranted and in this, the last post, I want to address the issue of what it all means for our sense of self.
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(For previous posts in this series, see here.)
Let’s consider two scenarios. In one case, John carefully plans and executes a murder. In the other case, Susan kills an assailant who attacks her. With a belief in free will, we assume that John freely made a willful and conscious decision to commit that act and is thus more culpable than Susan who reacted on the spur of the moment out of the instinct for self-preservation and thus did not use her free will. We thus feel justified in punishing John more harshly than Susan.
If there is no free will, that means that both John’s and Susan’s actions were the result of unconscious neural activity, the only difference being that John’s neural activity had sufficient lead time to create conscious thoughts. Shouldn’t the planned murder be treated in the same way as the self-defense? Doesn’t that imply that they should be punished the same? Is this fair? [Read more…]
(For previous posts in this series, see here.)
Many people are suspicious of the insanity defense, suspecting that it is abused by unscrupulous criminals and their lawyers. The fact that psychiatrists and other experts can be found to argue both sides of the case adds weight to the suspicion that there is no objective basis to many of the claims of insanity.
This problem arose when the grounds for the insanity defense was loosened from the strict M’Naghten rule. In a 1954 court decision Durham vs. United States, a US Appeals Court extended the reach of the insanity defense beyond cognitive incapacity and said that “The rule we now hold is simply that the accused is not criminally responsible if his unlawful act was the product of mental disease or mental defect.” (Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, p. 184) As a result of the Durham precedent, there was a proliferation of expert testimony on both sides to argue the question of whether the accused did in fact have a mental disease or defect and whether the act that was committed was the product of that defective mental state, and thus not truly ‘free’.
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(For previous posts in this series, see here.)
It is time to examine the consequences if we are forced to conclude, as seems likely, that there is no such thing as free will and that our actions are determined by the unconscious neural activity of a physical brain that was itself the creation of the genes, environment, and stochastic processes that make up our personal and evolutionary history.
The most obvious implications lie in the areas of crime and punishment and personal morality. Does the absence of free will mean that we are condemned to an amoral anarchy, in which people can claim that they are not responsible for any and every action because they did not freely choose to do so, and thus should bear no consequences?
Actually, no. In chapter 10 The Fear of Determinism in his book The Blank State: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker argues that we need not perpetuate the fiction that there is free will when there is none simply because of fears of such an outcome. Apart from the fact that it is almost always better to base our policies on what is true than on illusions, the lack of free will can actually be more effective than having it because it enables us to see more clearly when and how to assign responsibility for actions.
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