Over the last thirty years or so, a growing body of experimentation by neuroscientists has begun to suggest that human beings might not actually have free will. The conclusions to date are still tentative, and the entire area warrants (and is attracting) extensive additional research, but the early indications are clear enough to suggest that we might not understand the nature of humanity quite as well as we think we do. Let’s just sit with the possibility for a second, okay? We do not actually have free will. We are, essentially, complex machines responding to sensory and informational inputs: so complex, in fact, that it actually looks like we do have free will. Hard to imagine, no? Well, it was hard to imagine, once upon a time, that the Earth revolved around the sun… that homo sapiens evolved from other species… that the universe was more than 14 billion years old… that we aren’t living at the center of it. You get the picture. The absolutely strange can, in
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