(February 10, 2014 at 12:43 am)JuliaL Wrote: We think we have free will and that's all that counts.This. In the end, does it matter? Some day we may unravel the human brain sufficiently to know just how "free" we are to act and how much of what we do is selected by our subconscious. At that point I suppose we'll worry about just how free our will really is.
Ironically, the free will argument seems to be used as a way to place us in an even more restrictive cage than the one our mind builds around us.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
