Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

Thus, undermine someone’s belief in free will and they feel less of a sense of agency, meaning, or self-knowledge, less gratitude for other people’s kindness. And most important for our purposes, they become less ethical in their behavior, less helpful, and more aggressive. Burn this book before anyone else stumbles upon it and has their moral comp

Collectively, these EEG studies show that when people believe less in free will, they put less intentionality and effort into their actions, monitor their errors less closely, and are less invested in the outcomes of a task.[6]

Even if quantum indeterminacy did bubble all the way up to behavior, there is the fatal problem that all it would produce is randomness.

Step #1. Start with a tube of diameter Z (a tube because geometrically, a blood vessel branch, a dendritic branch, and a tree branch can all be thought of that way). Step #2. Extend that tube until it is, to pull a number out of a hat, four times longer than its diameter (i.e., 4Z). Step #3. At that point, the tube bifurcates, splits in two. Repeat

determinism and predictability are very different things. Even if chaoticism is unpredictable, it is still deterministic.

chaoticism, or chaos theory. And its central idea is that really interesting, complicated things are often not best understood, cannot be understood, on a reductive level.

Harris argues convincingly that it’s impossible to successfully think of what you’re going to think next. The takeaway from chapters 2 and 3 is that it’s impossible to successfully wish what you’re going to wish for. This chapter’s punchline is that it’s impossible to successfully will yourself to have more willpower. And that it isn’t a great idea

There are also PFC differences in cognitive style. In general, collectivist-culture individuals prefer and excel at context-dependent cognitive tasks, while it’s context-independent tasks for individualistic-culture folks.

How’s this for rapidly altering frontal function—take an average heterosexual male and expose him to a particular stimulus, and his PFC becomes more likely to decide that jaywalking is a good idea. What’s the stimulus? The proximity of an attractive woman. I know, pathetic.[*23]