Sunday
4:32 p.m.
Hi Cris,
I thoroughly enjoyed your book, The Myth of Free Will. I also found it to be rather depressing. I concluded free will was a myth by extricating my Self from my fundamentalist roots, observing my fourth and fifth grade students for thirty-three years and dealing with the free will dysfunction in my personal life. My discovery that physics and brain research nails the lid on free will came last.
What took some time to sink in was, all these credentialed and intelligent people concluded free will was a myth and then went back to their business as usual behavior. Steve Pinker's article in Time Magazine was the first indication I had that anyone was truly aware that the brain, that thought and consciousness were purely physiological functions. I attempted to contact him with no response.
I have concluded that the mathematic disciplines, the physical and natural sciences have experienced stable and consistent growth because they are not merely accepting of, but are committed to, a determined universe. To the contrary, the social sciences have experienced cyclic collapse, personal and national dysfunction and horrendous destruction because they have refused to accept that ours is a determined universe. Living in a determined universe as if it were a free will universe is tantamount to breathing water as if it were air. At this point in history the patient is pretty much on life support! Heck! If we manage to bring it back to life, it'll just go back to breathing water! Good intentioned people like Al Gore, Barack Obama, and bless his heart, Ralph Nader, are dueling with symptoms and appear to be completely unaware of the disease, which is mankind's free will mindset.
How can all these extremely intelligent and credentialed people not know that life on this planet is on the brink of extinction, not because of global warming, not because of starvation and poverty, not because of the atrocities of war, but because of its allegiance to free will? We can proudly pat ourselves on the back for reducing carbon emissions, caring for the poor and needy, and decrying the insanity of war, but focusing on symptoms and either feigning or actually being oblivious to the underlying disease is...gosh! The only words that come to mind are dumb, stupid, insane and really scary. I give the world no more than decades, perhaps if we are lucky, a century, but without some concerted effort to educate society about the disease, we'll still be nearsightedly obsessed with the symptoms while they giddily drive us over the cliff and into the arms of extinction.
Am I making a mountain of a mole hill? I really don't think so. I'm not a person clothed in sackcloth and ashes, standing on a big city curb and shouting the end is near! Frankly, being a rock solid determinist, I can take this world or leave it! The French had it right: What will be, will be. But my god! The world society is in the middle of the railroad tracks absorbed in some kind of make-believe ritual while the locomotive is barreling down on it at a couple hundred miles an hour! And all Steve Pinker does is clear his throat, nods his head towards the locomotive a couple times, and then serenely goes back to his studies of language development, as if language development will have any relevancy when Earth is a dead planet. It just does not make sense to me! Unlike the Steve Pinkers of the world, I am not a credentialed person and I have no respected Ivy League platform. I am an elementary teacher (that equates to a post office clerk) who is a compulsive thinker that obsesses about anomalies; about things that don't make sense, and intellectuals who behave dumbly, knowledgeable people who capitulate to what amounts to a superstitious intuitive universal mindset, distinctively educated people who refuse to connect the dots simply don't make sense to me. I'm more exasperated with this world's intellectual elite than I am that free-will will inevitably destroy life on this planet. I have established a website. It is an amateurish attempt and a bit wordy, but it expresses my concern for life on this planet and more importantly goes beyond embracing universal determinism and delves into specific benefits which will result from living in harmony with what is real. I confess, I feel a bit like Don Quixote only I don't have a Sanchez and free-will is no windmill! The website is:
www.beneficentparentalism.com
Any thoughts you have would be appreciated. Over-all, your book provided a significant boost to my morale!
Sincerely,
Ronald K. Olson
465 W. Wright Ave. Apt 7
Shepherd, MI 48883
threetwenty-seven@hotmail.com
1-989-567-2222
Return to Main Content Page
