The book “Exploring the Illusion of Free Will” is written by George Ortega, a psychologist and host of the TV series of the same name. The book is available free on Google Books.
Some of my previous posts on free will include the following:
Liberated by Giving Up Free Will
Wall Street and the End of Free Will
Here are some quotes from the book:
“Here’s how to disprove any free will argument in two easy steps: 1. Ask the free will believer to give an example of a choice they consider to be freely willed. 2. Ask the free will believer to say whether or not that choice was caused. Congratulations; you’ve just succeeded. If the free will believer says the choice was caused, the ensuing causal regression makes free will impossible. If the free will believer says the choice was uncaused, that would mean the choice was random.”
“As our world comes to understand the fact and significance of free will being an illusion, the predominantly attribution-based premise for rewarding the top 1% with inordinate power and wealth evaporates. A humanity transformed by a new causal consciousness of reality and human will can no longer rationally justify the attributive rewarding or retributive punishing of anyone for what s/he truly had no choice but to do.”
“Overcoming the illusion of free will provides the global revolution of the 99% with a powerful founding principle for the creation of a much saner and more equal world.”
“If I truly had a free will, I would be a perfect angel always. I would always know what to say. I would choose to feel only very positive feelings toward everyone and everything. That’s one of the strongest understandings we gain from our personal lives that, no, we don’t have free wills, and that free will is an illusion.”
“We’re born into a world where the causal past is what makes things happen. It’s all about cause and effect. What happens at one moment causes what happens at the next moment, which causes what happens the next moment, and onward causally into the future. If you’ll notice, this causal chain naturally goes back to before we were born.”
“Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is a hedonic imperative.”
“Our personalities are about 50 percent genetic, and if our genes aren’t determining our personality, then it is being determined by our upbringing and environment.”
“Let’s say you believe in God. I equate God with the universe. If God is everywhere and God is everything, then God is the universe. I ascribe to God more wisdom and understanding than I would to an individual. If you’re not so comfortable with the reality of our wills being causal, that God is the only power on Earth, and that the causal past is determining everything today, perhaps you can appreciate that God would likely be wiser than we are. You may then want to conclude that it’s probably better for all concerned that reality is causal, or God-willed. If our choices were up to us, we’d probably make fewer good choices.”
“Through experiments with hypnosis, and now also in neuroscience, we’ve discovered that even though we think we’re making choices, it is actually our unconscious that is making those choices.”
“If your unconscious never sleeps, and is a part of every decision you make, then that is a very clear way to understand that free will is an illusion.”
“When others do something really great, we sometimes feel envious, but we wouldn’t under a causal will perspective because we would know that whatever they did was not up to them; it was completely compelled by factors outside of their control.”
“Our reality is very much like a movie. What I’m doing right now is completely compelled. None of it is up to me. I’m like an actor whose every word has been scripted, every gesture has been scripted, and every feeling has been scripted. My whole presentation has been scripted by the causal past. That is amazing, and awesome.”
“The rightness and wrongness of what we do is not up to us. It’s up to how we were taught. If we’re in a certain culture, we’re going to believe that certain things are right and certain things are wrong. If we’re in a completely different culture, we may believe that other things are right, and other things are wrong. And we don’t get to choose what culture we are raised in. We don’t get to choose what parents we have, what ethics they instill in us, what books we read in school relating to morality, etc.”
“We’re not truly morally accountable. We’re puppets, or robots, or automatons, or whatever, and we do good and evil because we’re either lucky in the first case or unlucky in the second.”
“If somebody is doing something wrong, we may not blame them for it, but we’ll certainly have to take some action to minimize the impact of the wrong.”
“Punishing an entire country for things that nobody in that country could have done any other way is the height of insanity.”
“Causality controls everything.”
“Our whole lives are based on a premise that is wrong. Of course, we’re not to blame for this. We didn’t choose to be deluded in this way. We didn’t choose to believe we have a free will.”
“We’re doing the will of God, or the causal past.”
“If somebody is going around doing things that are hurtful to themselves or others, certainly we need to take steps to prevent that kind of behavior.”
“By understanding that we don’t have a free will, we can catch those of us who would eventually turn to crime in their later years when they are very young, and condition them to not go that route.”
“The reality is that we human beings have causal wills. We have a will, in the sense that we make decisions, but all of these decisions are caused by factors outside of our control.”
“Causality means that things happen according to the principle of cause and effect. It means that everything that happens, including our every thought, feeling and action, has a cause. And that cause has a cause, because everything must have a cause.”
“If everything happens for a reason, that of course makes free will impossible.”
“To say that we experience free will is to say that we would experience a will that is free of even causality, or this process of cause and effect that governs everything.”
“Everything that any of us thinks and does, and everything that happens – because causality is not limited just to human will; it applies to the entire universe – is completely determined by the causal past.”
“There are many ways of understanding why free will is impossible, and why we simply don’t have a free will. Simple cause and effect and the fact that we have an unconscious that is always awake and taking part in our decision are prime examples.”
“Abandoning the illusion of free will doesn’t mean that we’re going to abandon morality. We can do what we have to do from a more understanding causal perspective.”
“There are many experiments that demonstrate how the unconscious is actually making the decisions that we generally attribute to our conscious mind.”
“If we have a causal will, that means that we may hold ourselves responsible to preserve our civilization and to have a certain degree of order, but that attribution is just a convention. Perhaps because we don’t know any better, or for some other reason, but the fundamental reality is that we’re not responsible.”
“Attributing free will to others and to ourselves causes a lot of unnecessary blame, guilt, and aggression.”
“We don’t want to see ourselves as robots, or puppets – completely programmed beings, and everything being a movie. Another way to look at this, however, is that God’s will is manifested through us.”
“Some people believe that if we relinquish our belief in free will, there will be anarchy. No, because we’re hard wired to act in certain ways.”
“A very cool thing about not believing in free will is that we can thereby hold ourselves as innocent – as blameless. To be able to hold God as blameless would also be good.”
“If we were to claim that part of our decisions was up to us, we would have to confront the following questions. What was the reason for that decision? Why did we make that decision? And, what caused us to have that reason?”
“A free decision is presumably one for which there would be our own autonomous reasons. In other words, asserting that we have a free will is akin to asserting that our will is free of causality, free of any kind of reason, and free of the self.”
“Through the process of priming, researchers can make us behave in certain ways, and make certain decisions, without or even being aware of the experimental manipulation.”
“[Advertisers] understand that we don’t have a free will, and they condition us to behave in ways they would prefer.”
“For example, let’s say we claim that our feelings are completely up to us. If that’s the premise – that free will means that we can freely choose to feel what we want – then who among us would choose to feel negative feelings? Who among us would choose to feel anything but blissful every hour of every day? If having a free will means that we could make our moral decisions completely up to us – that we could be as good as we would want to – who among us wouldn’t be a perfect angel? Who wouldn’t be and do good all of the time, especially toward the people in our lives?”
“We’re not really in control of our desires. Whether we desire a certain kind of food, or experience, or music, or clothing, or whatever, these are preferences that are the result of genetics and past experience. We can’t, at the moment we’re making a decision, just choose our desires. They have been chosen for us by the causal process of nature and nurture.”
“We have to study to take tests. If we had a free will, we could just commit something to memory, and at test time just write it without hesitation, because we could freely draw whatever we willed from our memory bank.”
“We’re spectators, rather than the writer. We experience, rather than decide, our reality.”
“When you understand that free will is an illusion – that there is no such thing as free will – then suddenly there is no reason to forgive, because there is no reason for indictment to begin with.”
“We’re just going along for the ride. We’re experiencing life rather than freely making the decisions that make it happen.”
“Remember that much of the pain that arises from the illusion of free will comes from self-blame.”
“We might want to blame, or hold accountable, the universe for whatever it compels us to do. But since we’re agents, or instruments, of the past, and since our decisions are not up to us, we are not personally morally responsible.”
“The science all points to the very strong conclusion that everything is caused, that everything has a causal past, and because of that, free will is impossible.”
“We may not have a free will, but we still experience life. We human beings don’t decide; we experience.”
“Life can have all the meaning it needs – we’re here, and we’re experiencing life – without our needing to falsely believe that we are the authors of our thoughts.”
“We’re obviously fated to succeed at some tasks and fail at others, but it’s all predetermined.”
