10 Aug Even if you don’t quite believe you have free will, you’re better off acting as if you do.
When it comes to health and wellbeing, mental health and happiness, and most areas of life in fact, what you believe is important.
Even more so, believing that what you believe is important is also important.
Whether you’re interested in happiness or not, although if you’re reading this I assume you are, this article is likely to be thought provoking and helpful …
via the Atlantic by Arthur C Brooks
In 2005, the journal Nature published a short science-fiction story by the writer Ted Chiang about a small toy called the “Predictor.” Roughly the size of a car’s key fob, the Predictor has a button and a green light. The green light illuminates one second before the operator presses the button. No one can outwit it, because it works by reading the operator’s predetermined behaviors before they’re apparent to the operator themselves.
At first, people goof around with the device as a simple amusement. But in time, its effects on many users clearly become serious, because they realize from playing with it that free will is an illusion. As a result, a third of the population develops a pathology known as “akinetic mutism,” a kind of walking coma in which all motivation is absent from life. Some are hospitalized because they won’t feed themselves. Without free will, it seems, people do not feel they are truly alive.
That account is fiction, but we are living in a time when science and philosophy present fresh challenges to the existence of free will. Just as Chiang’s story suggests, this has profound implications for happiness. Understanding the arguments at play, and deciding how to respond, can make a big difference in your life.
The question of free will arises from what philosophers call the “mind-body problem,” which asks whether the mind and the brain are the same thing or separate entities. The philosopher René Descartes famously wrestled with this conundrum in his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy, arguing that the mind occupies no physical space and is thus distinct from the body.
This “dualist” view has had many modern adherents, both religious and secular. For example, the Australian philosopher David Chalmers believes that the mind is not physical or material; he posits that one could exist physically without consciousness, like a zombie, so consciousness must exist outside the material realm.
If this is true, where does the mind reside, if not in the brain? Some might say that the mind is in the soul—or is the soul itself—which, if not physical, might exist beyond physical death. Others point to a kind of panpsychism, or a degree of consciousness that inhabits all natural bodies. But whatever the mind is and wherever it resides, we seem to possess an essence that enables us to make decisions in our daily lives, an expression of independent choice, of free will. A useful metaphor for this view is that the brain is the computer and the mind is the operator.
In contrast to all of this, a school of “physicalists” believes that subjective experiences and consciousness emanate entirely from the brain, and that the separateness of brain and mind is an illusion. To revert to the metaphor, no external operator exists …
… keep reading the full & original article HERE