354 | Christian List on Free Will and Levels of Reality – Sean Carroll

HOW ASTROLOGERS VIEW FREE WILL VS. CHALLENGING ASTROLOGICAL INFLUENCES

This is a very good question and the answer is not exactly YES or NO. Lets understand it step by step.

Is your AI chatbot manipulating you? Subtly reshaping your opinions?

Companies like Meta and IBM are exploring explore how AI can hyper-personalize ads, drawing from our chat histories, playing to our unique fears and vanities.

Chance, choice, and control: free will in an indeterministic universe - Synthese

While the free will debate tends to focus primarily on the implications of determinism for freedom, a long line of philosophers have also argued that free will would not be compatible with indeterminism either. These arguments typically take the form of a so-called Luck Objection: a family of related arguments which all seek to show, roughly, that if an action is not causally pre-determined then it must be a sort of random happening, over which the agent lacks the control required for free will. If successful, these arguments are fatal for libertarian accounts of free will, which are committed to the view that free actions must be both undetermined and under the agent’s control. In this paper, we defend libertarian free will against this challenge from luck. We argue that most formulations of the Luck Objection presuppose a conceptual model of indeterministic decision-making that is not well aligned with recent advances in the natural sciences; specifically, we argue that they make assumptions about the nature of indeterminacy and about the causal structure of decision-making, which libertarians have good empirical reason (from both physics and neuroscience) to reject. We develop a more empirically plausible model of agential decision-making and apply this to the problem of luck. We argue that, under such a model, it is entirely natural to think of an agent’s actions as both ‘undetermined’ (in the sense of being under-determined) and under their own control. We conclude that indeterminism poses no threat to a more naturalistic version of libertarian free will.

Russell, Bertrand - Lecture (1949-01-30), "Individual and Social Ethics," Reith Lecture, "Authority and the Individual" No. 6, BBC Radio | WIST Quotations

In our own day [...] there has been too much of a tendency towards authority, and too little care for the preservation of initiative. Men in control of vast organisations have tended to be too abstract in their outlook, to forget what actual human beings are like, and to try…

You Can't Choose Your Beliefs

Belief isn't a choice you make, it's something that happens to you when the evidence tips the scales.

Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don’t want to

That means targeting mechanisms engineered to rewire the brain’s reward system, writes Marie Potel-Saville

Review: The Science of Fate by Hannah Critchlow – Ian Robinson's Soapbox