Let’s pick some low-hanging wisp-pated bug-minded bug-eyed bugman fruit in the form of the “entity” labeled Yuval Noah Hariri.
This is not an insult! Hariri himself tells us he is an entity: I merely repeat his mind. Which made him say, in The Guardian, “‘free will” isn’t a scientific reality. It is a myth inherited from Christian theology.”
Theologians developed the idea of “free will” to explain why God is right to punish sinners for their bad choices and reward saints for their good choices. If our choices aren’t made freely, why should God punish or reward us for them? According to the theologians, it is reasonable for God to do so, because our choices reflect the free will of our eternal souls, which are independent of all physical and biological constraints.
Best that can be said of this is that it is Reddit-level history. But never mind. What interests us is entity-Hariri’s view of itself:
Humans certainly have a will – but it isn’t free. You cannot decide what desires you have. You don’t decide to be introvert or extrovert, easy-going or anxious, gay or straight. Humans make choices – but they are never independent choices. Every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself…
This is not abstract theory. You can witness this easily. Just observe the next thought that pops up in your mind. Where did it come from? Did you freely choose to think it? Obviously not. If you carefully observe your own mind, you come to realise that you have little control of what’s going on there, and you are not choosing freely what to think, what to feel, and what to want.
You have the idea. We are mere “entities” who only seem to make “choices”, such as (Hariri’s example) what to eat, but you don’t really choose, because the choices are governed by events outside your control, such as your genes.
Not constrained, which is obviously true—you can’t choose to eat a trilobyte, because there ain’t none—but governed, which we observe is false.
Our bugman grants that the idea of free will was once useful: “It emboldened people who had to fight against the Inquisition, the divine right of kings, the KGB and the KKK.” How?He never says. He cannot say.
In any case, “belief in ‘free will’ [now] suddenly becomes dangerous.” Why? Because those who believe in free will might make the wrong choices!
Even scarier, “If governments and corporations succeed in hacking the human animal, the easiest people to manipulate will be those who believe in free will.”
This has already happened, Hariri says, because he has discovered some react to click bait. Doing so proves, to him, “you have been hacked.” Who chooses to create the click bait? Russia. So only Russian trolls have free will? He never says.
Now I often joke that these anti-free will articles all boil down to this pronouncement: if only people realize they didn’t have free will, they would make better choices.
Entity Hariri makes the joke himself:
For starters, realising that our thoughts and desires don’t reflect our free will can help us become less obsessive about them. If I see myself as an entirely free agent, choosing my desires in complete independence from the world, it creates a barrier between me and all other entities…But if we understood that our desires are not the outcome of free choice, we would hopefully be less preoccupied with them, and would also feel more connected to the rest of the world.
Here comes the punchline. Entity begins its article by asking itself pre-ordained questions. “Should scholars serve the truth, even at the cost of social harmony? Should you expose a fiction even if that fiction sustains the social order?” And many more like it, all with the theme, Should I, an amazing entity who has broken free of the constraints of the universe, dare to choose to tell the world that it cannot make choices?
And here is how Entity answers itself (my emphasis): “I eventually chose free discussion over self-censorship, thanks to my belief both in the strength of liberal democracy and in the necessity to revamp it.”
See what I mean? The same joke in all these things, over and over.
A man believes he has come to supreme enlightenment—he never says how—and has escaped the ravages of free will. He has come to deliver salvation.
It’s no surprise the WEF, the Midwit Pinnacle Of NGOs, as its representative.
Subscribe or donate to support this site and its wholly independent host using credit card click here. For Zelle, use my email: matt@wmbriggs.com, and please include yours so I know who to thank.
“…wisp-pated bug-minded bug-eyed bugman fruit in the form of the “entity” labeled Yuval Noah Hariri.”
Missing a couple of important qualifiers in your succinct personal description of the Hariri-Entity, representing other choices it has made in its life. Just to round out that blurb, we can add:
“…flaming homo vegan Israeli citizen ‘married’ to a man, Hebrew language author, resident of Tel Aviv, meditation freak…”
Every.
Single.
Time.
Remember, first and foremost, that (((they))) hate us. They want us dead, our children brainwashed, mutilated, and enslaved, our culture forgotten.
Yuval Noah Hariri…let me guess, an out-of-work, stand-up philosopher who hasn’t BS’d this week or, last week living off the taxpayer dole…as has been pre-ordained by the annoying gods of Mount Olympus.
Tell all of your friends: The era of brooking Jewsplain is over.
Briggs:
Well, salvation is from the Jews…
Puts me in mind of a Sabbatai Zevi or Jacob Franks certainly cut from the same cloth;
all possessed.
“Entity”
This is how demons speak, referring to themselves.
Et nota bene, the goal is “more connection with the rest of the world.” A primary instruction to Christians from the very beginning is “be in the world, not of it.” The Desert Fathers strove to drive all attachment from their lives.
The logical arguments and their stark errors notwithstanding, this is all very telling. You almost don’t have to even look for it.
Well ya, sure, but.. umm
1 – I maintain that the universe is 100% deterministic. Thus P(E) !=1|0 simply means we lack info. I have three different pre-made lunches in the fridge. Which one will I eat today? no idea – not because of free will, but because I do not know what factors will drive the choice later this morning. Notice, however, that this is a distinction without a practical difference.
2 – why does evil exist? I rather think chatGPT et al are in the process of demonstrating the obvious answer: you can’t have intelligence without both good and evil. Think of it this way: your ability to read this comes from manipulation of increasingly complex patterns of nothing more than yes/no choices. Our perception of good and evil is constructed “the same way” (well, by analogy) from nothing more than “this hurts, this pleases”.
3 – Something the doc here will find fascinating just got outed – an abundance of wee pees sketching the glaringly obvious: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2023-34166-001 Headline: “Support for freedom of speech and concern for political correctness: The effects of trait emotional intelligence and cognitive ability.” Whee…
My replay to his “Theologians developed…”:
Theologians developed the idea of “no free will” to explain why no works can ever be involved in salvation and it must be by faith alone and even that faith must be given to you by God because you have no free will.
In fact, I don’t see that anyone ever argued there is no free will until Augustine. Beforehand everyone always believed in free will. So lack-of-freewill is the theologically created by men abstraction.
Ah yes, the common refrain that because the entity is constrained by factors outside of it’s control, it cannot decide.
Sure honey-bunny. You don’t get to decide or change the era you were born in, nor your biological parents, nor your skin colour, nor the fact that the local store is closed on a Sunday when you really needed that item.
The entity is mad that it cannot have more than two functional arms. That it cannot say “Fiat Lux” and make light be so in the void. It an be sitting there in Eden with every luxury and going “WAAAAH, but I wanna eat from that tree! I obviously have no Free Will if I can’t!”
Hoes mad because it can’t be God.
What you can choose to do is ultimately refuse to cooperate with reality. So if you are factually a man, you put on a tutu and lipstick and deer hirns and announce that you feel like a woman, or just some disgusting queer.
Ultimately, you are free to either love God and His providence, as in, your circumstances according to His Will, and choose to be in harmony with at least natural law, or not. Everything, every decision ultimately has to do with that.
This entity is why Hell exists in the first place. It chose not to reason, pretends it didn’t, tries to convince you to choose do the same to provide it fellowship, get apoplectic with rage that your ability to choose otherwise demonstrably destroys its fragile belief in no Free Will, and it ain’t ever going to choose to change its mind because it has chosen what it wants and can choose that it cannot possibly choose otherwise. So it goes to an eternal place to do just that forever and keep complaining about that too, as if God can do something. The existence of logos and logical constraints on reality is itself Hell for it. It craves the chaos! It likes it there. Show no pity towards it.
I prefer chocolate to broccoli. That wasn’t a decision; I just came out that way. But I eat choose to eat broccoli with dinner, not chocolate. That’s exercising free will. Is it really any more complicated than that?
Jesus (His name means Saviour) is our Saviour, not a race.
Cornelius a Lapide on the Gospel of John , Chapter 4:
Ver. 22.—Ye worship what (Arabic, whom) ye know not, &c. Here Christ gives a direct answer to the woman, and decides the Jews to be in the right in the controversy concerning the worship of God, condemning the Samaritans as schismatics. He says, You, 0 ye Samaritans, worship ye know not what, because ye worship God together with your Assyrian idols; and associating God as it were with idols, ye worship a false or fictitious God. Again the Samaritans had their own heresies and errors, which S. Epiphanius recapitulates. In the same manner the Turks and Jews worship a God whom they know not, because they deny Him to be in a Trinity of Persons. So also Calvin with his followers, in denying the omnipotence of God, and making Him cruel in condemning some men to hell without any demerit on their part, worship not a true, but a false God. For the true God is Almighty, and most kind.
2. and better. Ye worship, i.e. ye have a method of worship and sacrifice which ye do not know to have proceeded from God. For ye have framed it out of your own imagination, contrary to the will and law of God. But we Jews know what we worship, because we follow the way of worshipping God which was prescribed by Moses.
For salvation, &c. Both because I, Christ, who am the Author of salvation, am not born of the Samaritans, but of the Jews, as well as because the true knowledge and worship of God, which leads men to salvation, formerly emanated from the Jews to the Gentiles, and now in the New Law will emanate from Me, a Jew, to all nations.
Even dogs have free will. But maybe not zombies.
He is so wrong-headed that it hurts to read him.
It’s not at all ironic that this most useless example of the human creature deigns to pass judgment on the 8 billion other humans on the planet.
The 18th-century philosopher George Berkeley constructed complex arguments to prove that matter doesn’t really exist. In response, Samuel Johnson famously kicked a rock and said, “I refute (him) thus.”
Yuval Noah Hariri constructs arguments to prove that free will does not exist. Briggs freely chooses to kick him in his metaphorical ass and says, “I refute him thus.”
Instead of an Entity, be an Object. Entities are just data, Objects have actions, one of them being exerciseFreeWill().
sounds ridiculous, but this man is very very evil and dangerous
He’s just this guy, you know?