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Scientists say free will probably doesn't exist, but urge: "Don't stop believing!"
by Jesse Bering from Scientific American
"Suspend disbelief for a moment and imagine that you have agreed, as a secret agent in some confidential military
operation, to travel back in time to the year 1894. To your
astonishment, it’s a success! And now—after wiping away the magical
time-travelling dust from your eyes—you find yourself on the fringes of
some Bavarian village, hidden in a camouflaging thicket of wilderness
against the edge of town, the distant, disembodied voices of
nineteenth-century Germans mingling atmospherically with the
unmistakable sounds of church bells.
Quickly, you survey your surroundings: you seem to be directly
behind a set of old row houses; white linens have been hung out to dry;
a little stream tinkles behind you; windows have been opened to let in
the warm springtime air. How quaint. No one else appears to be about,
although occasionally you glimpse a pedestrian passing between the
narrow gaps separating the houses. And then you notice him. There’s a
quiet, solemn-looking little boy
nearby, playing quietly with some toys in the dirt. He looks to be
about six years old—a mere kindergartner, in the modern era. It’s then
that you’re reminded of your mission: this is the town of Passau in
Southern Germany. And that’s no ordinary little boy. It’s none other
than young Adolph Hitler (image above).
What would you do next?
This scenario is, rather unfortunately for us, in the realm of science fiction. But your answer
to this hypothetical question—and others like it—is a matter for
psychological scientists, because among other things it betrays your
underlying assumptions about whether Hitler, and the decisions he made
later in his life, were simply the product of his environment acting on
his genes or whether he could have acted differently by exerting his “free will.”
Most scientists in this area aren’t terribly concerned over whether or
not free will does or doesn’t exist, but rather how people’s everyday
reasoning about free will, particularly in the moral domain, influences their social behaviors and attitudes. (In fact, the Templeton Foundation has just launched a massive funding initiative designed to support scientific research on the subject of free will.)..."
Read the article.