Free Will: What others have thought about it in the past...

The evolution of thought around free will:

God: You think therefore you have sinned.

Plato: I think I can imagine what is.

Renes Descartes: I think therefore I am.

Hobbes: I think we're better off together.

Adam Smith: We are better off together.

Charles Darwin: I think I selected you because you think.

Elvis: I think I love you.

Mick Jagger: I think I can't get no satisfaction.

Pink Floyd: I think it's just one more brick in the wall.

Richard Nixon: I think I am not a crook.

Daniel Dennett: I think I think therefore I think.

Sam Harris: I think therefore I am not really thinking.

Christopher Hitchens: I think therefore I need no god.

Richard Dawkins: I think because it gives me more descendants.

Donald Trump: I think I'm a very smart person

Scott Adams: I don't think, I just do. I have no free will... so I can be an a$$hole. It's not my fault! I can't help myself.

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Grand Vacations or Burning Man on Mars. It could happen.

Precursors No, it will happen. At least if the aliens don't get here first. But we'll talk about that in another blog post. What I want to talk about today is the mistaken idea that progress will end. There's a neat book by John Brockman , actually a series of books that I call 'blog fodder.' The one that drove me to write about Grand Vacations is: " This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories that are Blocking Progress ." John has put together several books of this type where he asks scientists, economists and others to write something provocative on his chosen topic. These books are great fun to scan. Many of the articles are great fun, many are just crazy, some are so bad they aren't even wrong (as Wolfgang Pauli would say.) The article that started my train of thought that has led to this blog post was: "Economic Growth." Cesar Hidalgo , an Associate Professor at MIT claims the idea of economic growth must die. He makes two arg...

Capitalism is not inherently bad, unethical or immoral. Limited Liability Companies? They are the engines that pollute the world.

What is wrong with capitalism? I blame Limited Liability Corporations . Let’s be clear: Corporations are not human beings. Corporations have no conscience. Corporations are immoral, doing whatever it takes to survive. Capitalism tried to harvest that greed to benefit all mankind. Most would say it's been successful; however, without regulations, Corporations will do anything to improve their profits. They will lie, cheat and steal. Corporations will force their costs on anyone they can, refuse to clean up their messes and kill people if it means they will make more profits. They have no other incentive without regulations. As Limited Liability Corporations the owners have no fear of retribution from the state, except to lose their investment. It’s a perfect storm of corruption. Capitalism is designed to harness this immoral greed and attempt to benefit mankind. And it works surprisingly well. The number of people in abject poverty has fallen absolutely in the last few decades. [ UR...

The Nerd Rapture: The Second Singularity is Coming, but it's not the POINT.

If evolution can create it, so can man. There is and will be intelligent design. It's only a matter of time. We are in the midst of the last great battle of reason over evolution -- why is this happening now? Because evolution developed the first great singularity [1] about 300 thousand years ago. And it happened to our ancestors and they learned to talk somehow, really talk. Talking lets you pass information between generations at an exponentially faster speed than evolution does. Evolution is slow. We evolved complex language which let us talk about abstract concepts very quickly, in evolutionary terms. This happened a long time ago in human terms (in the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.) This ability to know thyself and talk about it is the genesis of the tree of knowledge story. Not only did humans name all the animals, they could now talk about and reason about what an animal would do. [2] Darwinian evolution signed its own death warrant that day. In evolutionary time ...

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