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—>>> ***I refer to the „unfree will,“ which leads to an abuse of cause and effect***.

People should not mistakenly reify „cause“ and „effect“ the way those investigating nature do (and people like them who nowadays naturalize their thinking—), in accordance with the ruling mechanistic foolishness which allows causes to push and shove until they „have an effect.“ People should use „cause“ and „effect“ merely as pure ideas, that is, as conventional fictions to indicate and communicate, not as an explanation. In the „in itself“ there is no „causal connection,“ no „necessity,“ no „psychological unfreedom,“ no „effect following from the cause“; no „law“ holds sway. We are the ones who have, on our own, made up causes, causal sequences, for-one-another, relativity, compulsion, number, law, freedom, reason, and purpose, and when we fabricate this world of signs inside things as something „in itself,“ when we stir it into things, then we’re once again acting as we have always done, namely, mythologically.

—–>>>>> ****The „unfree will“ is a myth****: in real life it’s merely a matter of strong and weak wills.—It is almost always already a symptom of something lacking in a thinker himself when he senses in all „causal connections“ and „psychological necessity“ some purpose, necessity, inevitable consequence, pressure, and unfreedom. That very feeling is a telltale give away—the person is betraying himself. And if I have seen things correctly, the „un-freedom of the will“ has generally been seen as a problem from two totally contrasting points of view, but always in a deeply personal way: some people are not willing at any price to let go of their „responsibility,“ their belief in themselves, their personal right to their credit (the vain races belong to this group—); the others want the reverse: they don’t wish to be responsible for or guilty of anything, and demand, out of an inner self- contempt, that they can shift blame for themselves somewhere else. People in this second group, when they write books, are in the habit nowadays of taking up the cause of criminals; a sort of socialist pity is their most attractive disguise. And in fact, the fatalism of those with weak wills brightens up amazingly when it learns how to present itself as „la religion de la souffrance humaine“ [the religion of human suffering]—that’s its „good taste.““

Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism #21.

I’d avoid citing Nietzsche if you wish to advocate for Determinism. He’s an existential philosopher, among the most difficult to grasp.

Let us begin with Nietzsche, whose book Tho Spoke Zarathustra is heavy on this theme. As some mentioned elsewhere, Nietzsche discovered that some laws of physics suggest the notion of an eternal reoccurrence. This would mean that there is no room for any freedom whatever, since we are due to relive the exact same life, to have the exact same thoughts, to answer the exact same way to the same persons, etc…

William James? He starts his treatise bashing against metaphysics, and laughing at the idea of free will. In fact, William James‘ stance early in his work of 1890, evokes that of Sapolsky.

Same with Sapolsky, whose book Behave forced him down a certain path.

But Nietzsche, not without committing to several contradictions, proposed the overman principle, which by nature is an invitation to create our own freedom.

William James, within the same treatise, by chap5-6, changes his mind, and accepts the idea that we’re not about to achieve one to one brain-correlate to mental state mappings. He was later to publish a deep thesis in favor of free will (The Will To Believe).

Same thing happened to Dawkins, exact same thing. In the selfish gene, he proposes a thesis which supposes intentionality while rejecting it at the same time. Anyone who has read his entire work (footnotes included) knows that he essentially embraced the Extended Synthesis.

And I predict that if he lives at least 10 more years, the same faith is awating Sapolsky

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