How Physics and Neuroscience Dictate Your "Free" Will. In a remote corner of the universe, on a small blue planet gravitating around a humdrum sun in the outer districts of the Milky Way, organisms arose from the primordial mud and ooze in an epic struggle for survival that spanned aeons. Despite all evidence to the contrary, these bipedal creatures thought of themselves as extraordinarily privileged, occupying a unique place in a cosmos of a trillion trillion stars. Conceited as they were, they believed that they, and only they, could escape the iron law of cause and effect that governs everything. They could do this by virtue of something they called free will, which allowed them to do things without any material reason. Can you truly act freely? The question of free will is no mere philosophical banter; it engages people in a way that few other metaphysical questions do. Let’s say you are living with a loving and lovely spouse. Such gut-churning choices confront you with the question of how much say you really have in the matter.
The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life (9780465027552): Robert Trivers. Forgetting is Key to a Healthy Mind. Internet Changes How We Remember. Four years ago Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow turned to her husband after looking up some movie trivia online and asked, “What did we do before the Internet?” Thus, Sparrow set out to investigate how Google, and all the information it proffers, has changed how people think. Four psychology experiments later Sparrow has her answer, which was published in Science this past August. “[The Web] is an external memory storage space, and we make it responsible for remembering things,” she says. In one of Sparrow’s experiments she presented two groups of undergraduates with trivia statements.
Does this mean the Web is dumbing us down? The Hidden Logic of Deception.