As you may know, I don’t believe in anything as free will. The brain is either deterministic or inter-deterministic and this leaves no place for free will. Every neuron impulse is determined by the previous one. For example, when you choose what ice cream to buy, it may by decision of hundred of neurons you exert no control over. They exert control over you. But even if we mysteriously had free will there are still limits of it:
1. We don’t swear at dementia-stricken people for forgetting things
2. We have certain IQ
3. We have certain creativity
4. We have certain talent predispositions
5. We have personality we basically cannot change (motivation is a part of it)
6. We may have brain damage
7. We were born to the certain religious background so it may be difficult to convert to another faith
8. You were born to some culture (you act some way)
9. We have different emotions
10. We went through different subjective experiences
11. We were born to different socioeconomic background (ghetto, lower class, middle class, upper class, 1 %) that predestines your attainment
12. If you were beaten as a child you will have limited short-term memory (and limited short-term memory predispose you to short long-term memory which is crucial in the formal-educational system)
13. You are integrated into a specific economic system (with certain GDP, certain average wages)
14. We may have a mental illness
15. We have strong self-preserving reflex
16. We are evolutionary set in some way: people eat, sleep, defecate, relax, observe other people to gain knowledge about the hunting-gathering group to increase their evolutionary fitness, like to hunt, have children and care about them, practice sex, infanticide, homicide, genocide, wars, reciprocal altruism
17. We enjoy being part of the family, we help our kin and have personal relationships, emotions (grief, anger, affection, curiosity, euphoria and so on)
18. We adhere to animalistic ideologies, compete nearly for everything (scarce resources, sexual partners etc.)
19. We fear spiders, snakes, other predators and darkness
20. We have intelligence to solve complex relations in the hunter-gathering group
21. We live in hierarchical societies where submissive-dominant relation prevails
22. We tend to be egalitarianistic
23. We understand value of things, love story-telling, like sugar and fatty meals and migrate quite often
24. We are programmed to be religious. People also adhere to primitive moral systems.
25. Imagine you have decided to do just one activity of the above-mentioned; simply you cannot, the brain doesn’t allow you to do so. It same goes with your robust cognitive apparatus, it slides from one thing to another, try to focus on one thing continuously for two years. You cannot. We know we live in the universe but don’t concentrate on it all the time. It same goes with sciences (notably physics). No matter what culture are you from, we are slaves of this animalistic personality and sets of behaviors we cannot change.
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