Existential Physics by Sabine Hossenfelder

Author:Sabine Hossenfelder [Hossenfelder, Sabine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.

This passage, however, does more than just neutrally inform people that the laws of nature are incompatible with free will. It also denigrates their sense of purpose and agency by using phrases like “no more than” and “nothing but.” And it fails to remind the reader that this “vast assembly of nerve cells” can do some truly amazing things, like reading passages about itself, not to mention having found out what it’s assembled of to begin with.

Of course, Crick’s passage is deliberately sharply phrased to get his message across (not unlike some passages you read in chapter 4 of this very book); nothing wrong with that in and of itself. But it doesn’t prime people just to question free will; it primes them for fatalism—the idea that it doesn’t matter what you do. Suppose he’d primed them instead using this passage:

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