[fallingfrog]

“Were free will to be shown to be nonexistent – and were we truly to absorb the fact – it would “precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution”, Harris has written.“

I guarantee you that nobody outside of a tiny group of academics would care at all. The only reason that people care about evolution is that they feel insulted at being called monkeys. Call them mammals instead and you’ll get no response, because it doesn’t trigger the same emotional reaction. Call them animals, they’ll protest. Call them vertebrates, shrug. There’s no logic involved. People just react to the connotation of what an “animal” or an “ape” is and then rationalize that reaction after the fact. If you just the word “hominids” instead of apes they wouldn’t care. People are idiots, it takes years of training to be able to think the way a scientist does.

Free will is an airy abstraction. Nobody cares about that. Only someone like Harris could possibly think they would.

[mensetmanusman]

Free will is not an airy abstraction.

Why does my cloud of atoms disagree with yours? ;)