Fiona’s Reviews > Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will > Status Update

"The highly religious tend to view good works more in a personal, private context, helping to explain why religious Americans donate more of their income to charity than do the secular. In contrast, atheists are more likely to view good works as a collective responsibility, helping to explain why they are the ones who are more likely to support candidates advocating wealth redistribution to decrease inequality."

So do secular primes affect theists as well?

Footnote 8: "Physicist Sean Carroll emphasizes this dichotomy, noting how in the nonclassical micro world, there is no arrow of time; the only difference between the past and the future is that one is easier to explain and the other is easier to influence, and neither interests the universe. It is only at the macro level of classical physics that our usual sense of time becomes meaningful."

"Where I am definitely trying to sound pejorative and worse is when this ahistorical view of judging people’s behavior is moralistic. Why would you ignore what came before the present in analyzing someone’s behavior? Because you don’t care why someone else turned out to be different from you."

"Show me a neuron (or a group of neurons, or an entire brain) whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you’ve demonstrated free will. The point of the first half of this book is to establish that this can’t be shown."

Oh, this is a guy who uses footnotes as commentary asides.