 FWAM (free will as myth) gov't
So people say that the topic of no free will has been beaten to death. They say that "whether we have it or not, it doesn't matter, we still have to behave like we have free will." Many philosophers say that this makes the notion of free will vs determinism an uninteresting argument.
I disagree.
The notion of "free will as myth" has to do with what we know about behavioral neurobiology. Creatures are driven by their neural networks. The neural networks process sensory inputs and create behaviors. If you change part of the neural network with drugs or through genetics or other means in an experiment, the behavior of the organism changes. This is how people study modern neural networks. They generate behavioral assays for a certain response in an organism and then change something about the neural network and characterize the behavioral changes. For the human model, this has classically been done by studying accidental brain lesions in their results. In modern neurobiology, the most studied animals in this field are mice and the fruit fly (drosophila melanogaster). "Libraries" of genetic mutants of these creatures are created and they are put through all sorts of behavioral tests to detect changes from control animals.
There is one particularly interesting new tool called "channel rhodopsin" that allows scientists to turn off individual neurons temporarily with a pulse of blue light. This allows for detection of behavioral changes in the same animal with groups of neurons deactivated or activated. There are many such tools available to neuroscience for understanding behavior in neural networks and how it correlates with brain states and behavior.
What behavioral neuroscience illustrates is that free will is a myth. It illustrates that creatures are literally products of their environment. The brain develops based on the genetics of the creature and the chemical nature of its environment as it's gestating. After it's born into the world, the creature's brain begins to take in sensory inputs and adapt to its surroundings. All behavioral responses are identical to control systems such as cruise control in a car. They have "inputs" and "outputs" and the way that the inputs correlate with the outputs defines how the system works. We, and all neural machines are effectively computers.
I think that the notion of "free will as an illusion" should be the crown jewel of the skeptical/scientific movement. It has many implications:
1) We are literally eternal. The flesh in our hands is made up of material that was once at the center of a star and elsewhere in the universe. What we are as "individuals" are patterns of particles with complex interacting behavior. We are an "effect" that propagates and is connected to all other processes in the universe.
2) We are are literally selfless. We are a part of the entire process of the universe. No matter how big we think our egos are, it's ok. We are expressions of our environment. The idea of identity and individuality is a myth. The reason that soldiers lay down their lives on a grenade to save their friends is because they extend their sense of self to include what they're fighting for instead of just their own flesh. The reason that a mother protects her child is that she extends her identity of self to include that child. The firefighter identity extends to his community. All acts are selfish but with a sense of self that may extend outside your skin. This realization of modern neuroscience allows us a true understanding of self that includes all beings.
3) It offers definitive PROOF that the god of the western world (yaweh/allah/etc) is false. We no longer have to be a teapot agnostic on this topic. The great questions of being are still out there, but the notion of a personal god who JUDGES our behavior as free agents is patently false because we are NOT free agents. This take's dawkin's chapter 3 "why there is most probably no god" and changes it to "the western god is false. It is the product of our illusion."
4) This realization of science mimics the role that christ and buddha played in their respective religions. It shows that things like good and evil and fear and desire have no ultimate meaning. It shows that self is an illusion. It returns us to the garden of eden. The eden metaphor shows us being cast into the field of time by a realization of "good and evil." This notion of modern neuroscience shows that "good and evil" are as arbitrary as the behavior of our immune systems and have no real ultimate meaning (thus returning us to the garden). This is the exact role that jesus and buddha played in their respective mythologies. As we all know, jesus was there to defeat original sin (i.e. the attainment of the knowledge of good and evil).
5) This offers a true MORALITY of science where we can start with saying "Surviving is the first and only purpose of life." Why is that? Because without surviving, there can be no purpose. After that, following your bliss and creating a stable society should be balanced with one another. Judgments can be made on crimes in a population as if they were parameters in a feedback control system seeking stability. Judges no longer need to show righteous indignation at an "evil" offender. We can now, with the strength of systems engineering at our back, label offenders as destabilizing entities and extract them from the equation. A gentle balance will obviously have to be met here in order to not create a stagnant society. We no longer have worry about righteousness causing horrors like the holocaust or the inquisition because we no longer are driven by the notion of good and evil and some illusory being or ideology driving us.
6) Guilt is eradicated. People say that "free will vs determinism" is a useless debate because we "have to act like we have free will anyway." But when it comes down to it, people can be wracked by guilt and regret over things in their past. This can be motivational for the future, but it can also be destructive to the psyche. The idea of guilt is useless when you realize that it couldn't have happened any other way. Motivation can now be out of rational thought instead of the forces of fear and desire (i.e. the buddhist solution).
I think that this list goes on and on. I think that many of the atheist authors we have today equivocate on the notion of God and of science as being "amoral." I think there are many things that science clearly illustrates about the nature of being that are crucial to the stability of our society (i.e. the only metric of morality).
Free Will as Myth (FWAM) should be on the flag of our fricking nation and the neural basis of behavior should be taught in our most basic science classes. That human beings are complex adaptive feedback control systems is NOT in question. That is what modern neuroscience, physics, chemistry, biology, etc all illustrate.
This really is the light that is going to eventually drive our society into the future. It's what many of the newest major scientific research initiatives are based around. Howard Hughes Medical Institude, for example, has just opened up a new massive facility with insane resources (Janelia Farm) outside of DC in order to get directly at the neural basis of behavior in a variety of model systems. As you know, this conference from this forum addressed many of the issues of the neural basis of consciousness. It's clearly a hot topic today. The work of modern behavioral neurobiology illustrates that free will and self are illusions and we MUST deal with these realizations.
Instead of going nihilistic trying to mourn our old views of independent agents with identity and ego, I propose that we make this our fricking banner and post it up as the mesiah of our time, 2000 years after christ, and 2500 years after the buddha, but with the same message of exension of the self to all of existence and to living now and following your bliss under the realization that there is no distinction between you and me. Just because my skin doesn't enfold your neurons doesn't mean we're not the same process. The sanskrit for this idea is "tat tvam asi" and was highly repeated by Joseph Campbell. It means "Thou art That." It was also echo'd in Robert Heinlein's book "Stranger in a Strange Land" which was a fabulous kick in the pants to get secular humanism running ("Thou art God").
The idea of an individual entity "God" is silly too since the idea of an individual entity is a notion in our minds and with no real application to anything in the universe. If there is some directing process in the universe, its part of the UNIVERSE (the one verse, the one statement) as well. It's part of the process that we're part of. We are the same thing as it.
life is the processing of information. It enters the system, is modified, modifies the system, and then behavior is caused. This realization of free will as myth connects us to all matter in the universe. It identifies us with everything that exists and paints good/evil, death/birth, fear/desire, left/right choice, and all sorts of other pairs of opposites as illusions.
This notion is very powerful. To me, it's FAR from uninteresting as some philosophers and scientists would put it.
It yields eternal life, freedom from suffering, siezing of the day, loving thy neighbor/enemy as theyself, etc. It gives us everything that modern religions seek in the western world but its antithetical to the central notion in the west that each of us is an eternal soul (ego) that is inserted into this world and extracted out at death. So we've got a long way to go, but it's demonstrable and repeatable.
__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are | 
What's that? You haven't 
Linear Mode
