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While the author's previous book on the matter, "Exploring the
Illusion of Free Will, Second Edition, " is a popular work, this
brief discourse is decidedly and robustly academic. It will
regrettably prove inaccessible to many physical and social science
professors who are, as evident by the profusion of elementally
flawed free will defenses published by major peer-reviewed
journals, far more adept at learning, communicating and applying
concepts and principles than at understanding their fundamental
nature. The book focuses exclusively on the physical refutation of
the free will construct, concurrently addressing claims that
because we are human, our choices are somehow exempt from physical
law. It also delves deeply into quantum mechanical principles and
phenomena relevant to the free will question, siding with Einstein,
Bohm, Hawking, Krauss and others regarding the causal nature of
both the macro and quantum world. The refutations presented
hopefully describe the physical evidence against free will with
sufficient strength and clarity to win over more hitherto agnostic
minds than have earlier attempts by other authors. The book's
original contributions to the literature on human agency are that
it presents an a priori argument for the causality that refutes
free will, and that it not only challenges recent published
warnings of dangerous repercussions from abandoning belief in free
will, it presents a convincing argument for humanity evolving
beyond a notion of free choice that seems the catalyst for more
harm than good. The author presents evidence associating the
psychological defense mechanism known as "denial" with free will
belief, and proposes that a belief in human autonomy's correlate of
fundamental moral responsibility amplifies the widespread denial of
the existence and anthropogenic origin of a climate change crisis
that, unless successfully mitigated, many prominent scientists fear
poses a serious threat to the civilization we know. The hard
physical evidence prohibiting free will, and the arguments
suggesting a serious downside to maintaining the belief, will
hopefully inspire a long-overdue exploration of the implications of
acknowledging that we live in a world in which we, as humans, have
fundamentally no control. Such an investigation is clearly akin to
our formulating a categorically new, and distinctly evolved,
understanding of who we are, and of what our essential collective
experience is, as a human species.
Note: For the paperback edition the author has omitted chapter 2.
While free will is the most discussed topic in philosophy, few
books unequivocally refuting the notion have been published. Dan
Wegner's 2002 The Illusion of Conscious Will a pioneering,
powerfully documented exception, psychology has essentially ignored
the matter. That refuting the notion is profoundly important is not
asserted solely by author George Ortega. American philosopher John
Searle, (who in 2010 was listed the 13th most cited post-1900
philosopher in the world) strongly concurs. According to Searle,
for free will to be acknowledged an illusion would be "a bigger
revolution in our thinking than Einstein, or Copernicus, or Newton,
or Galileo, or Darwin - it would alter our whole conception of our
relation with the universe." Since 1997 when Ortega authored a
physics paper on why the causality that refutes free will is a
fundamental law of nature, he has worked to move the revelation
that free will is illusory from academia to the public arena. His
first success came in 2007 when he discovered an interested
audience among the Internet's leading voice-chat website, Paltalk.
Under the username Blisser, Ortega repeatedly brought up and
refuted free will in atheist rooms and in his own room completely
dedicated to the topic. It was not, however, until early 2010 that
Ortega succeeded in creating a major public buzz about free will
being an illusion. On April 7th, he founded the Manhattan, NYC
Meetup group "The Predetermined Will Society - Busting the Free
Will Myth." The visionary message of this world's first discussion
group devoted to publicizing the refutation of free will reached
innumerable Meetup members, (from among the 22 million New York
Metropolitan Area population) who encountered the group's listing
millions of times at the Meetup site. On January 6, 2011, Ortega
premiered the first-ever cable TV series devoted to the topic, a
weekly show called Exploring the Illusion of Free Will that
continues to cablecast new material to Westchester County, New
York, and to Manhattan, NYC. The promotions worked. With its April
16-22, 2011 article, "Free will; The illusion we can't live
without," New Scientist became the first magazine in history to
refute free will in a cover story. On March 6, 2012, best-selling
New York Times author Sam Harris published his refutation book Free
Will, and as its May/June, 2012 cover story, Scientific American
Mind ran the piece "Who's in Control - How Physics and Neuroscience
Dictate Your 'Free' Will." Ortega's unique passion for, and
leadership in publicizing, the truth about human will comes across
throughout the book's devastating, yet accessible, explanations of
why free will is impossible, and in its descriptions of the harm
free will-belief causes us personally and societally. What also
sets Ortega's work apart from refutations by others is his strong
recognition that humanity's overcoming the belief in free will is
an historic evolutionary leap in human consciousness. Comprising
edited transcripts of the first episodes of his revolutionary TV
series, another of his book's defining characteristics is the
reiteration of free will refutations and of other salient material.
Readers who lean toward free will belief are advised to not
discount the utility, in fact the necessity, of such review. The
emotional barriers to accepting that free will is impossible are
powerful, and will not readily yield to an unrecapitulated
presentation of the evidence. Ortega recognizes that unparalleled
history has already been made as the age-old belief in free will
has fallen to science, logic, and experience. In the epilogue, he
includes a virtually complete list of free will-refuting articles
in major publications over the last decade, and a list of 24 books
devoted to refuting free will. Ortega, who is second cousin to
composer Burt Bacharach, continues to reside in his Westchester
County, NY hometown of White P
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