I started thinking rationally. Unless magic is real, there isn't a god. Also, for everything good that happened, God was thanked, not freewill. But everything bad that happens, like an island for child sex trafficking, gets blamed on freewill.
The story of Vince Gilligan's gripping new Apple TV show explores the human condition through an inventive sci-fi premise that not only keeps us guessing but forces us to think deeply about the nature of free will, happiness, and what it means to be alive. And, in Episode 6, "HDP," Pluribus also briefly becomes a massive James Bond homage. Here's what's going on in the opening moments of Pluribus, and which specific 007 moments are getting referenced.
Then we segue into meeting Waverly (Emily Eisele), a young advertising exec, nervously bouncing around her Minneapolis apartment. Her shy, diffident date, Andrew (Ben Tissell) arrives, holding a book and a bottle of wine. In the scene's background, ongoing newscasts play unceasingly. Distracted, Waverly is phoning her mother and not receiving a response-both are frightened for family living in Manhattan.
Neuroscience is a newcomer to the field of free will. What are exactly the kind of questions that are worth asking? What different kinds of experiments that can say something about conscious and unconscious decisions can help us be more modest in what we realize we can control, and what we can't? Generally, humans have a sense that they control themselves and sometimes their environment more than they do.
The question of whether we are free to act compels us to accept that there are different degrees of determinism and that even freedom and causality might be compatible. That was already announced by Saint Augustine, for whom divine providence did not preclude free will. An incompatible position, in which determinism excludes true freedom, could hardly be reconciled with such indisputable phenomena as spontaneity, repentance, rebellion, or resistance, and the capacity for the future, which only finds their place in freedom.
