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I can live without God, but I need free will. Without free will life makes no sense, it lacks meaning. So I'm always on the lookout for strong, clear arguments for free will. Christian List, a philosopher at the London School of Economics, provides such arguments in his succinct new book Why Free Will Is Real (Harvard 2019). I met List in 2015 when I decided to attend, after much deliberation, a workshop on consciousness at NYU. I recently freely chose to send him some questions, which he freely chose to answer. -John HorganHorgan: Why philosophy? Was your choice pre-determined?
Comment: The above point is well taken, but as always, the devil is in the details. Becoming more self-aware, recognizing the source of one's unnecessary suffering and working to resolve it doesn't necessarily make one complacent. Self-awareness is a tool that will, ideally, make one similarly aware of the outside world, together with all its injustices and disparities. Unfortunately, mindfulness has come to be a synonym for navel-gazing. Hyper-focus on the self can be detrimental if it's not paired with an equal hyper-focus on the world as it is (not how we wish it to be), and a greater awareness of how our own biases taint our ability to see the world objectively. It is only by seeing anything, on the micro or macro level, objectively that can we truly affect change.
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