Tuesday, May 26, 2020

All Flash No Class

I am asked what I think of Yuval Noah Harari's rejection of free will.   I don't know much about Harari and the little I've seen of him I think he's a rather superficial, rather unimportant and uninteresting pop-scholar who, while maybe a few steps up from the fading Jordan Peterson (what is that U of T phony up to these days, anyway?) he is of that type.  

I have not read his rejection of free will but the little I have seen about it since you asked me makes me think it's the typical materialist-atheist-secularist stuff that  materialism will always lead to because it makes material causation the only admissible reality.   I think it's always bound to devolve into some kind of gangsterism.  

One of the claims he makes is that people who believe in free will will be the ones who are most vulnerable to manipulation by corporate-state oppression but that is nonsense.   While there are many naive and self-contradictory ways to talk about free will, free thought, there are more naive and self-contradictory ways to reject free will, worrying about robot-people being oppressed is one of the most obvious of those.

I'm not tempted to read more of him or about him,  I don't think he'll flash soon like Peterson has but he's not going to endure long enough to worry about.   He might sucker some people of fashion or a while but those idiots are nothing if not fickle and attention deficient. 

It's nice that he's a vegan,  I suppose.  I'm not impressed with his mindfulness practice.  I've come to be deeply skeptical of the mindfulness crowd. 

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