Understanding the Need to Divest Ourselves of the Intuitive but Harmful Perception of Free Will

People are attached to the apparent existence of human choice. 

 

But there is no such thing as free will, and there is no such thing as choice as normally understood:

 

Human beings are amazing specimens, for their natal intelligence, ability to create stunning works of visual art and to work their wonders on the aural sensibilities of their fellows via talent for musical composition, instrumental performance, and vocal expression. Human beings, in a process that behaviorist psychologists call successive approximations, have built on commonly shared knowledge bases to stand on the shoulders of their fellow giants (the metaphorical reference of Sir Isaac Newton) to forge new paths to our understanding of the laws that govern terrestrial reality (summarized brilliantly by Newton) and the more remote cosmos (the province of Einstein).

 

The sooner those of you clingers divest yourselves of the harmful notion of free will, the sooner we will can get on to building a favorable environment for the advancement of humankind, the sort of context for existence that will allow our talent for the arts and science to flourish.  We have no choice as conventionally understood, but we do have consciousness, and when allowed to flourish in an environment of excellent health and a wealth of information we can see more clearly the apparent options in any given situation.  Seeing those manifest options more clearly and with an understanding of likely consequences, we can make decisions most conducive to positive reinforcement for behaviors beneficial to ourselves and our posterity.

 

Free will is an illusion.

 

There is no such thing as choice.

 

There is, though, decision-making on the basis of an understanding of the environmental positive reinforcers, punishments, and negative reinforcers that actually drive our behaviors.

 

Decision making, understood properly, is very different from choice:

 

Human beings lack free will, but they do have enormous intelligence and the capacity to make decisions most likely to maximize their chances for lives of enrichment and meaning.

 

In K-12 education, we have the opportunity to create a whole new world thought the power of knowledge:

 

Let us with great haste go about designing a skill-replete, knowledge-intensive system of K-12 education with an exercise in good decision making that will make of our nation the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be, thereby inducing a concentric wave effect traversing the globe that will present to all human beings a context for the joyful expression of creativity conducive to happiness on this one earthly sojourn.