[…] most of us are “free-willers.” We automatically assume we can shape the future, including our technology, in almost any fashion we wish, at least within the constraints of the natural environment. A small but vocal school of determinists, however, argues that we delude ourselves.
Source: wiktionary
2006, John Taylor: The Mind: A User’s Manual, Chichester: John Wiley, Part 3, Chapter 18, p. 205,
Causality and determinism, in a quantum framework, persist down to the very shortest distances that experiments have been performed in high-energy particle accelerators. I see no way that a person could employ forces above (or even approximately near) what are achieved in those gigantic particle machines to achieve the dream of the free willers: uncaused processes.
Source: wiktionary
Here's the challenge to a free willer: Find me the neuron that started this process in this man's brain, the neuron that had an action potential for no reason, where no neuron spoke to it just before.
Source: wiktionary
1847, Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal entry dated May 1847, in Stephen E. Whicher (ed.), Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic Anthology, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957, p. 310,
The Americans are free-willers, fussy, self-asserting, buzzing all round creation.
Source: wiktionary
Showing 4 of 13 available sentences.