Responses on free will
There are two topics that seem to reliably bring people of strong opinion out of the woodwork every time they're brought up: feminism, and to a much lesser extent free will. I got quite a few comments on my post last week in which I took Jerry Coyne to task for overstating the implications of a recent study on decision-making. Rather than try to respond to each one with a separate comment (since many of them touch on similar issues) I thought I'd just consolidate my responses in a new post. If there's any confusion about where I stand on free will, reading that post as well as this one – which was heavily influence by this post by Sean Carroll – ought to clear the air. The following quoted sections are some of the more notable excerpts from comments I received: Yes, the processes going on in the brain that lead to an action (which we could call a "decision") is a real process, but could another "decision" have occurred given the same state? If no