#Determined: Life_Without_Free_Will by #Robert_Sapolsky – Review


     The forty years that the author spent as a neuro-scientist of human beings has been funneled into a one-word fact ‘Determined’ in the form of a book with a big, splashy write-up, both in number of pages and ambitions. 

    Robert Sapolsky sums up that we do not have ‘free will’ because our actions resulted from prior causes, which themselves resulted from prior causes, which….., corollary with the answer Einstein got over a question on how the Earth is balanced – Turtles all the way down (a seamless chain of causality stretching back in time), and uses a very sensible way of explaining ‘no free will’ on a large and small scale connecting both in the same instance. He leads us through this causal chain of events that goes back to seconds (caused by neurons firing), to minutes (caused by a thought, memory, emotion, or sensory stimulus), hours to days (hormones), to months (long-term experiences, e.g. depression), to years and decades (e.g. childhood, genetics), and centuries (the culture of ancestors).

#The_Singularity_is_Nearer: When we merge with AI - Ray_Kurzweil - #Review

    The book starts with “where we stand” in terms of epochs with the present one being a merger of bio-science with technology. The idea th...