Scientific American Mind - May/June 2012

Three articles piqued my interest in the scientific magazine Scientific American Mind in the latest issue:

- Finding Free Will by Christof Kock
- Sleep’s Secret Repairs by Jason Castro
- Are We Born to Be Religious? by Vassilis Saroglou

My comments related to the articles are following.

1. On the free will - again

This theme is one of my favorites, as I wrote earlier. Some conclusions in the article are questionable, I do not agree with them. The described experiments are interesting, but they are explicable from quite another aspect as well.

The article lists some classic definitions of freedom and its examples, and then the author of the article writes about determinism, about chaos, about quantum-mechanical uncertainty principle. He draws a conclusion that “Both quantum mechanics and deterministic chaos lead to unpredictable outcomes.” This is almost similar to my opinion i.e. the problem is not the violation of the chain of the action-reaction, but the difficulty is the unpredictability of the future.

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