Online Class Notes (Mike)

Your life has been programed even without notice. There is no so-called free will, because every choice you made, every path you ever chose were the outcome of the environment or the accumulated influence that imposed by events you encountered all through your life.
Everything in our life has been programed/predetermined, meaning that we don’t have any choices over our decisions. There is no so-called free will, because every choice you made, every path you ever chose were the outcome of the environment or the accumulated influence imposed by events you encountered all through your life.

Imagine that you are walking down the street, hungry and thirsty, which restaurant are you going to walk in and have a meal?

No matter pizza or steak, you are inclined to choose the one you have seen on an advertisement/commercial, or something you haven’t eaten for a long period of time, or out of your dietary habit inherited from your parents that your family always have a pizza every day.

No matter what your final decision is, it it for sure that the decision is a result of the environment that you are familiar with/born into, be it a TV commercial, a family dietary habit, or a regional preference.

The truth is that in these 3 separate situations, your behavior has been determined by the presence or the absence of something, or a habitual thing respectively, all of these come from past events which have present influence that finally have a impact on your choice or behavior.

Our choice or behavior are the final reaction out of a series of complex conditional reflex, such as morality, culture, habit, which are all implanted by the advertisement/propaganda of government, education of parents, environment you immense in. As a result, there is no so called free will, your life has always been programmed, you just haven’t realized yet.

Vocabulary

commercial (n) TV advertisement

propaganda (n)

determinist (n/adj.)

play devil’s advocate 故意唱反调

causation