[theapportioner]

I am more inclined towards Wegner's approach, since the idea of memes, invented by Richard Dawkins, does not, I believe, explain why certain memes (cultural viruses that infect people's minds and replicate as people spread ideas) are favored over others. It is the means, like DNA, but I feel that when talking about memes one can easily forget that underlying selection pressures influence the survival of certain memes. As environmental stimuli impact natural selection, certain (cognitive and 'precognitive') brain mechanisms impact cultural selection.

That being said, the idea of memes is a pretty cool one.

To rebut Horgan's thoughts:

Moreover, our faith in free will has social value.

I would one day like to articulate that the disproving of free will would have even greater social value.

It provides us with the metaphysical justification for ethics and morality.

Society functions nicely, without free will. There is something else going on, some natural order perhaps, and that something else would be a suitable, and more empirically correct, justification for ethics and morality. Our ethics and morality may have to be radically altered however. C'est la vie.

It forces us to take responsibility for ourselves rather than consigning our fate to our genes or God.

Not just genes (and certainly not a god), but also the interface between awareness and environment. This is the playground of hot and cold sensations, smells, memory, learning, and memes. Consciousness and subconsciousness and reflex.

In the same way, maybe we can have a free will of the gaps

I think it is absurd to believe in a "god of the gaps". Hardly a satisfying belief, and it's like saying "I give up" without really trying.


To rebut mburbank:

As long as one's neural structure functions in a relatively healthy way, we either

A.) Have free will
or
B.) Have completely convincing counterfit of free will.

And if one's neural structure isn't functioning healthily, then what? And I would hardly say it's a completely convincing counterfit (that alliterates!).


To rebut Helm:

Established how if there's no free will there's no point in discussing it, since any sort of dialectic or argumentative-based discussion is founded on the premise of free will, times before.

Nah. Argumentative-based discussion is founded on the rules and logic of language, not on the premise of free will (itself under the domain of language games, and more generally, memes).