
…crete, being, with no dynamic self-determination in changing “what we are,” then must this be true? Stephen Cave, in his Atlantic article “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will,” sure thinks so. They try to make a strong argument that we are what we are, and not what we do. You might even summarize this line of thought to be that we simply “are” what is done to us.
John Watson, a behaviorist, confidently wrote, “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.” Now compare that statement to one made by the physicist and mathematician P.S. Laplace, who stated, “We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion… would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the…