Or denying free will. Contrary to what is claimed here.
A vivid cross-section of what makes us human.
Based groundbreaking new research, We Are Our Brains is a sweeping biography of the human brain, from infancy to adulthood to old age. Renowned neuroscientist D. F. Swaab takes us on a guided tour of the intricate inner workings that determine our potential, our limitations, and our desires, with each chapter serving as an eye-opening window on a different stage of brain development: the gender differences that develop in the embryonic brain, what goes on in the heads of adolescents, how parenthood permanently changes the brain.
Moving beyond pure biological understanding, Swaab presents a controversial and multilayered ethical argument surrounding the brain. Far from possessing true free will, Swaab argues, we have very little control over our everyday decisions, or who we will become, because our brains predetermine everything about us, long before we are born, from our moral character to our religious leanings to whom we fall in love with. And he challenges many of our prevailing assumptions about what makes us human, decoding the intricate “moral networks” that allow us to experience emotion, revealing maternal instinct to be the result of hormonal changes in the pregnant brain, and exploring the way that religious “imprinting” shapes the brain during childhood. Colour emphasis added.
Note the continued obsession with denying free will and explaining away religion. There is nothing controversial about that stuff either.
Yet another wagon joins the Circus That Never Leaves Town. It can’t leave town, actually, because the clown car in the lead is full of methodological naturalists, who are leading the circus parade round and round in a circle on the town square. And now, yet another wagon joins the parade, as soon as a gap forms.
When I started this beat maybe twelve years ago, I wondered if they would indeed come up with something significant. Now I know they won’t because they can’t. They can only make room for another wagon, widening the circle. The God of the Gaps, I presume. – O’Leary for News