Determinism is a Humanism
Thoughts on Robert Sapolsky’s attack on free will
For a very long time people believed that the earth was at the centre of the universe.
Science proved it. Astronomers observed and mapped out Earth’s central place around which stars and planets turned.
This picture of the cosmos served the people of the ancient and mediaeval worlds well, enduring for some fifteen centuries until the Copernican Revolution took hold in the seventeenth century.
Geocentric systems gave practical benefits to the arts of navigation, predicting seasonal changes, and keeping time. But the planets and stars never quite moved the way astronomers predicted. Planetary orbits bizarrely differed in length from time to time, other strange occurrences were observed with increasing frequency.
Of course, the idea that humanity was at the centre of the cosmos wasn’t errornous, the system proving it just needed some tweaking. Modifications were duly made to account for any celestial movements that fell out of the predictive framework.
The tweaks grew over time and what became the Ptolemaic System — the culmination of geocentrism — was a complex facade of intricate rules that governed the celestial movements. These served as theoretical buttresses to maintain the integrity of…
