Belief in free will functions as a defense against acknowledging environmental determinism

Evidence

For Meyer and for Skinner, our attachments to notions such as freedom, will, autonomy, purpose, and agency are defense mechanisms that protect us from the uncomfortable facts of human ignorance. I think of Dickens’s Scrooge when he first encounters the doleful, chain-dragging ghost of his deceased partner Jacob Marley and denies the apparition, saying, “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.” So it is with freedom: an undigested bit of fear, a crumb of denial that, once metabolized, will dispel the apparition and deliver us to reality. The environment determines behavior, and our ignorance of precisely how it does so is the void that we fill with the fantasy of freedom. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1154

Categorization

• XREF: Skinner’s behaviorism and the mechanistic worldview connects to the book’s account of how surveillance capitalism treats humans as predictable behavioral organisms — and to deterministic themes in Zamyatin’s We. — connects to: Scientific fields’ deterministic stance leaves philosophy to defend apologetic free will — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2554; Behaviorism holds that free will is just ignorance of behavioral determinants — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1164; The physics view of behavior treats freedom as mere unexplained ignorance — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1315 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Behaviorism holds that free will is just ignorance of behavioral determinants #corroborates (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1164
• The physics view of behavior treats freedom as mere unexplained ignorance #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1315