Some fun with Java programming

Hey people, this is something different from the usual. I’ve been working on a new chessboard writing program in Java that is text based. That is it works with an int array where each element is either 0 or 1. This symbolizes black and white. The thing that makes it difficult is that I had to do it entirely from scratch just with math alone. I’m showing some screenshots here of what it can do so far.

Here are links to zip files containing the source and screenshots. This came in stage 1 and stage 2. Stage 2 is more advanced and can do more but stage one was the first example that took a lot less code.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/70g65ymcvrvt2i0/stage%201.zip?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/g2hi7jicw96z6e5/stage%202.zip?dl=0

Does disbelief in free will make people cheat?

Why Evolution Is True

I’ve posted before about Greg Caruso, a philosophy professor who writes about the down side of believing in free will, including its support of a “just world” view in which people deserve what they get, and so shouldn’t get government help. (Many Republicans hold such a view.) Caruso’s also the author of Free Will and Consciousness: A Determinist Account of the Illusion of Free Will, as well as Science and Religion: 5 Questions, books that are on my on my reading list.

Caruso continues his exploration of the social consequences of believing in free will in a new article in Psychology Today, “Does Disbelief in Free Will Increase Anti-Social Behavior?”  The answer has long been “yes,” but that was based on a single article by Vohs and Schooler (reference below), showing that if you “primed” students with readings that either reinforced or denigrated free will, they were more likely to cheat…

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What’s going on with my lack of self

Hey guys, I’m really excited about Paul Singh’s new book: “The Great Illusion: The Myth of Free Will, Consciousness, and the Self”

I added it to the list of books on George’s site:
http://causalconsciousness.com/index.html#Books%20refuting%20free%20will

It’s very big and much more in depth than Sam Harris’s book because it tries to take on three different illusions in one book! I see it becoming very popular in the future.

Also, I’ve been into the whole self illusion topic lately and have been investigating Liberation Unleashed ever since Simeon Dawkins told me about it on Facebook. I have a thread on the forum under the username pony1987

http://liberationunleashed.com/nation/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4876

My thought is that the idea of self/soul/spirit is just as essential to many unquestioned belief systems as is free will. Indeed, we need a “self” in order to even claim free will.

For me, self is of course the material body. Even the use of words such as “I” or “me” is a convention and a vast simplification given that we are composed of uncountable atoms. Still, language has a tendency to preserve false beliefs just as the word choice seems to imply free will. I’m still in the first chapter of Paul Singh’s book but he has already cleared up that simply choosing is not free will.

The concept of the self is also required for any belief in an afterlife. This is another major reason that I want to talk more about it in future podcasts.