Months ago, my good friend Barry Boyce encouraged me to look into Robert Sapolsky’s recent book, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. He thought it would be a good basis for an article pointing out the defects of materialism.
My initial ideas about Buddhism and free will were rather simplistic. But the more I investigated and pondered the subject, the more interesting it became. The Buddha’s teachings are throughly deterministic, yet the third noble truth offers the possibility of complete freedom. How could that be? That’s where the article goes.
As I was working on the piece, Frederick Ranollo-Higgins, an editor at Tricycle, approached me about writing a feature. Tricycle seemed like an excellent place to publish the free-will piece. Working with Frederick was a breeze, and I’m very happy with the results.
Read the article and see what you think.