Summary
Donald Trump criticized President Biden’s decision to commute the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates, calling them “violent criminals” and wishing them to go to hell.
Trump also took the opportunity to sarcastically wish a “Merry Christmas” to Chinese troops in the Panama Canal and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Trump’s post also included references to his previous attempts to purchase Greenland and his suggestion that Wayne Gretzky run for Canadian Prime Minister.
That’s a bit loaded question but yes.
No it’s not. He is a confidence man repackaging a New Age interpretation of Buddhism into Atheist friendly language
His core belief, that freewill doesn’t exist is predicated upon a very generous re-interpretation of the Libet study, a study often refuted by Benjamin Libet himself who noted that what many ignore about his experiment is the existence of what he called “Free Won’t”
In which subjects showed that although the readiness potential existed, it was still possible for them to change their mind and not press the button regardless of how much readiness potential was present.
Other studies on the subject have lead to radically different results.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/free-will-is-only-an-illusion-if-you-are-too/
tl;dr for this article
They did another study that suggests meaningless decisions have readiness potiential. Such as idly scratching an itch or deciding what leg you’re going to start walking on. However readiness potential is NOT detected at all if the decision has actual weight behind it.
As tested with a study where people were asked to push a button on the left or right to determine which of two charities would get a thousand dollar donation. Readiness potential was only detected in the control group, which was told to push a button to decide which charity they personally liked better with the 1000 dollar donation being split evenly between them.
Meaning that if a decision requires any thought behind it at all, it was consciously made by a free agent.
At best Libet’s work shows that we have a subconscious mind, which is not going to be a revelation to anyone with a 2nd Grader’s understanding of Psychology.
Sorry my friend, I’m afraid you exist, your choices matter, and Sam Harris is a hack who unironically suggested a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Arabic Communities under the premise that belief in Allah was an incurable mental illness that can only lead to mass genocide and a thirst for white blood.
Basically there’s not much difference between Sam Harris and the Spirit Science guy outside of what team they play for.
So it was a loaded question.