Free Do You Think You're Clever? by John Farndon Page A

like Descartes, think that the mind and body are separate, suggest that we can escape our mechanical fate because the mind is independent of the mechanism of the body and its constraint by physical laws. But then if the mind is independent, and disconnected from the body, how can it affect the mechanism at all? If it’s not disconnected, then it cannot be independent. The Greek philosopher Epicurus wondered if the mind could alterthe deterministic nature of the universe by making atoms swerve. But just thinking about such improbable mechanisms seems to make the dualist escape from fate less plausible.
    So most philosophers are divided between compatibilists, who believe that it’s possible to reconcile free will with a mechanical fate, and incompatibilists, who believe that it isn’t. The incompatibilists make this kind of argument: the past determines the present and future; you can’t control the past; you can’t alter how the past determines the future; so you have no control over the present or future. So free will is an illusion. Some philosophers have seen quantum mechanics as a way in which the predictable mechanics of the universe can be subverted. Yet this seems to make us victims of randomness – we are the playthings of luck rather than fate, which seems little better.
    To me, though, the impression that I do have some free will and at least some control over the direction of my life is so powerful that I cannot believe it’s an illusion. I am convinced in my own mind that I was not fated to write this sentence exactly at this moment … with a slight pause for thought here. And if it
is
an illusion, which I can never know one way or the other, then it still makes sense to behave as if it’s not. I will go along with Shakespeare’s Cassius, who accepted Caesar’s elevation to superstardom far above himself and Brutus with the explanation that if all else is equal:
    Men at some time are masters of their fates:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

How would you describe an apple?
    (Social and Political Sciences, Cambridge)
    ‘Surely,’ said the nineteenth-century American poet and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, ‘the apple is the noblest fruit.’ And there is no fruit that has acquired such symbolic status and been so overlaid with meaning as this ball of pulp, seeds and skin. From New York City to Macintosh computers, it stands for everything from true knowledge to all that’s wholesome, all in a tidy little package. A child is the ‘apple of his parents’ eyes’. A good kid gone rotten is ‘a bad apple’. Apples are the comfort for those sick of love in the ‘Song of Solomon’. In fact, apples are pretty much anything you want them to be. And everyone has their own way of describing them.
    If you were an artist, you might describe an apple as a roundish fruit typically about the size of a tennis ball (5 to 9 centimetres in diameter). It’s not quite round, though, as a closer look would show, for there are indentations on opposite sides – a shallow one at the bottom and a deeper one at the top where the stalk is attached. Some apples, you’d observe, have a glossy, waxy look that glistens with brilliant surface highlights, while others have a rougher,mottled matt texture that is richly and densely coloured. They vary in hue from a whitish green to golden yellow, from russet brown to bright crimson – but the colour is very rarely even. On some shiny green apples, the variations are subtle, with just paler spots and stripes visible here and there, with the occasional small dark spots. On others there are marked differences, especially in ripe apples, with some patches turning bright, warm scarlet and others remaining a sharp green.
    A mathematician might come at the description from a different angle. This would be tricky because the shape is variable, and it’s a complex shape. It’s only very roughly approximate to a sphere. You