Nothing Is Needed

Some instrumental music you might have fun listening to while you read this; the music is produced by Suno AI but from my extremely long and complex prompt, just to see how much control over the composition I can exert; if the link above doesn’t work, try this one. I’m quite impressed with how it turned out; if I heard it as part of a ‘light/popular classics’ program I think I’d probably nod and find a recording of it. Photo is my own. And so is this essay — AI could never explain this stuff! It’s been over a decade now since I was finally convinced, perhaps once and for all, that we have no free will — that everything we do, and everything we believe, is the product of our biological and our cultural conditioning, given the circumstances of the moment. And it was that point that I first encountered the strange message of a small group of speakers I call ‘radical non-dualists’, who assert that what is obvious ‘there’ is that not only is there no free will, there is no one to have it,…