A fellow Tippling Philosopher with whom I am having a long and protracted debate on free will sent me a poem he wrote on where we were at a bout a month ago on free will. He styles himself as a linguist and humanities man, quite explicitly, and this was true to form. I thought it would be amusing to put my riposte in poetic form!
Category Philosophy
Sean Carroll, who will soon be debating with William Lane Craig, I believe, some time ago organised a conference of…
The “meaning” of life comes purely from emotional experience, which is chemically based. We know that emotion, and even spiritual experiences, are chemical in nature. It is already possible, using current science, to use drugs and/or direct manipulation of the brain in order to induce “spiritual” experiences.
There has been a new member of the Tippling Philosophers group to which I attend and I have been involved…
So I have a question. I will detail the following research. For ‘free will’ to be true, it has to explain the following. Or more accurately, the following has to be fully explicable within the free will hypothesis. How does it do that?
The Tippling Philosophers group that I frequent has a collection of very differing viewpoints, from reductionist style physicalism to Christianity; agnosticism to various degrees of spiritualism. Fiona, who is posting here, has had an interesting journey. She has had, and continues to have, experience with Eastern worldviews and practices (including yoga and meditation, and Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism). This comes through in her post. But what is interesting is her acceptance fairly recently of the illusion of free will, and how this has affected her take on, well, herself. The ever illusive “I”.
There was a famous case of a terrible shooting in 1966. Charles Whitman, an otherwise intelligent (138 IQ), ‘normal’ man, did a very abnormal thing. Charles Joseph Whitman (June 24, 1941 – August 1, 1966) was an American engineering student and former U.S. Marine, who killed seventeen people and wounded thirty-two others in a mass shooting rampage located in and around the Tower of the University of Texas in Austin on the afternoon of August 1, 1966.
I would like to put together a logical syllogism which really expresses the denial of free will through the denial of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities. The idea is that the ability to choose otherwise is rendered incoherent by lacking fundamental grounding reasoning since all deliberation and causal reasons are taking into account when choosing, say, A, so that what could possibly ground choosing B, rationally, in that identical scenario? As Ted Honderich states in the Oxford Handbook of Free Will:
So having posted the Philpapers survey results, the biggest ever survey of philosophers conducted in 2009, several readers were not aware of it (the reason for re-communicating it) and were unsure as to what some of the questions were. I offered to do a series on them, so here it is – Philosophy 101 (Philpapers induced). I will go down the questions in order. I will explain the terms and the question, whilst also giving some context within the discipline of Philosophy of Religion.
Having just edited James A. Lindsay’s superb book Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly, i thought it would be appropriate to post some of his thoughts on number and God. Please support our project by buying the book!
Today was a fun day. Philosophy professor and best-selling author Peter Boghossian, Manual For Creating Atheists, invited me to speak with his Atheism class at Portland State via Skype.
Another thing I wanted to add was the idea that the mental, the experiential, supervenes on the physical. This means that the physical in some way defines and is necessary for the mental.
This is becoming more and more evident. Let me exemplify:
How much do you love your mother?
Mike D’s excellent blog The A-Unicornist has some real gems, and if only I had more time I would hang out there more often (I am trying to get a sidebar widget to link to offsite blogs). His latest post concerns the is/ought debate, especially dealing with Sam Harris/Richard Carrier and the great philosopher of science, Massimo Pigliucci.
A new Tippling Philosopher has recently joined our group and come to the last few meetings. I was discussing free will with him in the pub, and he seemed to fail to understand how the Principle of Alternative Possibilities worked, and how the incoherence of free will seems insurmountable. Here is the last email I sent to the group to try to explain.
My twins had their birthday the other day so we went to Paulton’s Park, a local theme park for young children with a section called Peppa Pig World, and my boys love Peppa Pig.
All sounds rather unphilosophical so far. But that was until we pulled off the M27 and hit the short dual carriageway to a roundabout which led to a single carriage road to the park itself. The drive would normally take somewhere in the region of a minute. Or less. Apart from it took us an hour. One whole hour of my life I will never get back.
A chap called Lothar’s Son from Germany has contacted me to offer an argument against naturalism which he has posted on his blog. His blog, lotharlorraine, hosts the piece which can be found here. Please feel free to comment there as well as here. Thanks for LS for contacting me! Here is his argument, with kind permission:
This is from Stephen’s SIN post. i have posted an excerpt. Check out the rest here.
A while ago the well-known Christian apologist and blogger Randal Rauser posted a very long review of my book Believing Bullshit on his blog. You can find Rauser’s review here.
While making a few nice comments about the book, Rauser was generally very negative. He posted the same review on the amazon page for my book and gave the book just two stars.
Last night’s meeting at Portsmouth Skeptics int he Pub was great fun. Rather than have a single speaker, previous speakers…
The longer I have been pursuing philosophy, the more liberal I have become and the less nationalistic. By this i/ mean that I have recognised that my nationality if a mixture of several components over which I have no control:
Here is another guest post. The last one by The Thinker has had a thread which has exploded. This one…
I am going to look at political libertarianism in this post in the context of morality, ethics and philosophy. This has been brought on by the Any Questions live radio programme on BBC Radio 4 the other day from the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, Wales which featured right-wing Conservative, Telegraph blogger, Climate Change (AGW) denier James Delingpole, Secretary of State for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs, Owen Paterson MP (Conservative), left wing Labour politician Peter Hain MP, Leader of Plaid Cymru (The Welsh national party), socialist and republican Leanne Wood.