This essay sets out to dispel the myth that the soul can be the originator for free will. I will start the essay by establishing the Cartesian idea of what the body is and showing that Descartes and modern biology indicate that the body is a biological machine. After indicating how Descartes (and others) use the soul as the originator for free will / volition, I will show that in order for the soul to be labelled and identified as a soul, it must have the format and properties of a soul. These must be adhered to in order to designate the soul with coherent and consistent properties. To conclude, I will maintain that if a soul must adhere to rules and laws to remain being a soul, then it must operate within a deterministic framework.
Tag determinism
Science Daily – July 19, 2013 — If you could hit the reset button on evolution and start over, would essentially the same species appear? Yes, according to a study of Caribbean lizards by researchers at the University of California, Davis, Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts. The work is published July 19 in the journal Science.
Here is another guest post. The last one by The Thinker has had a thread which has exploded. This one…
A multi-national team of researchers has identified genetic markers that predict educational attainment by pooling data from more than 125,000 individuals in the United States, Australia, and 13 western European countries.
This is a superb article from Jerry Coyne over at Why Evolution Is True about the work being done building on and improving upon the Benjamin Libet experiments which I have talked about before online and in my book. Thanks you so much to Jerry who has allowed me to repost his article. Please, please check out his excellent blog.
Two episodes of Skepticule have become available with my counter-apologetics segment, called Pearced Off.
The first episode (44) features my piece on free will as an incoherent gift from God, which can be found here. My segment starts at 29.10.
So I am arguing in many different forums at the moment about free will, and in particular, about whether Libertarian Free Will (LFW) is compatible with the Kalam Cosmological Argument.
i define LFW here as the ability to choose otherwise. That means I invoke the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. This means that given a particular situation (CC1), I could choose A or B, and if we rewound time to CC1, and given that everything would remain the same in CC1 (ceteris paribus), then the agent could somehow choose differently, invoking a freedom of the will.
I was posting on Randal Rauser’s blog recently and made a throw away comment about the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) and libertarian free will. It is an argument which have meant to spell out for some time and so I guess this is as good a time as any.
Tom Clark is the Director for the Center for Naturalism (CFN), an organisation which harbours the excellent resource Naturalism.Org. The Mission for CFN is stated as follows:
The Center for Naturalism (CFN) is an educational and advocacy organization devoted to increasing public awareness of naturalism and its implications for social and personal well-being. The CFN seeks to foster the understanding that human beings and their behavior are fully caused, entirely natural phenomena, and that human flourishing is best achieved in the light of such understanding.
http://youtu.be/bObzpWrhH-Q This is a nice little video to express why incompatibilism is the most robust worldview with regard to free…
Tom Clark, or the Center For Naturalism, and someone whom I will shortly be interviewing, has created this transcript of…
Some research out seems to support an idea that ‘bad decisions’ that we make are as a result of the quality of the information coming in rather than the quality of the systems working on that information. Of course, this may call into question the quality of the systems actually responsible for collecting that data. The chicken and the egg scenario seems to persist here. Science Daily:
Apr. 15, 2013 — Making decisions involves a gradual accumulation of facts that support one choice or another. A person choosing a college might weigh factors such as course selection, institutional reputation and the quality of future job prospects.
I was lucky enough to be asked back to the Dorset Humanists, based in Bournemouth, UK, to give a talk on free will. I had previously given them a talk on the Nativity, based on my book, The Nativity: A Critical Examination. They appeared to enjoy it enough to ask me back, and I obliged.
What is frustrating about this article is the fact that Science Daily produced it and I saw it just as I returned from giving a talk on free will to the Dorset Humanists. Grr. I talked about similar predicitve pieces of research, such as lack of fear conditioning in toddlers and criminal records, as in Gao et al, whose research concluded:
Can’t believe I missed this one. Interesting, and something I will bring up in my talk tonight on free will at Southampton University to the Atheist Society. Research into prosocial (kind) behaviour is always interesting, and something I have documented here, here and here. there is a mix of genetic and environmental influences with this one. It seems that talking to children about giving, about kindness, is more important than role-modeling when measuring children’s kindness. Of course, children who do not have these environmental influences will be at a disadvantage to others who have, and these are variables outside of their control.
Science Daily: Mar. 3, 2013 — Researchers at the University of Rochester and the University of Ottawa have applied a recently developed technique to directly measure for the first time the polarization states of light. Their work both overcomes some important challenges of Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle and also is applicable to qubits, the building blocks of quantum information theory.
Good news on the speaking front, for me (not that any of you will particularly care!). I have been booked…
I love research like this, it just fascinates me, and adds to the mountains of empirical evidence that supports the logical and philosophical evidence / argumentation which underpins determinism (or, more accurately, the lack of libertarian free will) about which I wrote my first book – Free Will? An investigation into whether we have free will or whether I was always going to write this book. Which, you will glad to know, has some cracking reviews.
William Lane Craig, as we all know, is an apologist with a predilection for the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which goes like this:
1) Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause of its existence;
2) The universe has a beginning of its existence;
C) Therefore: The universe has a cause of its existence.
The point I want to make today is about quantum indeterminacy. This is the notion that, at the quantum, microscopic level, things could be indeterminate, or ‘uncaused’. This potentially invalidates the first premise.