I have just had an article published in the “Free Inquiry” magazine, looking at whether society is coming to grips…
Tag free will
What it says on the tin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L5XbuxKNI8 A massive frustration in the lack of defining the terms led to a…
The flagship BBC religion, ethics and politics show, The Big Questions, this week featured a whole hour on free will. I was asked to attend ass a front row guest on the subject in York for the pre-recorded show last Sunday. Here are my thoughts on the actual content of what was discussed.
I have been having a long-standing argument with a relative newcomer to our pub philosophy group (The Tippling Philosophers) over free will. He believes in libertarian free will, though it does appear to be largely based on an argument from wishful thinking and being unwilling to confront the ramifications of not having it, rather than a robust understanding of the philosophical debate.
It finally came to pass as the producers liked the cut of my jib when they phoned me to ask me about my views on free will; a sort of a test run to see if I sounded OK. I passed.
As a determinist who believes that free will is an illusion, the argument over whether we have libertarian free will or not is somewhat passé. The interesting debates happen over whether we have moral responsibility or not, what any ramifications of this would be, and what approaches we should have to crime and punishment.
The weekly BBC programme dealing with religion, morality, ethics etc., called The Big Questions and hosted by Nicky Campbell, have…
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 meant. 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.
And now for something completely different. This has come through my friend Julian Haydon, and it a great piece of creative atheology, dripping with deterministic wordsmithying I love it. Let me know what you think.
One approach to the growing evidence, and immutable logical philosophy, for the fact of (adequate) determinism and free will as an illusion of the mind is that of the illusionist.
This is a nice little watch. I have a lot of time for the quarantine approach to which Caruso refers.…
‘Trick Slattery, who has written a really good introductory book & ebook on determinism, has produced this infographic comparing determinism…
This fascinating article is from ScienceDaily. It is something I have talked about before with friends, that you can tell so much about a person (or at least think you can) from a cursory look to the face. And, indeed, your brain is doing n awful lot of this non-conscious computation along those lines:
I am speaking at Bournemouth tonight, on free will. It is at the Bournemouth Skeptics in the Pub. Be there!…
Do you jump to help the less fortunate, cry during sad movie scenes, or tweet and post the latest topics and photos that excite or move you? If yes, you may be among the 20 percent of our population that is genetically pre-disposed to empathy, according to Stony Brook University psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron.
A new light has been cast on one of philosophy’s most profound debates: Do we have free will, and if so where does it come from?
Free will seems pretty obvious. When we make a decision we feel like we’re actually making a choice, not as though a confluence of our genetic inheritance and environmental factors have made it inevitable that we will take the path we do. However, whether this is really the case is much less clear. The more we learn about the factors that cause people to act in certain ways the easier it is to question if there is any choice involved.
The Information Philosopher, Bob Doyle, who has also written a book called The Scandal of Free Will has proposed a two-stage model of free will based on the thinking of William James. I bring this up because previous and infamous ATP commenter, JohnM (John Muze) has been commenting on the Unbelievable forum on facebook about it. It is his knight in shining armour which supposedly gives him the free will for which he argued so vociferously and badly when he commented here.
Bournemouth Skeptics in the Pub have asked me to come and talk about free will on the 9th July. Here…
I am pretty excited that my biggest talk to date will take place later this month on Thursday 29th May…
Causality. It is a funny thing. Or not so funny.
A few years back, I took my class, as a teacher, on a class trip to the Historic Dockyard in the naval city of Portsmouth, UK. My school is some 45 minutes walk and a short ferry ride from there. With the cost of coaches, it is important to be able to walk to such places to keep the costs down for parents.