Dilbert doing philosophy. Good stuff! Particularly the last one!
Tag free will
I am presently reading an absolutely superb book by David Eagleman called Incognito:
The book is a popular foray into psychology and neuroscience and synthesises a host of different studies into things brain. I wanted to just bring up a few fascinating studies which cast doubt upon the idea that we have fully fledged, or even remotely authored, conscious free will. It even talks about chicken sexers, which is nice. Rather than produce notes, I have tried to directly link the claims.
A friend of mine on facebook, George Ortega, who runs the causalconsciousness website, alerted me to the website categorisation project known as…
An online friend of mine whom has a real interest in the concept of free will, and all the problematic baggage it brings with it. He has a proclivity for producing adverts for newspapers and publications like Free Inquiry that concern themselves with this erroneous philosophical belief. Here is one such piece from the Free Inquiry which does a good job of summing up the issues with an account of libertarian free will, and how that works in the context of Christianity. Let me know what you think.
Childhood poverty and chronic stress may lead to problems regulating emotions as an adult, according to research published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In refutation of the argument for “free moral agency,” Ingersoll once used the following illustration, — itself an argument as clear as it is unanswerable: —
“It is insisted that man is free, and is responsible, because he knows right from wrong. But the compass does not navigate the ship; neither does it in any way, of itself, determine the direction that is taken. When wind and waves are too powerful, the compass is of no importance. The pilot may read it correctly, and may know the direction the ship ought to take, but the compass is not a force. So men, blown by the tempests of passion, may have the intellectual conviction that they should go another way; but of what use, of what force, is the conviction?”
Here is a criticism about God’s omniscience and omnipotence based upon a point made by John D. Barrow in Impossibility, drawing on the work of cognitive scientist Donald Mackay. To put it into simple terms, it might be easier to state it as follows:
Well, it depends on your definition of highbrow, of course. But please check out the video of myself, Counter Apologist and Justin Schieber from Reasonable Doubts discussing the Evidential Problem of Evil, going through a ton of arguments and interesting points. It was really enjoyable and we hope you get out as much enjoyment as we did! Hopefully it won’t be the last.
University of Washington researchers have performed what they believe is the first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface, with one researcher able to send a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motions of a fellow researcher.
As most of you probably already know, my first book was Free Will? An into whether we have free will or whether I was always going to write this book. This has received overwhelmingly good reviews (the only negative one on Amazon.com is from a mental Catholic priest who hadn’t read it and who has been banned from here, as well as negatively reviewing all of my books.
Anywho, I just thought I’d share the last couple of reviews for Free Will?
Some time ago I posted a piece called God Loves Abortion, to which Andy Schueler added a nice piece on conception and the creation of the soul and personhood from a biological perspective. The other day on my Free Will, Heaven and the Problem of Evil video, Honest_John_Law linked this summary by Scott Rhoades of an interesting piece by Gregory Paul.
Not sure if I have posted this one before, but needing to do quick and edifying (hopefully) posts, I am…
Over at the website Closer To Truth, which is a site about an agnostic who goes around interviewing philosophers and scientists to try to find answers to the biggest and deepest mysteries of the meaning of existence and the universe, there is a profile of William Lane Craig. In it, they summarize his arguments against the tenseless theory of time. I want to quickly address them here.
Craig’s done his homework to try to put this theory to rest, but I think he ultimately fails. I’m not going to go into detail here, but I will add a few thoughts how I think each of his refutations are ultimately baseless.
I have a comment to answer on the original blog post Libertarian Free Will Defeats the Kalam Cosmological Argument and I thought I would not lose all the work to a comment forgotten in the annals of blog history. So here is the original post almost in full to remind you:
Everything which begins to exist has a cause for its existence
The universe began to exist
Therefore the universe had a cause (for its existence)
After having looked at Randal Rauser’s reasons for being a Christian, and having had my reasons and his defences intensely debated on his blog, I have in a previous post offered Dr Vincent Torley’s account. Some readers may know Vincent from the Uncommon Descent website which attempts to refute evolution. I have argued with him at length when I used to write for John Loftus more often at Debunking Christianity. Here is his bio:
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.
I have been kindly asked to give a talk to the Dorset Humanists next month, They seemed to enjoy my last few talks so much as to want me to create a talk to deliver. I am gratefully obliging.
I will be looking at arguments for and against God, starting off with the wide deistic arguments from philosophy, and then narrowing down to particular arguments concerning the historicity and probability of the Judeo-Christian God. Here is something I am working on with regards to the ridiculousness of the Exodus account.
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.