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The Non Reality Of Free Will
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Book Synopsis The Non-reality of Free Will by : Richard Double
Download or read book The Non-reality of Free Will written by Richard Double and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1991 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The traditional disputants in the free will discussion--the libertarian, soft determinist, and hard determinist--agree that free will is a coherent concept, while disagreeing on how the concept might be satisfied and whether it can, in fact, be satisfied. In this innovative analysis, Richard Double offers a bold new argument, rejecting all of the traditional theories and proposing that the concept of free will cannot be satisfied, no matter what the nature of reality. Arguing that there is unavoidable conflict within our understanding of moral responsibility and free choice, Double seeks to prove that when we ascribe responsibility, blame, or freedom, we merely express attitudes, rather than state anything capable of truth or falsity. Free will, he concludes, is essentially an incoherent notion.
Book Synopsis Why Free Will Is Real by : Christian List
Download or read book Why Free Will Is Real written by Christian List and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-06 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A crystal-clear, scientifically rigorous argument for the existence of free will, challenging what many scientists and scientifically minded philosophers believe. Philosophers have argued about the nature and the very existence of free will for centuries. Today, many scientists and scientifically minded commentators are skeptical that it exists, especially when it is understood to require the ability to choose between alternative possibilities. If the laws of physics govern everything that happens, they argue, then how can our choices be free? Believers in free will must be misled by habit, sentiment, or religious doctrine. Why Free Will Is Real defies scientific orthodoxy and presents a bold new defense of free will in the same naturalistic terms that are usually deployed against it. Unlike those who defend free will by giving up the idea that it requires alternative possibilities to choose from, Christian List retains this idea as central, resisting the tendency to defend free will by watering it down. He concedes that free will and its prerequisites—intentional agency, alternative possibilities, and causal control over our actions—cannot be found among the fundamental physical features of the natural world. But, he argues, that’s not where we should be looking. Free will is a “higher-level” phenomenon found at the level of psychology. It is like other phenomena that emerge from physical processes but are autonomous from them and not best understood in fundamental physical terms—like an ecosystem or the economy. When we discover it in its proper context, acknowledging that free will is real is not just scientifically respectable; it is indispensable for explaining our world.
Download or read book Free Will written by Sam Harris and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of The End of Faith, a thought-provoking, "brilliant and witty" (Oliver Sacks) look at the notion of free will—and the implications that it is an illusion. A belief in free will touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion. In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that this truth about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life.
Download or read book Free Will Explained written by Dan Barker and published by Union Square & Co.. This book was released on 2018-02-28 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling essay on free will from an internationally recognized authority on atheism, and author of God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction. Do we have free will? And if we don’t, why do we feel as if we do? In a godless universe governed by impersonal laws of cause and effect, are you responsible for your actions? Former evangelical minister Dan Barker (God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction) unveils a novel solution to the question that has baffled scientists and philosophers for millennia. He outlines the concept of what he calls “harmonic free will,” a two-dimensional perspective that pivots the paradox on its axis to show that there is no single answer—both sides are right. Free will is a useful illusion: not a scientific, but a social truth.
Download or read book Free Will written by Meghan Griffith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of whether humans are free to make their own decisions has long been debated and it continues to be a controversial topic today. In Free Will: The Basics readers are provided with a clear and accessible introduction to this central but challenging philosophical problem. The questions which are discussed include: Does free will exist? Or is it illusory? Can we be free even if everything is determined by a chain of causes? If our actions are not determined, does this mean they are just random or a matter of luck? In order to have the kind of freedom required for moral responsibility, must we have alternatives? What can recent developments in science tell us about the existence of free will? Because these questions are discussed without prejudicing one view over others and all technical terminology is clearly explained, this book is an ideal introduction to free will for the uninitiated.
Book Synopsis Breaking the Free Will Illusion for the Betterment of Humankind by : 'Trick Slattery
Download or read book Breaking the Free Will Illusion for the Betterment of Humankind written by 'Trick Slattery and published by . This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn why the belief in free will doesn't make sense, and why you and the rest of humankind will be better off abandoning it! Free will is an ability many think they posses. Most, however, aren't aware of the dangers imposed by such a belief, and have never thought about free will other than their own assumptions based on a pervasive feeling. The logic, reason, and evidence, however, says something entirely different. Have you ever blamed yourself for something you've done in the past? If so, for how long? Perhaps you still are? Have you ever held a grudge over another person or them you? Perhaps you have hatred for someone who has opposing ideas, thoughts, and beliefs. Or maybe you think someone is more deserving than another or to blame for their own situation? The belief in free will embeds itself within so much of what we think, feel, and do. It isn't just about abstract philosophical metaphysics that applies only to those in academic circles. The belief in free will is a root feeling and concept that has an effect on how most people think about politics, religion, economics, morality / ethics, law, criminal and justice systems, feelings about ourselves, our relationship to others, and our relationship to the world around us. It's for this reason that the topic needs to move away from academia and into the real world. Individually, the free will topic means a lot to you and everything you think, say, and do. Overall, the topic means a great deal for the entirety of humanity. There are real world consequences to holding such a belief in free will, and those consequences are more dire than one would suspect. Free will is often taken for granted and assumed as something positive. The reality, however, is something surprisingly different and, at least initially, counter-intuitive. In actuality, the belief in free will creates people who have resentment, guilt, and hatred. It drives inequality, egoism, poverty dismissal, retributive tendencies, non-connectedness, and a slew of other unhelpful and downright dangerous thoughts and feelings. If we continue holding on to such illusions as if they are real, the future looks bleak. Rather than try to understand causes and fix things at base, we'll just assume that people could have done other than they did. It is, after all, much easier to place blame on people than it is to look for actual causes. It's a much simpler task to suggest that you or the another person simply could have or should have done differently. If, however, we begin to break away from the illusion -- If we begin to understand that free will is not a rational belief -- only then can humanity progress to a state of less ego, more understanding, and start to develop solutions based on reality rather than fictions. We can either keep holding on to the ultimately harmful free will illusion, or break the illusion in the most educated and safe ways possible. And the only way to break the illusion is with well reasoned information. In this enlightening book, 'Trick Slattery gives the ultimate case against free will, and also explores why it's important that we begin to recognize this fact and understand what it means. He makes the case that it's not only an illusion, but a harmful illusion at that. The only way to begin mending the harms this illusion has caused is to understand why it simply can't exist, and what it does and doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Free will is an illusion. We experience a feeling of free will, but that feeling doesn't correlate with something real. It's only a feeling. Come be a part of the history that breaks the free will illusion for the betterment of humankind!
Book Synopsis Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility by : Gregg D. Caruso
Download or read book Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility written by Gregg D. Caruso and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-07-05 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility investigates the philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism and their implications. Skepticism about free will and moral responsibility has been on the rise in recent years. In fact, a significant number of philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists now either doubt or outright deny the existence of free will and/or moral responsibility—and the list of prominent skeptics appears to grow by the day. Given the profound importance that the concepts of free will and moral responsibility hold in our lives—in understanding ourselves, society, and the law—it is important that we explore what is behind this new wave of skepticism. It is also important that we explore the potential consequences of skepticism for ourselves and society. Edited by Gregg D. Caruso, this collection of new essays brings together an internationally recognized line-up of contributors, most of whom hold skeptical positions of some sort, to display and explore the leading arguments for free will skepticism and to debate their implications.
Book Synopsis The Nonsense of Free Will by : Richard Oerton
Download or read book The Nonsense of Free Will written by Richard Oerton and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did Myra Hindley deserve to be punished? Does any criminal? Is belief in free will an essential foundation for morality, or an excuse for unwarranted cruelty? Is free will a myth and, if so, can we let go of it?
Book Synopsis The Free Will Delusion by : James B. Miles
Download or read book The Free Will Delusion written by James B. Miles and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poverty is not accident, but design. We are not all equal before the law. And the central message of contemporary ethics is that only some people matter.
Book Synopsis The Illusion of Conscious Will by : Daniel M. Wegner
Download or read book The Illusion of Conscious Will written by Daniel M. Wegner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-08-11 with total page 725 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.
Book Synopsis Living without Free Will by : Derk Pereboom
Download or read book Living without Free Will written by Derk Pereboom and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-02-19 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most people assume that, even though some degenerative or criminal behavior may be caused by influences beyond our control, ordinary human actions are not similarly generated, but rather are freely chosen, and we can be praiseworthy or blameworthy for them. A less popular and more radical claim is that factors beyond our control produce all of the actions we perform. It is this hard determinist stance that Derk Pereboom articulates in Living Without Free Will. Pereboom argues that our best scientific theories have the consequence that factors beyond our control produce all of the actions we perform, and that because of this, we are not morally responsible for any of them. He seeks to defend the view that morality, meaning and value remain intact even if we are not morally responsible, and furthermore, that adopting this perspective would provide significant benefit for our lives.
Book Synopsis Essay on the Freedom of the Will by : Arthur Schopenhauer
Download or read book Essay on the Freedom of the Will written by Arthur Schopenhauer and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-03-02 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVBrilliant and elegant in its treatment, Schopenhauer's 1839 essay on free will and determinism still remains relevant to modern readers. A useful introduction to the philosopher's work for students of philosophy or religion. /div
Book Synopsis Free Will and Action Explanation by : Scott Robert Sehon
Download or read book Free Will and Action Explanation written by Scott Robert Sehon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do we have free will and moral responsibility? Is free will compatible with determinism? Scott Sehon argues that we can make progress on these questions by focusing on an underlying issue: the nature of action explanation. Part I of the book proposes and defends a non-causal account of action and agency, according to which reason explanation of human behavior is irreducibly teleological rather than causal. Part II applies the teleological account of action to free will and responsibility, arguing that the free actions-the ones for which we are directly responsible. It is then argued that this non-causal account of action undermines the appeal of incompatibilist arguments, arguments attempting to show that free will is not compatible with determinism. Beyond this, Sehon argues that the non-causal compatibilist account works well in practice: it is in accord with our clear intuitions about cases, and it both explains and provides guidance in the cases where our intuitions are murkier.
Book Synopsis Metaphilosophy and Free Will by : Richard Double
Download or read book Metaphilosophy and Free Will written by Richard Double and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996-09-26 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is debate over the free will problem so intractable? In this broad and stimulating look at the philosophical enterprise, Richard Double uses the free will controversy to build on the subjectivist conclusion he developed in The Non-Reality of Free Will (OUP 1991). Double argues that various views about free will--e.g., compatibilism, incompatibilism, and even subjectivism--are compelling if, and only if, we adopt supporting metaphilosophical views. Because metaphilosophical considerations are not provable, we cannot show any free will theory to be most reasonable. Metaphilosophy and Free Will deconstructs the free will problem and, by example, challenges philosophers in other areas to show how their philosophical argumentation can succeed.
Book Synopsis Four Views on Free Will by : John Martin Fischer
Download or read book Four Views on Free Will written by John Martin Fischer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-02-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the concepts and interactions of free will, moralresponsibility, and determinism, this text represents the mostup-to-date account of the four major positions in the free willdebate. Four serious and well-known philosophers explore the opposingviewpoints of libertarianism, compatibilism, hard incompatibilism,and revisionism The first half of the book contains each philosopher’sexplanation of his particular view; the second half allows them todirectly respond to each other’s arguments, in a lively andengaging conversation Offers the reader a one of a kind, interactive discussion Forms part of the acclaimed Great Debates in Philosophyseries
Book Synopsis Free Will and Illusion by : Saul Smilansky
Download or read book Free Will and Illusion written by Saul Smilansky and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2000-03-30 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saul Smilansky presents an original treatment of the problem of free will, which lies at the heart of morality and human self-understanding. He maintains that we have most of the resources we need for a proper understanding of the problem; and the key to it is the role played by illusion. The major traditional philosophical approaches are inadequate, Smilansky argues: their partial insights need to be integrated into a hybrid view, which he calls Fundamental Dualism. Common views about justice, responsibility, human worth, and related notions are radically misguided, and the absurd looms large. We do, however, find some justification for enlightened moral views, and grounding for some of our most cherished views of human nature. The bold and perhaps disturbing claim of Free Will and Illusion is that we could not live adequately with a complete awareness of the truth about human freedom: illusion lies at the centre of the human condition. The necessity of illusion is seen to follow from the basic elements of the free will issue, helping keep our moral and psychological worlds intact. Smilansky offers the challenge of recognizing the centrality of illusion and trying to free ourselves to some extent from it; this is not only a philosophical challenge, but a moral and psychological one as well.
Download or read book Free Will written by Mark Balaguer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-02-14 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A philosopher considers whether the scientific and philosophical arguments against free will are reason enough to give up our belief in it. In our daily life, it really seems as though we have free will, that what we do from moment to moment is determined by conscious decisions that we freely make. You get up from the couch, you go for a walk, you eat chocolate ice cream. It seems that we're in control of actions like these; if we are, then we have free will. But in recent years, some have argued that free will is an illusion. The neuroscientist (and best-selling author) Sam Harris and the late Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner, for example, claim that certain scientific findings disprove free will. In this engaging and accessible volume in the Essential Knowledge series, the philosopher Mark Balaguer examines the various arguments and experiments that have been cited to support the claim that human beings don't have free will. He finds them to be overstated and misguided. Balaguer discusses determinism, the view that every physical event is predetermined, or completely caused by prior events. He describes several philosophical and scientific arguments against free will, including one based on Benjamin Libet's famous neuroscientific experiments, which allegedly show that our conscious decisions are caused by neural events that occur before we choose. He considers various religious and philosophical views, including the philosophical pro-free-will view known as compatibilism. Balaguer concludes that the anti-free-will arguments put forward by philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists simply don't work. They don't provide any good reason to doubt the existence of free will. But, he cautions, this doesn't necessarily mean that we have free will. The question of whether we have free will remains an open one; we simply don't know enough about the brain to answer it definitively.
