I just finished reading Daniel C Dennett’s latest book “Intuition Pumps And Other Tools For Thinking” and, while it’s overall an engaging book, his final section is just plain disappointing. In the final chapters, Dennett attempts to demonstrate some of his “intuition pumps” (tools for improving our thinking about difficult problems) by tackling three very hard […]
I’m currently reading Stephen Hawking’s most recent book (co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow) “The Grand Design” and was pleased to find the following paragraphs about free will. “Do people have free will? If we have free will, where in the evolutionary tree did it develop? Do blue-green algae or bacteria have free will, or is their […]
Sam Harris has posted a new article today called “Life Without Free Will“. He starts off: One of the most common objections to my position on free will is that accepting it could have terrible consequences, psychologically or socially. This is a strange rejoinder, analogous to what many religious people allege against atheism: Without a […]
Lawrence Krauss a Canadian-American theoretical physicist who is a professor of physics, Foundation Professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration, and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing. He is an advocate of […]
A hot topic for several thousand years, the question of whether free will exists may never be settled to everyone’s satisfaction. But in a series of new articles for the Chronicles of Higher Education, six academics from diverse fields offer fresh perspectives from the standpoints of modern neuroscience and philosophy. Ultimately, they voted 4-2 in […]
I love getting questions or challenges from readers and I will respond to as many of them as I can here. Last night I was talking to a reader who happens to be my mother. Her feeling was that we don’t yet know everything there is to know about how the brain works and […]
Great video!
USA Today has this excellent article by Jerry Coyne, Professor of Evolution at the University of Chicago. Prof. Coyne’s explanation mirrors my own, however he is much more elegant. His conclusion: There’s not much downside to abandoning the notion of free will. It’s impossible, anyway, to act as though we don’t have it: you’ll pretend […]
Just in case you didn’t believe me, neuroscientist and author Sam Harris has written an excellent piece on free will in the Christmas edition of New Statesmen magazine (which has been edited by Richard Dawkins). Here’s a screenshot of my iPad copy. It’s worth purchasing the app so you can read the whole thing, it’s […]
Here’s a great list of quotes about free will via Bill Schloendorn. While they are all great, this one is my favourite: Charles Darwin: “…one doubts existence of free will [because] every action determined by heredity, constitution, example of others or teaching of others.” “This view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no credit […]