See how I am made to suffer for my belief that free will is an illusion? I am accused of being a pedophile! LOL. Note that I have pasted this directly from the email I got; the misspellings and other errors, which are ubiquitous, are the responsibility of “Lee Hudson” From: Lee Hudson [email address redacted] […]
Eddy Nahmias is an assistant professor in the Philosophy Department and the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University, in Atlanta. Lately he’s been writing and speaking a lot about free will. Nahmias is a compatibilist, someone who thinks that free will is indeed compatible with physical determinism (i.e., there is no “will” outside of our […]
While perusing the New Humanist website, trying to find Francis Spufford’s letter that I discussed yesterday, I came across a short piece I hadn’t seen before. It’s by Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher (also trained in biology) working at the City University of New York, and is called “Science needs philosophy” (free at the link). If […]
Oy gewalt, and this defense of free will appears in Harvard Magazine, the vehicle of my alma mater. In a short piece called “Two steps to free will,” Craig Lambert presents the pro-free-will views of Robert Doyle, of the university’s department of astronomy. Note that at the outset Lambert states the problem as one of […]
This was Michael Ruse last week, explaining why, as a nonbeliever, he was still trying to reconcile evolution’s randomness with the determinism—i.e., the inevitability that a humanlike creature would appear in evolution—demanded by science-friendly Christians. (My emphasis in second sentence below): This is not because I am a believer, because I am not. It is […]
Update: Over at Choice in Dying, Eric has an even more splenetic take on Ruse’s lucubrations, including this conclusion: But, here’s another thing. If no limitations can be placed on God, as Ruse assumes, then God should be able to know, by calculating the probablities, which one of the gazillion possible universes would come up with human beings, […]
In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, author and editor Daniel Menaker evaluates Sam Harris’s new book in a review called, “Have it your way.“ I hoped Menaker would engage Harris’s arguments, for book reviews are boring if they merely regurgitate the book’s contents. And though I agree with Sam’s thesis and think his book […]
Over at the Richard Dawkins Foundation, you can find a new essay by “Zeuglodon” on free will and determinism, “The raw deal of determinism and reductionism.” It’s a bit wordy and hard to follow, but seems to conclude that free will is a convincing illusion. Along the way, though, Zeuglodon makes an unnecessary diversion: Speaking […]
The European has an interview with Stephen Wolfram, (Many of you will know Wolfram as the designer of the famous computer program Mathematica.) The interview is mostly about progress in computer technology and its social benefits, but there’s one question about free will. The European: This equation of nature and technology raises a few very […]
It no longer baffles me why philosophers like Elliott Sober and Michael Ruse, both professed nonbelievers, spend their time telling the faithful how they can reconcile God and evolution. To me it seems like a complete waste of time, especially for atheists and agnostics, but Sober explains his reasons at the end of this post. […]
