UPDATE: For those of you who see Americans as having, by and large, a “sophisticated” view of free will, see this editorial in the student newspaper of the University of Central Florida. _____ It was inevitable: two of the Four Horsemen are jousting on the field of free will. Sam Harris, who like myself is […]
In a comment on my post about Sam Harris’s new book (Free Will) yesterday, reader coelsblog said the following: This whole conversation would be much, much more straightforward if people managed to accept that compatibilists really, really do reject “strong free will”. They are then wanting to have the next stage of the conversation; but […]
Sam Harris’s new book, Free Will, will be out in three days. You can order a paperback here, a Kindle version ($3.99) here, read a short excerpt here, and a longer excerpt at the Amazon site. At 90 pages, it’s only $6.99. I like it a lot (I’ve blurbed it), and if you know my […]
Almost all of us agree that we’re meat automatons in the sense that all our actions are predetermined by the laws of physics as mediated through our genes and environments and expressed in brains. We differ in how we interpret that fact vis-à-vis “free will and “moral responsibility,” though many of us seem to think […]
Lest you think that liberal theologians and churchmen are innocuous in this world, have a gander at this article from Saturday’s Telegraph, “Lord Carey backs Christian psychotherapist in ‘gay conversion’ row.“ In short, Lesley Pilkington, a British psychotherapist, was de-licensed because she tried to convert a gay man of his homosexuality, who turned out to […]
“Finally, there is the worry that to reject free will is to render all of life pointless: why would you bother with anything if it has all long since been determined? The answer is that you will bother because you are a human, and that is what humans do. Even if you decide, as part […]
The readers’ comments on my USA Today piece on free will did show the expected religious pushback, but not as much as I expected. Before we get to them, I’ll deal with two other religious critics. **** Predictably, at his own website the Thinking Christian says that the assumption of natural laws that absolutely determine our choices […]
I’ve written an op-ed piece that is online at the latest USA Today: “Why you don’t really have free will.“ My views won’t surprise regular readers, many of whom of course object to such views. To these detractors I’ll respond as did Hitchens at 7:03 (but, since I love my readers, without the invitation to posterior osculation): “I can’t […]
I’ve spent a few more weeks reading about free will and the varieties of compatibilism and incompatibilism. And—much to the regret of some of my readers, I suppose—I haven’t changed my mind. I still don’t think that we can make real “choices” at any given moment; I feel that all of our choices are predetermined […]
The amazing results reported in this piece from New Scientist, “Rat cyborg gets digital cerebellum,” haven’t yet been published in a scientific journal, but were reported in a meeting in the UK. The details are sketchy, but scientists apparently built a computer chip using information from the inputs of a rat’s brainstem to its cerebellum […]
