http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/is-neuroscience-the-death-of-free-will/?pagewanted=print
- understand free will as a set of capacities for imagining future courses of action, deliberating about one’s reasons for choosing them, planning one’s actions in light of this deliberation and controlling actions in the face of competing desires
- deliberation
- rational thinking
- self-control
- typically ignored by scientists who conclude that free will is an illusion. It also turns out that most non-philosophers have intuitions about free and responsible action that track this conception of free will
- most people think that free will and responsibility are compatible with determinism (all events are part of a law-like chain of events from earlier events
- misunderstand determinism to mean that we are
- somehow cut out of this causal chain leading to our actions. People are threatened by a possibility I call “bypassing” — the idea that our actions are caused in ways that bypass our conscious deliberations and decisions.
- So, if people mistakenly take causal determinism to mean that everything that happens is inevitable no matter what you think or try to do, then they conclude that we have no free will.
- Or if determinism is presented in a way that suggests all our decisions are just chemical reactions, they take that to mean that our conscious thinking is bypassed in such a way that we lack free will.
Related ~ Are We Ready for a ‘Morality Pill’?
- twilson1b
- Germany
Can the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics free the brain from determinism?
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