In this article I want to focus, in the general sense, on 10 of the many benefits of not believing in free will as defined here, if one understands the reasons behind why it doesn’t exist and what such implies. You’ll notice that many of the below benefits interconnect with each other.
So here we go…
An article in Psychology Today titled “Free Will à la Mode? Do you have free will? Can you bake a pie “from scratch”?”, philosopher Jim Stone used a blurb from Cosmos by Carl Sagan that says:
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
…in order to address two popular philosopher’s semantic positions on the topic of free will: Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett.
To get the full context, please click here and read the article before moving on. Don’t worry, it’s not too long. I’ll wait for you to come back. Continue reading »
Some philosophers such as Alfred Mele think that people are jumping the gun on suggesting that the neuroscientific evidence against free will is sufficient for the conclusion that free will doesn’t exist. What they don’t seem to understand is that the neuroscientific evidence is just empirical supporting evidence that free will doesn’t exist. It is hardly the whole story. The larger story around free will stems not to empirical evidence against it, but rather it’s logical incoherence. Continue reading »
Emile at kritischdenken.info asked me a while back to create a Dutch version of my Determinism vs. Fatalism infographic so she could use for her site focused on Dutch speaking skeptics, but it seems she never ended up using it. I don’t want a translated version to go to waste so I’m placing it here on my website. Click here for the original English version: Determinism vs. Fatalism – InfoGraphic (a comparison)
Some people point to indeterminism or non-caused (acausal) events as their free will savior. Point ’em to this infographic to help explain why such events do not allow for free will:
PLEASE SHARE THIS INFOGRAPHIC WITH OTHERS!
There are so many words used to label certain philosophical concepts that I truly hate with a passion! I don’t hate the actual concepts themself, just what was, somewhere down the philosophical line, used to label such concepts. Often the labels I hate are the ones that use words that have ambiguous meanings elsewhere. This offers so much confusion to so many people.
When getting into the topic of free will, one must deal with the concept of causality. Within that one concept, there are many labels I disdain. Today I’m going to address “sufficient” and “necessary” causality, as the understanding of these are important. The words “necessary” and “sufficient”, however, are anything but helpful. There are other ideas surrounding causality that have horrible labels as well, for example, “accidental” vs “essential” causality. And no, such words do not imply that a cause happens by accident or that one happens to be less essential to the output. Continue reading »
A contagious brain disease has been infecting various people. The disease spreads quickly, often within as little as a 5 minute period of being exposed to it, and sometimes it draws one into long exposures. Though the disease has had many incarnations, we found a primary host of a very strong version and have rightly named the disease Dennettrhea after this host. The main symptom of the disease is wrongheaded compatibilistic thinking about the topic of free will that overrides any concern over the type of free will that most people feel they possess.
But don’t worry, you can build up immunity to the disease with a good dose of rationality (Rx). The more you learn about the disease, the more you can be aware of the symptoms and through rational thinking prevent yourself from becoming infected. Continue reading »
A philosophical zombie (also called a p-zombie) is, in philosophy, a thought experiment that plays into our ideas about consciousness. Basically, a p-zombie is a person who looks and acts like any other person, but who doesn’t have consciousness. There are two different versions of a p-zombie:
The first version is only a functional p-zombie. This is a zombie that looks and acts identically to any human, but that internally is not identical (the physical construct is different). You can think of such a p-zombie as a cyborg that from the outside looks and acts identically to a human (acts based on input and data received), in which the program/cyborg outputs exactly what a person might have done, but never truly experiences consciousness like a person does. The point about this type of zombie is that it is not physically identical to a human.
The next version is both a functional and physically identical p-zombie. In other words, it’s as if we were to duplicate your entire physical structure, without the consciousness existing, yet the zombie would still do everything you would have done through only the physical processing but without the consciousness as a part of such.
It’s this second version that this article will be about, which happens to be the more common version when philosophers talk about “philosophical zombies”. Continue reading »
A common misconception surrounding the free will debate is the idea that if we can’t predict the future, that free will somehow resides or has the possibility of residing in the fact that we can’t know such. That somehow our lack of being able to know all of the variables is the savior of free will.
This misconception is often grounded by the ways words such as “determinism” are not used for the free will debate. People tend to look at such words and assume what is being suggested by the word is that “we” can determine what we will do in the future. And when they hear about things such as the uncertainty principle, or about a measurement problem (there are different ones), or even chaos theory, they note that we can’t “determine” the future in any absolute way, and so (they believe) such “determinism” doesn’t apply. Continue reading »
It’s surprising how many people try to suggest that we could have done otherwise (sometimes abbreviated as CHDO online) in an entirely causal (deterministic) universe, when discussing the free will debate. And it’s always surprising how many people don’t recognize the contradiction of such. In my book I point this out with numerous demonstrations, but for this article I just want to get to the vegan-meat and potatoes. First let’s address what we mean by “could have done otherwise”. This statement is not an “after the fact” statement, as obviously once something has been done that is the thing that was done. We are addressing that if we were to somehow bring the moment back to before the decision or action, that such a decision or action doesn’t have to take the same path (it could lead elsewhere). So let’s get into the contradictory nature of such an idea. Continue reading »