Jan 152015
'Trick Slattery
Jan 092015
Daniel Dennett, everyone’s favorite compatibilist, is at his wrong-headed antics once again. He just seems to love using an argument from adverse consequences fallacy to tell people they shouldn’t be giving others the truth about free will – namely, that they don’t have it. And once again, he assumes these consequences based on studies that conflate deterministic mindsets with fatalistic mindsets. Once again, he assumes this based on people who aren’t really educated on the topic of free will …rather, on people who think they have free will becoming confused. Watch the “Big Think” video here, and let’s have some fun: Continue reading »
Jan 062015
Laplace’s demon is a thought experiment proposed in 1814 by French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace. It was the first published articulation of determinism in conceptual form. It can be summarized by Laplace here:
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
—Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities
It must be noted that the word “demon” was never used by Laplace, rather he used the word “intellect”. The word “demon” was a later added for effect.
And of course with modern-day physics whether the universe is entirely causal or not is sort of “up in the air”. If we were to accept that it is entirely causal, meaning that the universe is deterministic (rather than indeterministic), does Laplace’s demon hold water?
The answer: In some regards yes, in other regards no. Continue reading »
New Year’s Resolution: Believe in Fairies Rather than Free Will!
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Dec 292014
It’s holiday time, so why not tell people to believe in fictions as their New Year’s resolution?
Another nonsensical article has cropped up titled “Need a New Year’s Resolution? Believe in Free Will!” written by science writer John Horgan for the Scientific American website. Of course this opinion piece is anything but scientific or unbiased.
In this article Horgan takes the compatibilist position of Daniel Dennett, basically defining free will as something compatible with reality, but avoiding the free will most people feel they possess. Continue reading »
Dec 182014
If you’ve read anything regarding free will skepticism, it’s likely that you’ve heard the term “free will illusion” or “the illusion of free will”. This is a common expression used to denote that the free will that most people intuitively feel they possess isn’t something real. Like an optical illusion or an illusion created by your favorite magician, we are experiencing something that isn’t really there. It’s a trick of the mind. Something the mind does to fill in the gaps.
For the experience of free will, this type of “filling in the blanks” is exactly the illusion that is happening. We don’t see all of the variables that go into our thoughts and decisions, so we think those thoughts and decisions are more “free” than they actually are. Continue reading »
Dec 092014
There are various studies out and about that (poorly) suggest that a lack of free will leads to unethical actions. I’ll be getting into some of these studies in future posts, in which this article will be a necessary precursor. It’s my objective to point back to this article and various others such as Problems With The Free Will and Determinism Plus Scale (FAD-Plus) which addresses some of the flaws with the scale used in many of these studies. Needless to say there is not just one thing wrong with the way these studies are done and the ideas concluded in them, but numerous problems throughout them.
One common problem with many of these studies that think they are addressing a disbelief in free will is that they do not study actual people with a disbelief in free will. Continue reading »
Dec 032014
There are a whole lot of things that people make assumptions over that are incorrect about the lack of free will. This infographic gives just a few of some common ones. Of course there is much more than this, but hopefully this infographic will help distill some of these mistakes and non-sequiturs. Continue reading »
Dec 022014
A common tool used in various psychological studies attempting to assess how people act when they believe they have free will compared to when they do not is “The Free Will and Determinism Plus (FAD-Plus) scale“. The purpose of the scale is to distinguish between people who believe in free will and those who do not.
This scale asks participants to rate twenty-seven sentences regarding how much they disagree or agree with them (a 1 for totally disagreeing to a 5 for totally agreeing) . Seven of the sentences align with the belief in free will (or so the scale says), and the rest align with one of three types of “no free will” positions:
1) Scientific Determinism
2) Fatalism
3) Unpredictability
Scientific Determinism has seven, Fatalism has five, and Unpredictability has seven sentences. One problem with a lot of studies is that they don’t bother to break these three down. Rather, they just suggest a lack of free will causes a particular action without separating these, even though these categories are extremely important.
Both fatalism and unpredictability fall into problematic containers of thought that lead to types of futility and defeatism. So if these are injected into a study’s assessment of “lacking a belief in free will”, this says nothing about holding the types of non-belief in free will that actually align with reality. Let’s look at these parts of the FAD-Plus for a moment: Continue reading »
Nov 242014
As someone with a site specifically honed on this topic of free will, I look at it as my job to address or debunk various misinformed articles (and other media) by people who have the ability to get a lot of views (For example, remember this Michio Kaku video?).
Roy Baumeister, an eminent social psychologist and author of the book “Willpower“, has written an article in Slate magazine in support of “free will” a little while back. This is a response to that article. If you haven’t read it, it can be found here.
There are some things he gets right, but a whole lot he gets wrong. This post, of course, is about those wrong things. So let’s jump right to some quotes from the article, shall we? Continue reading »
Nov 172014
Some compatibilists like to define free will as something entirely different than the definition I’ve supplied here: FREE WILL.
Notice I have both a present tense version:
“The ability to choose between more than one viable option or action, in which that choice was up to the chooser.”
and a past tense version:
“The ability to have, of one’s own accord, chosen otherwise than they did.”
They are really the same definition in different forms. Notice that in both versions there is a qualifier, that being “up to the chooser” or “of one’s own accord”. These parts basically mean the same thing, and they are only tacked on to the definitions to address “indeterminism” (meaning if some events are acausal) and how they could never be “up to the chooser” or “of one’s own accord”. They’d just happen regardless of “us”. Most compatibilist agree with this, but they say that free will isn’t incompatible with determinism. Therefore, we can truncate my definition and take out these qualifiers under the assumption that all events are causal (at least when addressing the compatibilist). If we were to address the libertarian (who thinks free will is compatible with indeterminism), such qualifiers are important. Continue reading »