I read Dennett’s first book “Elbow Room” and thought it was easy to follow and made a really good case against free will, and I wondered why Dennett didn’t just accept it. I read the first 3rd or so of his next book “Freedom Evolves” and thought it both boring and sketchy so I moved on to other things (life is short you know). How much Dennett have you read?
To show you have good answers. I understand if you do not, in fact I’m pretty sure you do not.
Why quote from that book? I hardly remember it. I already said why I think liberal Christianity is bad. It’s ignorance itself, and it promotes faith and Christianity as virtuous both of which help to prop up fundamentalist Christianity which is even more ignorant, though I admit less hypocritical.
To be certain we’re on the same page, we are talking about this entry, right? If so, you can see he’s deferring to Locke’s “Essay on the Human Understanding” and its chapter on Power, and says that “A free will is an expression absolutely void of sense” which is again refusing to define the term.
No, I think it’s on my bookshelf but fate has not determined that I read it yet, but as I say, that’s not the Voltaire chapters I cited. Do you have any criticism’s of the chapters I really cited?
The links work for me. You are looking for the chapters “Destiny” and “Liberty” which is some books are out of order because the Philosophical Dictionary was originally written in French. In the meantime maybe you could think of some things people do that are not resultant on physical or divine forces. Perhaps something you have done that did not result from some combination of biology and environment or was not predestined by some all powerful and all knowing God.
I won’t be able to get to this tonight. A friend of mine that I’ve known for nearly 40 years died today, and we’re helping her husband (who is in his late 70s) to help get ready for incoming family and friends, the funeral, etc.
One time after school (eleventh grade) I was getting into my friend’s car to go hang out for a while. My mother called me and asked me to go pick up my sister. I complied.
Later that day I was notified that my friends got into a wreck. All except for one was dead; the one who didn’t die is still in a coma (it’s been almost three months).
I had ridden with those friends hundreds of times before. They were all good people. Not into drugs, didn’t screw with the driver, wore seatbelts, et cetera.
And my mother had never called me at school with a request like that before.
If I were to call any event in my life “divine intervention”, that would be it.
No matter how you define free will… how is that not it?
Your brain reviews data and then makes a decision without the influence of another sentient force. What definition of “free will” excludes that circumstance?
“You do not have free will because you do not make your own decisions. Your brain does.” A person’s identity is contained within the brain. The rest of the body is nothing but a collection of tools used to carry out the will of the brain. This makes no sense to me.
(I kind of jumped in at page 11… maybe I’m missing something here.)
If your actions are foreseen by some all knowing being such that you are powerless to do anything other than what you did, your will is not free will. If your actions are controlled by some all powerful being who controls everything, your will is not free will. If your brain acts in its perceived best interest based entirely on it’s biology and it’s interaction with the environment (what else is there?) such that it it would do no other, your will is not free.
“Men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and desires, but are ignorant of the causes by which they are led to wish and desire.” Spinoza
“Free will” as you define it not only does not exist, it cannot exist according to what we know about physics. True, independent randomness has not been achieved.