FREE WILL. From the Free Press: A belief in free will touches nearly everything that human beings value.
It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion. In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that this truth about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life.
In this elegant and provocative book, Sam Harris demonstrates—with great intellectual ferocity and panache—that free will is an inherently flawed and incoherent concept, even in subjective terms. Free will is an illusion so convincing that people simply refuse to believe that we don’t have it. Free Will. 1.
Rational Deliberation 1.1 Free Will as Choosing on the Basis of One's Desires On a minimalist account, free will is the ability to select a course of action as a means of fulfilling some desire. David Hume, for example, defines liberty as “a power of acting or of not acting, according to the determination of the will.” (1748, sect.viii, part 1). And we find in Jonathan Edwards (1754) a similar account of free willings as those which proceed from one's own desires. One reason to deem this insufficient is that it is consistent with the goal-directed behavior of some animals whom we do not suppose to be morally responsible agents. 1.2 Free Will as deliberative choosing on the basis of desires and values A natural suggestion, then, is to modify the minimalist thesis by taking account of (what may be) distinctively human capacities and self-conception. Here we are clearly in the neighborhood of the ‘rational appetite’ accounts of will one finds in the medieval Aristotelians. 2. 3. 4.
Free will. Though it is a commonly held intuition that we have free will,[3] it has been widely debated throughout history not only whether that is true, but even how to define the concept of free will.[4] How exactly must the will be free, what exactly must the will be free from, in order for us to have free will?
Historically, the constraint of dominant concern has been determinism of some variety (such as logical, nomological, or theological), so the two most prominent common positions are named incompatibilist or compatibilist for the relation they hold to exist between free will and determinism. In Western philosophy[edit] The underlying issue is: Do we have some control over our actions, and if so, what sort of control, and to what extent? These questions predate the early Greek stoics (for example, Chrysippus), and some modern philosophers lament the lack of progress over all these millennia.[11][12] Below are the classic arguments bearing upon the dilemma and its underpinnings. [edit] Notes. There is no such thing as free will.