Do You Believe In Free Will? Maybe You Should, Even If You Don't | Artful Choice Is free will real, or is just one of our happy illusions? As it turns out, the answer might not matter as much as our belief in the answer does. A recent study showed that, when people’s belief in free will was experimentally reduced, pre-conscious motor preparation, or that activity that precedes action, in the brain was delayed by more than one second relative to those who believed in free will – an eternity in brain time. Finding free will in the brain For over fifty years, almost all the way up to his death in 2007, Benjamin Libet studied the neural correlates of consciousness. First, he observed the existence of something called the readiness potential, or RP, in the brain, up to 550ms prior to the initiation of action. However, the more striking finding was that this RP preceded conscious awareness of the intention to act: Libet’s subjects became aware of their action intention 350-400ms after the RP had started. Our brains care if we believe in free will The importance of agency
The 25 Most Influential Living Atheists Go back a few hundred years, and atheism was very much a minority position. Those who were atheists would have been ostracized by society and possibly even killed (as in burned at the stake, depending on how far back you go). Fast forward to the present, and atheism is far less objectionable, and in some circles even the dominant view. In the new millennium, prominent atheists abound. One website, www.celebatheists.com, is even dedicated to listing celebrity atheists. To make it on SuperScholar’s list of influential living atheists, an atheist can’t merely disbelieve in God but also must actively encourage others to disbelieve in God. Thus, to make it on our list, an atheist needs not only to be actively promoting atheism but also to do so as scholars in scholarly forums – this is, after all, SuperScholar! Many of the scholars listed here have given new life to atheism, inviting the term “neo-atheism” to describe their impact and movement. 1. More info: Wikipedia, Homepage 2. 3. 4. 5.
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State of the Nation The first incorrect assumption I would like to address is the topic of "belief": Atheism is a belief system. Atheism is not a belief system because there isn't anything we are "believing" that could be considered a "system." Atheism doesn't join people together in a common ideology like religions do because atheists share nothing in common, except their lack of belief in 1 specific thing. In a way, people will get into a discussion of semantics of whether atheism is a "belief" or not, but really that is only because it is possible to state the any negative belief as a belief in the negative, which kinda works in english even if it doesn't exactly convey the position. Some definitions of atheism will even say something along the lines of "belief there is no god" but really the issue here, from my perspective, is that there are a number of things I believe. But the things I don't believe are infinite. Don't believe me? Do you believe that there is a pink unicorn in front of you right now?
Descartes Ontological Argument First published Mon Jun 18, 2001; substantive revision Tue Apr 12, 2011 Descartes' ontological (or a priori) argument is both one of the most fascinating and poorly understood aspects of his philosophy. Fascination with the argument stems from the effort to prove God's existence from simple but powerful premises. The main statement of the argument appears in the Fifth Meditation. Descartes was not the first philosopher to formulate an ontological argument. Despite similarities, Descartes' version of the argument differs from Anselm's in important ways. Descartes often compares the ontological argument to a geometric demonstration, arguing that necessary existence cannot be excluded from idea of God anymore than the fact that its angles equal two right angles, for example, can be excluded from the idea of a triangle. 1. One of the hallmarks of Descartes' version of the ontological argument is its simplicity. To illustrate this point Descartes appeals to divine omnipotence. 2.
Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing We Americans are growing increasingly disenchanted with the institutions on which we depend. We can't trust them. They disappoint us. They fail to give us what we need. And the disenchantment we experience as recipients of services is often matched by the dissatisfaction of those who provide them. When we try to make things better, we generally reach for one of two tools. This blog is an attempt to answer this question. The term practical wisdom sounds like an oxymoron to modern ears. This is what took practical wisdom. Why "wisdom"? Doctors--and teachers attempting to teach and inspire, or lawyers attempting to provide proper counsel and serve justice--are not puzzling over a choice between the "right" thing and the "wrong" thing. Aristotle recognized that balancing acts like these beg for wisdom, and that abstract or ethereal wisdom would not do. We've been working together on practical wisdom, and teaching courses in it, for a decade.
Foreknowledge and Free Will Suppose it were known, by someone else, what you are going to choose to do tomorrow. Wouldn’t that entail that tomorrow you must do what it was known in advance that you would do? In spite of your deliberating and planning, in the end, all is futile: you must choose exactly as it was earlier known that you would. The supposed exercise of your free will is ultimately an illusion. Historically, the tension between foreknowledge and the exercise of free will was addressed in a religious context. However, the trouble with such solutions is that they are generally unsatisfactory on their own terms. In this article, various ways of trying to solve the problem—for example, by putting constraints on the truth-conditions for statements, or by “tightening” the conditions necessary for knowledge—are examined and shown not to work. Table of Contents 1. Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) has set out the problem in the traditional manner: The argument can be extended. 2. 1. 2. 3. 3. 4. a.
Ragged Trousered Philosopher I met god the other day. I know what you're thinking. How the hell did you know it was god? Well, I'll explain as we go along, but basically he convinced me by having all, and I do mean ALL, the answers. Which is odd, because I'm still an atheist and we even agree on that! It all started on the 8.20 back from Paddington. What did he look like? Well not what you might have expected that's for sure. 'Anyone sitting here?' 'Help yourself' I replied. Sits down, relaxes, I ignore and back to the correspondence on genetically modified crops entering the food chain... Train pulls out and a few minutes later he speaks. 'Can I ask you a question?' Fighting to restrain my left eyebrow I replied 'Yes' in a tone which was intended to convey that I might not mind one question, and possibly a supplementary, but I really wasn't in the mood for a conversation. 'Why don't you believe in god?' The Bastard! I love this kind of conversation and can rabbit on for hours about the nonsense of theist beliefs. 'Stottle.
Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Apart form the interest this thesis may hold for those who are engaged in futuristic speculation, there are also more purely theoretical rewards. The structure of the paper is as follows. A common assumption in the philosophy of mind is that of substrate-independence. Arguments for this thesis have been given in the literature, and although it is not entirely uncontroversial, we shall here take it as a given. Memory seems to be a no more stringent constraint than processing power. Writing and thus: .
The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov by Isaac Asimov I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important. In the first sentence, he told me he was majoring in English Literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. (I sighed a bit, for I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to teach me science, but I am very aware of the vast state of my ignorance and I am prepared to learn as much as I can from anyone, however low on the social scale, so I read on.) It seemed that in one of my innumerable essays, here and elsewhere, I had expressed a certain gladness at living in a century in which we finally got the basis of the Universe straight. These are all twentieth-century discoveries, you see. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. No one knows nothing.