But Is Determinism True?
Does science show that we fated to want whatever we want?Modern science—both theoretical and experimental—strongly supports the reality of free will.
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How Can Mere Products of Nature Have Free Will?
Materialists don’t like the outcome of their philosophy but twisting logic won’t change itAlthough most compatibilists have a more or less materialist view of nature, they find it impossible to shake the conviction that free will is real.
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Quantum Randomness Gives Nature Free Will
Whether or not quantum randomness explains how our brains work, it may help us create unbreakable encryption codesCryptography requires true, unhackable randomness, not just a string of numbers that looks random to us because we don’t know how they are generated. Because the quantum world truly is random, quantum random number generators would truly be random and are a potential solution.
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Has Neuroscience Disproved Thinking?
A philosopher argues that Nobel Prize-winning research shows that the theory of mind is just another illusion, useful for survival and successWe’ve all seen this sort of argument before in many other guises. It is commonly called “reductionism.” The reductionist claims that, because an object can be construed as made up of parts, the object is just the parts. It is like saying that because an article like this one is constructed from letters of the alphabet, the article is only rows of letters.
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Do Quasars Provide Evidence for Free Will?
Possibly. They certainly rule out experimenter interference.The universe would seem much neater if everything were determined. One result is that objections to randomness and to free will have become more sophisticated. But have they succeeded?
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The End of Human Drama
Part 3: Yuval Harari on the end of democracy, volition, religion, and art?In this third part of their reflection on Yuval Harari’s Atlantic piece anticipating technology’s march toward tyranny, Jay Richards and Robert J. Marks discuss the many assumptions therein. At the root of these speculations is an overestimation of the power of information processing systems and an underestimation of the human ability to be the true governors of their creations, not their docile “pets”. Harari rightly points to a better understanding of the mind as the way forward, but fails to appreciate its true nature, resulting in a dismal prognosis for art, religion, and democracy.
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Does brain stimulation research challenge free will?
If we can be forced to want something, is the will still free?The materialist interpretation of Reilly’s work is a misunderstanding of what the research actually shows. The stimulations did not evoke complex abstract intentions and acts—the patients didn’t reflexively decide to do integral calculus or donate to Amnesty International.
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Is Free Will a Dangerous Myth?
The denial of free will is a much more dangerous mythDenial of free will, in a culture of pervasive surveillance, is the straightest road to totalitarianism.
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Can free will even be an illusion?
Michael Egnor reiterates the freeing implications of quantum indeterminacyMany say so. For example, at Cosmos, senior artificial intelligence research scientist Alfredo Metere explains, … there is a causal relationship between the Big Bang and us. In other words, free will is not allowed, and all of our actions are just a mere consequence of that first event. Such a view is known as “determinism”, or “super-determinism” (if one finds it productive to reinvent the wheel). He asserts that today we know the universe to be chaotic. Because the cosmos is clearly chaotic, we can observe time-reversibility only locally, rather than globally. This in turn means that free will is an inevitable illusion for us humans, due to our subjective perception of the universe, rather than its innermost nature. Read More ›