'Trick Slattery's Blog, page 7

Free Will Quiz (10 Yes/No Questions)

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Thought I'd try something new today with a quick little quiz about "free will" (defined here) and causality/acausality. Don't worry, it's nothing difficult, just answer honestly (or as close as you can with a yes or no). This is just an experiment to test familiarity with and understanding of the topic.

Note: For eachof these questions, assume the same universe and same initial conditions of the universe at "big bang" for all parts of the question.

Free Will Q...

10 Benefits of Not Believing in Free Will

In this articleI want to focus, in the general sense, on 10of the many benefits of not believing in free will as defined here, if one understands the reasons behind why it doesn’t exist and what such implies. You’ll notice that many of the below benefits interconnect witheach other.

So here we go…

10 Benefits of NOTBelieving in Free Will * * * * * * * * * * 1) GoodCritical Thinking Skills Are More Likely

The belief in free will is logically incoherent, meaning logically impossible for the two...

Baking Pies from Ultimate Scratch – A Poor Free Will Analogy

An article in Psychology Today titled “Free Will à la Mode?Do you have free will? Can you bake a pie “from scratch”?”,philosopher Jim Stone used a blurb from Cosmos by Carl Sagan that says:

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

…in order to address two popular philosopher’s semanticpositions onthe topic of free will: Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett.

To get the full context, please click here and read the article before moving on. Don’t worry, it’s...

Neuroscientific Supporting Evidence Against Free Will

Some philosophers such as Alfred Mele think that people are jumping the gun on suggesting that the neuroscientific evidence against free will is sufficient for the conclusion that free will doesn’t exist. What they don’t seem to understand is that the neuroscientific evidence is just empirical supporting evidence that free willdoesn’t exist. It is hardly the whole story. The largerstory around free will stems not to empirical evidence against it, but rather it’s logical incoherence.

Imagine,...

Determinisme vs. Fatalisme InfoGraphic (DUTCH)

Emile atkritischdenken.infoasked me a while back to create a Dutch version of my Determinism vs. Fatalism infographic so she could use for her site focused onDutch speaking skeptics, but it seems she never ended up using it. I don’t want a translated version to go to waste so I’m placing it here on my website. Click here for the original English version:Determinism vs. Fatalism – InfoGraphic (a comparison)

Dutch Translation:

DETERMINISME vs. FATALISME
DETERMINISME

Niet verenigbaar met “vri...

Non-caused Events and Free Will – Infographic

Some people point to indeterminism or non-caused (acausal) events as their free will savior. Point ‘em to this infographic to help explain why such events do not allow for free will:

PLEASE SHARE THIS INFOGRAPHIC WITH OTHERS!

Note that people often confuse probabalism with acausality, or unpredictability with indeterminism. These are not the same thing. Here are a few related posts that could help in these areas, or I have chapters in my book clarifying these sorts of things:

The Word “Pos...

Uncomplicating Necessary and Sufficient Causality (for the Free Will Debate)

There are so many words used to label certain philosophical concepts that I truly hate with a passion! I don’t hate the actual concepts themself, just what was, somewhere down the philosophical line, used to label such concepts. Often the labels I hate are the ones that use words that have ambiguous meanings elsewhere. This offers so much confusion to so many people.

When getting into the topic of free will, one must deal with the concept of causality. Within that one concept, there are manyl...

Dennettrhea – A “Free Will” Compatibilist Infection in 5 minutes

A contagious brain diseasehas been infecting variouspeople. The diseasespreads quickly, often within as little as a5 minute period of being exposed to it, and sometimes it draws one into long exposures. Though the diseasehas had manyincarnations,we found aprimary host of avery strong version and have rightly named the diseaseDennettrhea after this host. The main symptom of the diseaseis wrongheaded compatibilistic thinking about the topic of free will thatoverrides any concern over the type...

Philosophical Zombies? Inconceivable!

A philosophical zombie (also called ap-zombie) is, in philosophy, a thought experiment that plays into our ideas about consciousness. Basically, a p-zombie is a person who looks and acts like any other person, but who doesn’t have consciousness. There are two different versions of a p-zombie:

The first version is only afunctional p-zombie. This is a zombie that looks and acts identically to any human, but that internally is not identical (the physical construct is different). You can think o...

Unpredictable Future ≠ Freely Willed Future

A common misconception surrounding the free will debate is the idea that if we can’t predict the future, that free will somehow resides or has the possibility of residing in the fact that we can’t know such. That somehow our lack of being able to know all of the variables is the savior of free will.

This misconception is often grounded by the ways words such as “determinism” are not used for the free will debate. People tend to look at such words and assume what is being suggested by the wor...