Re:Is Free Will An Illusion?
by danielmims on Thursday September 03, 2009 @02:42PM
(#803168)
"If we feel it, then it's real."
The word "real" loses all meaning once we start saying that what we feel -- any old fantasy, delusion, speculation -- is real. We also indulge one of the central fantasies of human reflexive identity -- that we are supernatural -- when we say that what we feel is therefore, ipso facto, real.
As for Dennett, he is a serial question-begger and equivocator on this topic. He doesn't merely change the definition of "free will" in that book. He arbitrarily changes the definition to a trivial one; argues that that new kind of free will is possible; and then reinserts his conclusions into a debate in which the definition has not changed. Hence he has offered absolutely nothing to the issue that we're all talking about -- free will that would allow for culpability, or what I call non-trivial free will. I recommend Peter Van Inwagen and Galen Strawson instead, who offer much more rigorous good-faith arguments about free will.
The word "real" loses all meaning once we start saying that what we feel -- any old fantasy, delusion, speculation -- is real. We also indulge one of the central fantasies of human reflexive identity -- that we are supernatural -- when we say that what we feel is therefore, ipso facto, real.
As for Dennett, he is a serial question-begger and equivocator on this topic. He doesn't merely change the definition of "free will" in that book. He arbitrarily changes the definition to a trivial one; argues that that new kind of free will is possible; and then reinserts his conclusions into a debate in which the definition has not changed. Hence he has offered absolutely nothing to the issue that we're all talking about -- free will that would allow for culpability, or what I call non-trivial free will. I recommend Peter Van Inwagen and Galen Strawson instead, who offer much more rigorous good-faith arguments about free will.