How could we have alternative possibilities if the world was physically deterministic? I argue that physical determinism does not rule out indeterminism at the level of agency. The distinction between determinism and indeterminism is level-specific.
Realism about free will is warranted, because the picture of humans as choice-making agents is explanatorily indispensable in the human and social sciences.
This series of posts discusses some key ideas from Why Free Will is Real (Harvard University Press, 2019) by Christian List.
Does responsibility require the possibility to have done otherwise? Does knowledge require safety? Can causation be reduced to some form of counterfactual dependency? Could a material duplicate fail to be a psychological duplicate? To answer these and similar questions, one must gain knowledge about metaphysical possibilities and necessities. One must …
[The following is a guest post by Bob Lockie. — JS] He who says that all things happen of necessity can hardly find fault with one who denies that all happens by necessity; for on his own theory this very argument is voiced by necessity (Epicurus 1964: XL). Epicurus’s famous …
Another book that may be of interest to The Brains Blog community is my Philosophical Foundations of Neurolaw, which is coming out next month. A major aim of the book is to provide an alternative to Michael Pardo and Dennis Patterson’s treatment of issues in the philosophy of mind and …
I am delighted to announce the second in our series of symposia on articles from Neuroscience of Consciousness. We have two types of symposia. For primarily theoretical articles, such as in last week’s post, we will have several commentators from a variety of theoretical perspectives. For novel empirical research, we …
