For those interested in the free will debate, Eric Rundquist at Book Battles compares "the two most recent, comprehensive and, crucially, the most scientific arguments on each side of this debate: Robert Sapolsky’s Determined: Life without Free Will and Kevin Mitchell’s Free Agents: How Evolution Gave us Free Will." Right away he is trying to get us to the central point:
When you make a choice, are you in control of that choice, as an independent causal agent in the universe (even if just a little bit), or are your decisions always fully determined by other things outside of your control? Or, to put it another way: Do your conscious decisions interfere in the unfolding causal chain of the universe, or are they just a part of that chain, like everything else that happens around you in the material world?
2 comments:
Science has to do with things you can measure. I'm not sure how to put a tape measure on free will.
Kant takes no position on the question, but he does point out that you can't act except on the presumption of free will. He does give a kind of test, though, which is to try and do what you ought to do even though you don't want to do it. If you can forgo the pleasure because you will instead to do your duty, it seems as if the forces that would be pushing you -- say towards a donut or another drink -- can be resisted by will. If that's true, it suggests freedom (or at least that it's possible, sometimes, for some people).
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