The uselessness of philosophy

We’re not going to solve this one today. You can check the journal archives or the publishers’ catalogues, people have been arguing about this for millennia and there’s no sign that the debate is going to let up.

Even though I think I’ve reached a point where I know what I think, I still get caught by the emotional power of the dilemma. I’m happy that we live in a deterministic universe, but I still wake up some days with the existential heebee-jeebies. “It can’t be true”, I feel, “that my thinking being is just a part of the unthinking causal machinery of the universe”. Surely what I feel is most intimately as my true self isn’t just the result of blind physics and chemistry?

But yet I go on believing it.

Because there is no agreement on the topic, I can’t tell you what philosophers, psychologists and neuroscients believe about freewill. I can just tell you what this psychologist believes.

I’ve got three important points I want to make. I want to explain why I came to be so convinced that determinism is compatible with free choice, in any worthwhile sense of that phrase. I want to point show how studies of the neuroscience of free will aren’t as constraining as people seem to believe. And I want to push back against the claim we are driven by irrational forces. Ideas and reasons can have a real and legitimate causal force in a deterministic universe.

Let’s go!

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More philosophy! MORE; direct link determinism

Why determinism is compatible with freewill NEXT; direct link sphexishness

Neuroscience and experiments on choice CHOOSE; direct link libet1

Having reasons for acting matters REASONS; direct link reasons