In response to Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb denying free will and all that, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor points out, “Logic and reason aren’t laws of physics and therefore they transcend physical properties.”
Tag: Free Will
Cornelius Hunter responds to Sabine Hossenfelder’s claim that there is no free will
Hunter: This is no scientific hypothesis and this video shows why this claim is false.
At Mind Matters News: Trying to disprove free will shows that materialism doesn’t work
To deny free will, biologist Jerry Coyne tries, once again, to defeat the implications of quantum mechanics, neuroscience, and logic.
A science writer offers some interesting thoughts on free will
It’s interesting that a science writer sees through the most fundamental materialist rot. Unfortunately, it sounds as though he hopes to replace it with a different one.
Michael Egnor: Materialists misrepresent Libet’s research on free will
Egnor is responding to a reader’s question about whether neuroscience has disproven free will.
New Scientist asks if we have free will
Denying free will means that totalitarianism is a viable government idea.
Is Jerry Coyne undercutting his own argument against free will?
Michael Egnor: “Except for action of any quantum events”? I challenge Coyne: What in nature isn’t the action of quantum events? Certainly, every event in the brain is quantum in nature—every brain state, every action potential, every secretion of a neurotransmitter, every bit of protein synthesis or ion flow—is the consequence of quantum events.
Why, as a neurosurgeon, Michael Egnor believes in free will
Egnor: “An intellectual seizure would be a seizure that caused abstract thought, such as logic, or reasoning, or mathematics. People never have, for example, mathematics seizures—seizures in which they involuntarily do calculus or arithmetic. This observation, which is as true today as it was in Penfield’s time nearly a century ago, begs for explanation.” He offers an argument for the immaterial powers of the mind.
Michael Egnor addresses an objection to free will raised here at Uncommon Descent
Egnor: [fMRI isn’t decisive.] But fMRI is worthless in the neuroscience of free will. To understand why, note that fMRI has very poor temporal resolution. fMRI measures changes in blood flow in the brain in response to activity of neurons, and these changes lag neuronal activity by at least several seconds.
Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is being labelled “anti-science”
Also, let this sink in: Despite believing in determinism, Hossenfelder believes we should “decide” against a new particle collider… We can decide? On that account, to other naturalists, she is “anti-science.” Naturalism is weird like that. Eats its own.
Free will makes more sense of our world than determinism—and science certainly allows for it
Scientists weigh in on both sides but accepting free will allows us to avoid some serious problems around logic and personal freedom.
Mike Egnor on why Coyne and Hossenfelder are wrong to deny free will
Egnor: Now let’s get to the neuroscience. Neuroscience has a lot to contribute to the debate over free will and all of it supports the reality of free will. There isn’t a shred of neuroscientific evidence that contradicts the reality of free will.
Outlining A Functional Mental Reality Theory
By accepting the fundamental, unequivocal logical fact that our experiential existence is necessarily, entirely mental in nature, and accepting the unambiguous scientific evidence that supports this view, we can move on to the task of developing a functioning and useful theory of mental reality. I will attempt to roughly outline such a theory here, with Read More…
Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins on free will
They think it’s an illusion, of course. Dawkins recommends Richard Dennett on the subject but Dennett also thinks that consciousness is an illusion. Michael Egnor would say, if your proposition is that consciousness is an illusion, then you don’t have a proposition.