(I think we’ve corrupted KF’s thread long enough.) The entire problem of mind/matter dualism is rooted in a single error of thought: the reification of an abstract descriptive model of experience into an causal agency independent of the mind that conceives it and the mental experience it is extrapolated from. It is similar to the […]
Tag: Free Will
Rob Sheldon offers a physics perspective on free will
Sheldon: My objection, which I will develop in two streams, is that both reductionism and emergence are just wrong, as is the philosophical denial of free will based on them.
Philosopher: The laws of physics don’t rule out free will
George Musser, a science writer reviewing a new book on the subject, thinks it will force free will skeptics to become more sophisticated in their arguments
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor: Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is really confused about free will
It really is quite funny. And physicists should stick to physics.
Transhumanists want to fix our morality for us as well
That would appear to make transhumanism an enemy of free will and of freedom generally. But give them credit for being honest about it.
Free will: One woman’s left hand seemed to have a mind of its own. Did it?
Does “alien hand syndrome mean that we don’t really have free will? Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor discusses
Neurosurgeon asks, Do we have free will or not?
Michael Egnor: Determinism at the quantum level is not true. Nature is not deterministic.
Gaming culture’s assumption about artificial and human intelligence
A gamer looks at Detroit: Becoming Human where, of course, you can choose what happens.
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor has become Darwinian Jerry Coyne’s “archenemy”
Coyne has good taste in archenemies. It shouldn’t go unrewarded.
Whether or not man has free will, quantum mechanics means that nature does
Computer engineering prof Robert J. Marks, first author of Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, explains, When I was boy, my father explained free will and predestination to me: I dig a fence post hole. · Did I create the hole because of my own free will? · Or was the hole already there and I simply […]
How to falsify reductionism with complex specified information
A philosopher claims that neuroscience has proven thoughts do not exist. Eric Holloway looks at the neuroscience and examines the claim: There is a problem with this sort of reasoning. One could make the same argument about computer code, as follows: There is no code. It’s all just assembly language. Or, there is no assembly, it’s all […]
Do quasars provide evidence for free will?
Possibly. They certainly rule out experimenter interference: Quantum particles appear to behave randomly when measured. But what if there is no free will? In that case, the physicists were fated, so to speak, to set up the experiment to achieve a certain set of results which might appear to them to be random. But that […]
Michael Egnor: Does brain stimulation research challenge free will?
If we can be forced to *want* something, is the will still free? If an electrode is applied to a specific brain region during “awake” neurosurgery, the patient may experience a strong desire to perform a related action and may even be mistaken about whether he has done so. For example, the study Movement intention […]
Michael Egnor: Is free will a dangerous myth?
The belief that there is no free will is a much more dangerous myth, he writes, at Mind Matters Today: There are four reasons to affirm the reality of free will against denial by materialist determinists. Two reasons are logical, and two are scientific. … 4. While scientific experiments do not entirely settle the matter, […]
Quantum mechanics: Pushing the “free-will loophole” back to 7.8 billion years ago
Philip Cunningham writes to tell us of an interesting experiment by quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger and colleagues that pushed the “free-will loophole” back to 7.8 billion years ago, using quasars to determine measurement settings: Abstract: In this Letter, we present a cosmic Bell experiment with polarization-entangled photons, in which measurement settings were determined based on real-time […]