Having stated that he wouldn’t engage in a dialogue (which he would presumably be doing if he responded), Coyne conceded shortly afterward that “I may be forced by the laws of physics in making a few remarks.” And he makes more than a few. But he presses on: “one more before I grow ill.” Physics is a harsh master.
Tag: Free Will
At Mind Matters News: Mike Egnor to Jerry Coyne: If evil exists, so must good — and real choices!
Egnor to Coyne: … when you find that your metaphysics was shared by the defense counsel at the Nazi war crime trials, you ought to reconsider your metaphysics. And I think Coyne should reconsider.
At Mind Matters News: Why free will is philosophically and scientifically sound
Takehome: Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor points out that, though free will may be unpopular with atheist thinkers like biologist Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, science doesn’t refute it.
At Mind Matters News: John Horgan at Scientific American: Does quantum mechanics kill free will?
Horgan sides, somewhat tentatively, with free will. He notes that humans are more than just heaps of particles. Higher levels of complexity enable genuinely new qualities. What humans can do is not merely a more complex version of what amoebas can do — in turn, a more complex version of what electrons can do. Greater complexity can involve genuinely new qualities. A philosopher would say that he is not a reductionist.
At Mind Matters News: Michael Egnor’s challenge to two atheists who deny free will
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor is challenging evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci to a debate. He thinks there is too much of this no-free-will nonsense in the science blogosphere. Egnor: “Free will has no physical cause? At least four categories of events in nature have no physical cause. Free will denial isn’t science, just atheism in a lab coat.”
At Mind Matters News: Does superdeterminism resolve dilemmas around free will?
Michael Egnor: If we lack free will, we have no justification whatsoever to even believe that we lack free will. In a timeless block however, the future exists simultaneously with the past and present — but that does not mean that the future determines the past and present.
At Mind Matters News: Leading astronomer gets it all wrong about free will and destiny
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.”
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.