Einstein famously said: God does not play dice. That of course does not mean luck is not involved in the way the universe is unfolding. We can see this luck as positive or negative. And our viewpoint is down to a matter of luck too. In his book, The Self Illusion, Bruce Hood describes a … Continue reading Luck
Category: free will
Sometimes I can't help thinking people write nonsense about complexity. They ascribe all sorts of supposedly emergent properties to these complex objects; whether these objects be animate or inanimate. Now we take these objects and think of them somehow independent of their environment. In the vernacular, this sort of thinking is useful. It allows for … Continue reading Complexity
The Big Picture Greg on his blog has added a defence for free will and it is based Sean Carroll's book The Big Picture. Now it's almost three years since I read the book, I thought it a really interesting book. Not that I took everything as gospel, and I did not agree with Carroll's … Continue reading Freedom to Choose
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZHp4JLWjNw When I heard of Hillary Clinton's comment on deplorables ... basket of deplorables. Right? They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic – Islamophobic – you name it. I thought it a foolish remark. These supposed deplorables have been hit hard by the crash of 2008 and are likely getting their heads above water only now. It … Continue reading Responsibility
This blog is a rebuttal of some arguments found in Marvin Edwards' essay on free will. For full disclosure, I am monistically inclined. And I cannot do otherwise but find remnants of dualism in Marvin Edwards' essay. While dualism can be useful to model this universe, it is fundamentally wrong, at least in my opinion. … Continue reading Deception
When discussing free will, people quite often refer to it as an emergent property. Emergence is described by Wikipedia as an entity having properties its parts do not have, due to interactions among the parts. This is fair enough. Sure, humans behave differently to molecules that make up the body; but so what? The assembled … Continue reading Emergence
A little while after James died, I got into discussions on what is sadly now the defunct AgnosticForums website. More than one of its threads touched upon free will. Initially, I thought the discussions trite, I believed I had free will, and even if I did not have free will, the whole thing was pretty … Continue reading Free Will
rom's corner 