Suggestions

[Justtristo]

May I ask you for your suggestions on books or other reading material to read about the whole free will vs determinism debate. It would be much appreciated by myself.

[theVOID]

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/Tayl...tt2010.pdf

And a series of blog posts covering their paper:

http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogsp...art-1.html

[Justtristo]

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/Tayl...tt2010.pdf

And a series of blog posts covering their paper:

http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogsp...art-1.html

Thank you very much.

[Angrboda]

Daniel Dennett's "Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting" is excellent.

I just happened across "The Oxford Handbook of Free Will" on Amazon and was impressed enough by the reviews to order a copy; I can't personally vouch for it and it will be a while before I get around to reading it, but if you'd like, when it arrives I'll give you an ignoramus' superficial appraisal.

Oh, and one thing to keep in mind is the distinction between compatibilists (who believe that free will and determinism are compatible -- that the two don't conflict) and non-compatibilists (who believe it's either / or -- that you can't have both); it's not always clear where a person falls on this issue solely from whether they advocate "free will" or "determinism". Perhaps Wikipedia or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online) might explain the issue better than my quick gloss.

[theVOID]

So much of the 'debate' is semantics, once you replace the labels with the concepts in conversation it turns out compatibilist and icompatibilist largely agree. Instead of saying "free will" talk about "The ability to deliberate prior to action" or "the ability to deliberate acausally" and the issues tend to get resolved pretty easily.

As much as I like Dennet I can't help but think that he wastes too much time fighting over definitions of "free will" and "determinism" rather than just getting to the point and presenting a theory of 'intentional action' and whether or not it is fully caused and/or fully part of nature.

I'm of the opinion that what people consider to be "free will" is simply "what a algorithm feels like from the inside" to quote Yudkowski, it's what it feels like for our brains to be deliberating, gathering our memories, beliefs, desires and emotions and assessing possible futures that we believe will happen by acting in particular ways, then seeing what one of those we believe at the time is most in line with our desires.

[Angrboda]

I uncovered another resource. There is a company by the name of "The Teaching Company" that produces educational materials, audio and video. One of their audio sets is titled "Great Philosophical Debates: Free Will and Determinism", and while I haven't watched this set, I've used other materials from The Teaching Company, and they are first rate. I know my library has nearly 700 items from them, perhaps you have access to them through your local, county or state library system.

[theVOID]

They're certainly misguided in calling it a "great debate", it's solved, there is no free will, time to move onto important stuff.