Freedom Evolves
Daniel C. Dennett
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: 0142003840
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? Renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett emphatically answers “yes!” Using an array of provocative formulations, Dennett sets out to show how we alone among the animals have evolved minds that give us free will and morality. Weaving a richly detailed narrative, Dennett explains in a series of strikingly original
arguments—drawing upon evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, and philosophy—that far from being an enemy of traditional explorations of freedom, morality, and meaning, the evolutionary perspective can be an indispensable ally. In Freedom Evolves, Dennett seeks to place ethics on the foundation it deserves: a realistic, naturalistic, potentially unified vision of our place in nature.
Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory
Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us
Medicinal Natural Products: A Biosynthetic Approach
Once Before Time: A Whole Story of the Universe
Quirk: Brain Science Makes Sense of Your Peculiar Personality
Popper once put it, it permits some of your hypotheses to die in your stead. Such Popperian creatures, as I have called them, get to test some of their hunches in informed simulations, rather than risking them in the real world, but they needn’t understand the rationale of this improvement in order to reap the benefits. The appreciation of the likely effects of particular actions is built into any such assessment, but the appreciation of the effects of the contemplation itself is a still higher,
freedom to pursue his interests as best he can. Whether or not such a ceremony of justification is actually performed, we can imagine the scenario. Suppose you are the culprit. The state says to you, in effect: “You erred. Tough luck, but for the good of the state you are hereby asked to undergo punishment.” You hear the charges, the evidence, the verdict. Let’s suppose that you are guilty as charged. (The checks and balances of the system will keep pressure on the state to make its cases well,
bioprophets, grandiose bird freedom of birdsong birth control bison, knowledge of Blackmore, Susan blame as the price we pay for credit blind watchmaker or sighted selfmaker blindsiding blink reflex bluff-detection Boeing bogeyman Boone, James L. bootstrapping Borges, Jorge Luis Boston Symphony Orchestra boundary(ies), of the faculty of practical reason in nature. See also carving at the joints bowerbird Boyd, Robert Boyer, Pascal brain growth of as meme–nest
all manner of surprising or fatal directions! As Hume noted, we expect the physics that has held so far in our world to hold in the future, but we cannot prove by pure logic that it will oblige us. We’ve had conspicuous success discovering regularities that have held in the past in our universe, and we’ve even learned how to make real-time predictions, about seasons and tides and falling objects and what you’ll find if you dig here, or dissect there, or heat this or mix that with water, and so
Boston Symphony Orchestra has been in existence for more than a century, its personnel continuously being replaced, its finances waxing and waning, its repertory growing and shifting as old chestnuts are retired and new pieces explored. In many ways this fine old institution is like a living organism, with a distinct personality, a particular history of growth, of sickness and health, learning and forgetting, traveling around the globe and returning to its home, replacing tired old “cells” with