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Read Book Freedom Evolves Ebook FREEDOM EVOLVES PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Daniel C. Dennett | 368 pages | 26 Feb 2004 | Penguin Books Ltd | 9780140283891 | English | London, United Kingdom Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett Product Details. Inspired by Your Browsing History. Labyrinths of Reason. Sleight of Mind. AI Ethics. Mark Coeckelbergh. Simply Philosophy. The Turning Point. Fritjof Capra. The Duck That Won the Lottery. Julian Baggini. Consciousness, Function, and Representation, Volume 1. A Logical Journey. Consciousness Revisited. Michael Tye. Sweet Anticipation. David Huron. Margaret Cuonzo. The Outer Limits of Reason. Noson S. Cognitive Pluralism. Steven Horst. What Is the Argument? Maralee Harrell. The Matrix and Philosophy. The Story of Philosophy. Dennett concludes by contemplating the possibility that people might be able to opt in or out of moral responsibility: surely, he suggests, given the benefits, they would choose to opt in, especially given that opting out includes such things as being imprisoned or institutionalized. Daniel Dennett also argues that no clear conclusion about volition can be derived from Benjamin Libet 's experiments supposedly demonstrating the non-existence of conscious volition. According to Dennett, ambiguities in the timings of the different events are involved. Libet tells when the readiness potential occurs objectively, using electrodes, but relies on the subject reporting the position of the hand of a clock to determine when the conscious decision was made. As Dennett points out, this is only a report of where it seems to the subject that various things come together, not of the objective time at which they actually occur. Suppose Libet knows that your readiness potential peaked at millisecond 6, of the experimental trial, and the clock dot was straight down which is what you reported you saw at millisecond 7, How many milliseconds should he have to add to this number to get the time you were conscious of it? The light gets from your clock face to your eyeball almost instantaneously, but the path of the signals from retina through lateral geniculate nucleus to striate cortex takes 5 to 10 milliseconds—a paltry fraction of the milliseconds offset, but how much longer does it take them to get to you. Or are you located in the striate cortex? The visual signals have to be processed before they arrive at wherever they need to arrive for you to make a conscious decision of simultaneity. Libet's method presupposes, in short, that we can locate the intersection of two trajectories:. Dennett spends a chapter criticising Robert Kane 's theory of libertarian free will. Kane believes freedom is based on certain rare and exceptional events, which he calls self-forming actions or SFA's. Dennett notes that there is no guarantee such an event will occur in an individual's life. If it does not, the individual does not in fact have free will at all, according to Kane. Beyond Good And Evil. The Shepherd's Life. Guns, Germs and Steel. Great Ideas. Julian Baggini , Antonia Macaro. The Black Swan. Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The Book of Joy. The Sunday Times Bestseller. Dalai Lama , Desmond Tutu. The Soul Of The Marionette. The Righteous Mind. The Universe Within. Beyond Human Nature. Is God Happy? Freedom Evolves by Dennett Daniel - Penguin Books Australia Revision history. Download options PhilArchive copy. This entry has no external links. Add one. Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server Configure custom proxy use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy. Configure custom resolver. Nathan Cofnas - - Foundations of Science 21 3 Nonreductive Physicalism and the Limits of the Exclusion Principle. Orly Shenker - - Iyyun Oxford University Press UK. Skepticism About Moral Responsibility. Gregg D. Caruso - - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Compatibilism Evolves? Manuel Vargas - - Metaphilosophy 36 4 Dennett on Freedom. Alfred Mele - - Metaphilosophy 36 4 John Martin Fischer - unknown. Freedom Evolves is a popular science and philosophy book by Daniel C. Dennett describes the book as an installment of a lifelong philosophical project, earlier parts of which were The Intentional Stance , Consciousness Explained and Elbow Room. It attempts to give an account of free will and moral responsibility which is complementary to Dennett's other views on consciousness and personhood. As in Consciousness Explained , Dennett advertises the controversial nature of his views extensively in advance. He expects hostility from those who fear that a skeptical analysis of freedom will undermine people's belief in the reality of moral considerations; he likens himself to an interfering crow who insists on telling Dumbo he doesn't really need the feather he believes is allowing him to fly. Dennett's stance on free will is compatibilism with an evolutionary twist — the view that, although in the strict physical sense our actions might be pre-determined, we can still be free in all the ways that matter, because of the abilities we evolved. Free will, seen this way, is about freedom to make decisions without duress and so is a version of Kantian positive practical free will, i. To clarify this distinction, he uses the term 'evitability' the opposite of 'inevitability' , defining it as the ability of an agent to anticipate likely consequences and act to avoid undesirable ones. Evitability is entirely compatible with, and actually requires, human action being deterministic. Dennett moves on to altruism , denying that it requires acting to the benefit of others without gaining any benefit yourself. He argues that it should be understood in terms of helping yourself by helping others, expanding the self to be more inclusive as opposed to being selfless. To show this blend, he calls such actions 'benselfish', and finds the roots of our capacity for this in the evolutionary pressures that produced kin selection. In his treatment of both free will and altruism, he starts by showing why we should not accept the traditional definitions of either term. Dennett also suggests that adherence to high ethical standards might pay off for the individual, because if others know your behaviour is restricted in these ways, the scope for certain beneficial mutual arrangements is enhanced. This is related to game theoretical considerations: in the famous Prisoner's Dilemma , 'moral' agents who cooperate will be more successful than 'non-moral' agents who do not cooperate. Determinism implies that given a particular configuration of particles in the universe including the states of the neurons in our brains there is only one possible state that the system can advance at the next tick of the cosmic clock. How can the absolute inevitability of all things be reconciled with the sense of free will that we all experience? It's a tricky question, and one that Dennett does not shy away from confronting in this book. It's a question that makes some people very nervous - if we don't have free will then what is the point of anything? Dennett likens this to Dumbo the elephant who believes that he can only fly when holding his magic feather until a pesky crow points out that the feather is not needed - stop that crow! Needless to say, Dennett sees himself in the role of the crow questioning the magic feathers that we insist on clinging onto. He squares the circle by first explaining exactly what determinism is and what it implies, beginning with simple mathematical models such as Conway's Life game and chess playing computers, and then shown how rational agents can develop 'evitability' within such systems. He then argues that natural selection of both our brains and the cultural memes that govern our lives have given rise to consciousness and free will, as well as concepts such as morality and altruism that initially seem at odds with 'red in tooth and claw' style Darwinism. If the book has any faults, it is that Dennett spends quite a lot of the time trying to anticipate the arguments that will be raised in objection to his thesis, thus making some of the early chapters somewhat convoluted in their presentation as he defines what determinism and free will are not before moving on to give his own ideas. Absolutely fascinating, and full of optimism for our ability to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps of our own consciousness. Jun 03, Dylan rated it really liked it Recommends it for: Jonathan. I was interested in this book because of the hypocritical inconsistency exhibited by many secular types who, reasonably enough, deny the existence of "God" but bristle at the prospect that we all live in a completely determined universe. They and I include myself here reflexively feel that while science rightly treats the entirety of the natural world as subject to the same universal deterministic laws, they must preserve an idea of human free will as an exception to the laws of physics, in I was interested in this book because of the hypocritical inconsistency exhibited by many secular types who, reasonably enough, deny the existence of "God" but bristle at the prospect that we all live in a completely determined universe. They and I include myself here reflexively feel that while science rightly treats the entirety of the natural world as subject to the same universal deterministic laws, they must preserve an idea of human free will as an exception to the laws of physics, in exactly the same way that theists allow for intervention by "God". As Dennett puts it, this indeterminism insists that human beings are little godlets, or miracle workers, able to defy the otherwise universal laws of physics. Dennett understands that we want to believe that we are always "able to choose otherwise" in a given situation because, if we're not, there seems to be no basis for moral responsibility: praise and blame only make sense in relation to free choices, and why care about anything if we can never deserve praise or blame for whatever good or bad we do? His thesis, in short, is that it is unnecessary to invoke miraculous powers to solve this apparent problem.
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