Chapter 7: FREEDOM and DETERMINISM
FREEDOM? Maybe Not!!
You might be wrong!
Well the book and the crumpled piece of paper
hit the ground at just about the same time.
Do it again if you doubt that.
Well if you thought that the book was hitting
the ground first because it was heavier than the single piece of paper,
you have a couple of choices as to what to believe now:
1. Somehow the single piece of paper
gained a lot of weight and now falls almost as fast as the textbook.
2. The textbook somehow lost weight and is
now about as light as the single piece of paper
3. You were wrong when you thought that the
book falls faster because it is heavier.
Well my thinking is that if you thought that
heavier things fall faster than light things,
YOU WERE WRONG!
Oh my, now what to believe!
Galileo disproved that idea about heavy things falling faster than
lighter things because of the weight.
He disproved it over 400 years ago.
OK, what's my point here. That
the idea about heavy things falling faster than lighter things because of
the weight is still popular and it appears to a lot of people to be very
obvious. BUT, it is wrong.
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On how things fall and why they fall as they do. If you want to know why things fall on earth the way they do and understand what was demonstrated go to this website and see a few demonstrations along with explanations: · Laws of Motion with illustrations: · |
So if your belief about why
things fall was not correct or not true at all , then consider this: maybe, just maybe, the
belief most people have about human
freedom is wrong as well.
Not everything is as it
appears to be!
What about free will? Free will means that a person could have chosen other than they did choose. A person is either forced to choose something or free to choose it. If a person chooses freely by choosing what they want to choose then why do they want to choose what they do? If they want what they want and cannot want otherwise when they choose then is there a choice? Could it have been otherwise?
Let's look at ideas of human freedom, even radical ideas. Let's start with exploring what most people already believe and then let's consider the ideas of the critics of freedom, the determinists.
 | Hard Determinism (Spinoza, Jonathan Edwards, Schopenhauer, Freud, Clarence Darrow, B. F. Skinner) |
| Libertarianism (The Existentialists, and others, e.g., Reid, Kant, Campbell, Taylor) |
| Compatibilism (Soft Determinism) (Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill, G. E. Moore, A. J. Ayer, Frankfurt) |
Let's start by understanding the basic terms involved in this issue a little better:
Cause, Determinism, Hard Determinism, Soft Determinisim, Indeterminism, Compatibilism, Incompatibilism, , Freedom, free will, libertarianism.
READ: http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwTerminology.html
lecture by Dr. Peter Millican at the University of Oxford.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XT6DKn6ZJso 18:48
lecture by Dr. Peter Millican at the University of Oxford.
Part One Part Two 10:04 Part Three 9:49
SUGGESTED READINGS:
STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA of PHILOSOPHY
INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA of PHILOSOPHY
Many Worlds Of Logic on free will :
VIDEOS:
Sam Harris on Free Will 1:18:52
Do We Have Free Will or Is Everything Predetermined? 5:23
How to Dissolve the Problem of Free Will and Determinism 1:00:10 EVIDENCE of Determinism
The next section presents the position of libertarianism.
Proceed to the next section.
Introduction to Philosophy by Philip A. Pecorino is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.