Five Minutes On Free Will with Daniel Dennett Part One
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- Опубликовано: 31 мар 2015
- New College of the Humanities visiting professor Daniel Dennett talks on the free will debate with NCH philosophy undergraduate student Millie Chip. Daniel is a regular visiting professor at NCH London teaching Philosophy. For more information about what we have to offer, click here: www.nchlondon.ac.uk/
Daniel is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He has held visiting positions at Harvard University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Oxford, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and the London School of Economics.
Other visiting professors at NCH include Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson and Sir Partha Dasgupta. For more videos please see our channel - / @northeasternldn
For me the Deterministic information we receive, from the genetics we are given and the life experiences we experience, are meshed together in the mixer that is 'Me' using our consciousness to make the most desirable decision for Me. That is my will, not entirely free but once it has passed through me it is wholy unique, and represents me and the choice I decided was best.
Determinism gives rise to freedoms worth wanting because we are able to weigh between options and respond appropriately I think that's what Dennett is saying which is true biologically speaking we do have the power to choose so in that sense determinism is (kind) of compatible with free will because we always make choices and think ahead about our future behaviour
Adamd 1457 yeah but you never act beyond your real determined posibilities.
The work that philosophers should do, is develop the philosophy of the autonomous science biology. Biology has different basic principles than the physicalist sciences physics, chemistry, mechanics. I am making videos on that topic lately on important books by biologists like "What Makes Biology Unique" by Ernst Mayr
Free will is not a thing! There is no such "thing" that we have or lack. We should be talking about the human faculty of thinking, reasoning and making choices.
I think what he is saying is that good health allows us the potential to make good or benefitial decisions within the deterministic framework and that that is what we should be starting from in our philosophical considerations. I don't know if I'm right about this. I haven't studied the man or his work.
I like when he says that determinism and in-determinism have nothing to do with this thing called 'Free will' - actually I dont even no why we need a word like 'Free will' when choice would suffice. Having the word 'Free' in there is the problem.....
One of the issues is people do believe we have free will by the "simple minded definition"
Dan Dennett should be more concerned with that issue. When he says "we have free will" people just assume that means the free will they believe in. Which it does not.
What variations of free will do we have that Daniel says is "worth having?"
A variety which enables you to act appropriately. If you can see an appropriate action as a Morally Competent Agent you want to act appropriately. If we can't call such behavior a variety of freewill worth having then what the hell could be? - Nothing??? If you answer IS nothing then nothing will change your mind.
Responsibility is the key word which destroys free will. Not one human is responsible for anything. How can we be? We're we given a manual how to do right or wrong? We are on this earth to experience good and evil. Nothing else.
But if we want others to be morally competent we will eventually be met with questions of what is good and how good can be redefined. I personally feel that I have a good grasp on what a moral action is, typically, if you don't antagonize someone for no reason, or just a really 'bad' reason, you are moral.
But I guess morals can be defined by using a goal.
We can easily define our morals by defining what state we want to be in, in the future.
Actions which we can reasonably assume to lead us away from our preferred future can be determined as immoral, or 'destructive'.
Actions which move us towards our goals are the opposite, are good. I think this simple system is really clear and helps communicate to the world what we want.
I think one issue is that although we have an end goal, we may or may not be able to achieve that goal. But in the pursuit of a good world, we will gamble on being able to do so.
Using these rules, we now enter a world where we have a goal which can contradict with other people's goals. And it will, inevitably, come into conflict. Conflict resolution follows a few different paths but, I feel optimistic because society's goal tends to be on the right track, and the evidence for that is; we arrest people for killing, and other crimes. If the world was much more grim, we would have killers ruling above all.
That isn't true.
That isn't in anyone's interest but the killer's either.
So the power discrepancy between the killers and those who would rather be alive is so great that it is improbable that our goal of a good future will ever be overcome by these kinds of people. It is still an arduous task to give a full definition to what I think is 'good' though, because it is not really a succinct definition at all.
We can say for example, that in a just world, everyone gets to enjoy their life, with minimal pains, and optimal amounts of things they want which also do not impede other people. I think given this definition the absolute height of human achievement is probably simulations of worlds wherein the person themselves are Gods.
It requires a post-scarcity environment and futuristic tech to achieve, though.
Well, doesn't this mean that I would espouse that the pursuit of more technological advancements is the 'ultimate good' for humanity? Yes.
Under the assumption that it doesn't have obvious costs, though. You have to do it without impeding others.
Well, prove that fish doesn't have free will
Salmon always comes back to the stream where they are born and lay their eggs there. If salmon does have free will( which is a fish) they can just choose to lay their eggs on the side. As like humans, we really don't have free will in a sense, We are just mindlessly doing and choosing things based on experience,familiarity,indoctrination and chemical influence in our brain.
@@maddog9180 I just wonder who did that like thumb up ...
A moralistic incompetent person would damage his own posibilities of being more...by going to jail if a crime is committed but then again this is relative itself.
Free will exists. Otherwise everything is predetermined, which scientifically is impossible as of yet because physics' probabilistic nature.
No conciousness means free will at least exists in some small sense
The indeterministic nature of quantum mechanics does not provide us free will. Imagine that all of ur decision are based on a toss of a coin.
What a snob. He can't accept that his ideas amount to nothing. Complexity does not grant freedom from physics. We are all products of various influences.
He doesn't think anything grants you freedom from physics and he doesn't think you should want freedom from it. That's just not what he's talking about.
Jan Scott It is terrifying that he thinks you can have a "morally competent agent" in a deterministic world. It is an abhorrent philosophy that leads to the death of empathy and compassion for the weak.
+Jessica Cottrell You can have a "morally competent agent" in a world other "morally competent agents" set up the social constructs that so-called makes up this morality. That's like taking away free-will if you ask me. There are so many laws you can't so much as defecate without worrying you're not a "morally competent agent" for not flushing the toilet.
+Jan Scott You don't understand his point. He is not arguing that we are free from physics, biology, our upbringing, society (in that order of ascending analysis). He is asking if there are notions of "free will" which don't depend on the separation of choice from circumstance, and he is demanding that public figures who go on the record about these debates inform themselves. This doesn't seem to be particularly snobbish. Are there plausible notions of "free will" which preserve moral responsibility, or intrinsic praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, or for legal institutions to make sense? This is a language game and he admits it is a language game. His question is "is this a language game worth playing?" He says yes. I say no, but I can see why someone might say yes, and I can give examples of language games I do think are worth playing.
Jan Scott, I totally agree. You don't get to choose "kinds" of free will. Dennett is a magician with words and can fool the unaware. He wrote "In a deterministic world there are avoiders." He might as well have said "In a deterministic world not all events are deterministic" which is a contradiction in terms.