Brain yoga. Keeping up with Daniel Dennett's train of thought is a bit like herding cats. Just when you think you've got a handle on one postulate, he launches another, often in a totally opposite direction. Even with his exquisite analogies [see: frog in a beer mug] I couldn't always wrap my brain around his concepts on the first pass. There were many paragraphs, and at least one entire chapter, that I had to read twice. That's not to say this book isn't fantastic (it is!). Dennett tackles the

Determinism does not mean that our fate was determined before we were born. But much of what happens to us in a lifetime is certainly influenced by that. Determinism is not fatalism. For someone to say, "It does not matter what I do, whatever is meant to happen will happen," is quite absurd. And yet to say we have free will and that I can do whatever I want to do, is also absurd. For me understanding determinism, I think of this instant of my life on a straight line. The straight line is my past...

I am a big fan of Dan Dennett. Free will is a very difficult topic to explain and this is a very careful, thoughtful treatment of the subject. I started to write a detailed summary of the book, but decided cut to the basics: This was an early book of his on the topic of consciousness and free will, and his later books are much better. You can see in this book the seeds of ideas that he will later present in "Consciousness Explained." Most everything in this book is explained better in that one.

"There's no sense wringing our hands because we can't undo the past, and can't prevent an event that actually happens, and can't create ourselves ex nihilo, and can't choose both alternatives at a decision point, and can't be perfect."

Read it in college. Reading it again. He has a terrific beard.

Interesting read, but difficult: Dennett writes for the student of Philosophy. Eminently accessible to a person willing to commit, but, as all philosophical writing, commitment it requires. He explores Free Will in terms of Determinism, that is, the proposal that Free Will as we think of it, is an illusion and that human beings as rational agents are as subject to causation as dominoes. It's an extremely uncomfortable idea for many people, and Dennett doesn't spend a great deal of time acclimati...

This is an excellent little series of essays on free will which only occasionally gets bogged down in "philosophese". Dennett very deftly takes on the fears based on the sneaking suspicion that we don't actually have "free will" by first asserting that we should buck up and not scare ourselves too much with deterministic bugbears. Then he makes the case that determinism could very much feel similar to free will. Then he points out that when many people talk about having even "free-er" will than

This is Dennett's earlier attempt to clarify philosophical thinking on the topic of free will. His thinking has evolved since it was written, and the newest edition has some qualifiers in the preface. But it remains a masterpiece complete with many important thought experiments which help demystify this question that has plagued philosophers of the past for a long time.He takes a so-called "compatibilist" approach in this books, that free will and determinism are compatible ideas. He defines fre...

I had to go and google "compatibilism" after finishing it lmao. sometimes an argument is too nuanced that you don't see the forest for the trees. It was an interesting dissection of the different false metaphors, "bug-bears", that philosophers use to make the notion of free will more scary/dramatic, but I feel like it could have had a bit more synthesis/construction rather than deconstruction. in general his view can be summarized by saying that free will is an emergent phenomenological aspect o...

What does it mean to have free will? Is free will incompatible with determinism? With indeterminism? What does it mean to control oneself? What does it mean to make a choice? Why do we want free will at all and what do we want when we want it?Dennett examines these perennial philosophical problems and disposes of many of the "bugbears" which plague the often fear-riddled investigations into these topics. Dennett also develops answers, or at least the start of some answers, that embrace the possi...

A nice presentation of the contemporary compatibilist position on free will (ie even though determinism may be how our physical world works, that's no reason to think we don't have free will)

On the pitfalls of premature verdicts of stupidity in the wasp, see Dawkins 1982, pp. 48-50.True, much of these causes occur 'inside' us--is it better to be a hand puppet than a marionette?Note that this "can" is Austin's frog at the bottom of the beer mug.Now it is open for some genius of pessimism to discover for us some sort of contra-Darwinian patterns of motiveless malignancy which would permit us to reconceptualize our view of nature as a sort of Manichaean struggle between Mother Nature a...

Dennett spends half his time making the case for determinism, and the other half laying out the argument for why it's really not that scary. He uses very clear language to keep the book accessible even to people without backgrounds in philosophy, which is good. Philosophers are weird, y'all.

"The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the overexamined life is nothing to write home about either." pg. 87

An easy read for those interested in the topic. Basically, Dennett argues that humans are information-processing creatures with the ability to take in cues from the environment, reflect, learn, deliberate, and maintain control over our operations - and not animals subjected to a life of repeating mindless, pre-determined behaviour. It is, therefore, rational for us to believe in free will - or at least the illusion of free will.“What we want when we want free will is the power to decide our cour...

I take the debate about free will very seriously. It's one of the few areas where I think a common-sense understanding (that we all have it) is wrong, and a philosophical dissection of the concept will do a lot of good. Many books on the subject, though, are unbearably dry and bog down in technical discussions that eventually bore even tech-y philosophers like myself. This one doesn't. It reaches a conclusion that I am in total agreement with, and it does so without "cheating" by avoiding any of...

This book should be called Varieties of Determinism Worth Wanting, or Varieties of Determinism Worth Having the Illusion that We Want, But are Incapable of Because Everything is Pre-ordained, Anyway.Whatever the title, this book doesn't describe any credable model of freedom.

It was really hard to rate this book. I have no use for most philosophy. I appreciate the premise but cannot abide so many self-important godless people hypothesizing themselves into oblivion. If that isn't enough, the rest of us are invited along with them. The book is really well written (other than some incorrectly conjugated verbs, but I'll blame the editor), and it is comprehensive in that it considers - or at least mentions - opposing points of view. The arguments are very thorough, if equ...