So I have a question. I will detail the following research. For ‘free will’ to be true, it has to explain the following. Or more accurately, the following has to be fully explicable within the free will hypothesis. How does it do that?
Tag psychology
Morality is not just something that people learn, argues Yale psychologist Paul Bloom: It is something we are all born with. At birth, babies are endowed with compassion, with empathy, with the beginnings of a sense of fairness. It is from these beginnings, he argues in his new book Just Babies, that adults develop their sense of right and wrong, their desire to do good — and, at times, their capacity to do terrible things. Bloom answered questions recently from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.
Post hoc rationalisation is what most of us end up doing when we reason. We have a gut instinct, a potentially irrational or a-rational decision based on the underlying cognitive faculties connected to our whole personhood, physical reactions and gut instincts.
I am presently reading an absolutely superb book by David Eagleman called Incognito:
The book is a popular foray into psychology and neuroscience and synthesises a host of different studies into things brain. I wanted to just bring up a few fascinating studies which cast doubt upon the idea that we have fully fledged, or even remotely authored, conscious free will. It even talks about chicken sexers, which is nice. Rather than produce notes, I have tried to directly link the claims.
If you are interested in psychology, then you might be interested in getting hold of a couple of introductory texts…
The longer I have been pursuing philosophy, the more liberal I have become and the less nationalistic. By this i/ mean that I have recognised that my nationality if a mixture of several components over which I have no control:
So Dr Caleb Lack, a fellow SINner, and I had a chat a few weeks back. It is due to go out as a Skepticule Extra podcast, but since there have been a few delays, I am putting it out here first. It was a really enjoyable chat / interview, covering cognitive biases, atheism and god. We had a great time and hopefully there will be a second part, or Caleb interviewing me. Any excuse for a chinwag.
Recently, I wrote a post which concluded that God was unfair due to not having a level playing field with regard to people having the same access to his love by point of fact that autistic people are less likely to be able to believe in a personal God, as well as men, compared to women, and so on.
As you’ve probably guessed, I am interested in all things free will. Recently, I was reading a chapter from “Are…