Food for Lovers Oliver Burkeson Amsterdam, May 3d 2021– Harris argues that if we fully grasped the case against free will, it would be difficult to hate other people: how can you hate someone you don’t blame for their actions? Yet love would survive largely unscathed, since love is “the condition of our wanting those…
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Food for lovers Oliver Burkeson Amsterdam, 3 May 2021– Why do I put down my coffee mug and head to the shower at the exact moment I do so? Because the intention to do so pops up, caused, no doubt, by all sorts of activity in my brain – but activity that lies outside my…
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An eternal discussion Food for Lovers By Oliver Burkeson Amsterdam,, 3 mai 2021 — Thinking of free will this way also puts a different spin on some notorious experiments conducted in the 80s by the American neuroscientist Benjamin Libet, which have been interpreted as offering scientific proof that free will doesn’t exist. Wiring his subjects to…
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Delicious Food for Thought Oliver Burkeson Amsterdam, May 3d 2021– That’s why they’re known as “compatibilists”: they think determinism and free will are compatible. There are many other positions in the debate, including some philosophers, many Christians among them, who think we really do have “ghostly” free will; and others who think the whole so-called…
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Free or in chains? Food for Thought Lovers by Oliver Burkeman Amsterdam, 3 May 2021– Like Strawson, he has received email abuse from people disturbed by the implications. Retribution is central to all modern systems of criminal justice, yet ultimately, Caruso thinks, “it’s a moral injustice to hold someone responsible for actions that are beyond…
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Part IV Oliver Burkeman Amsterdam, 3 May 2021– Just after midnight on 1 August 1966, Whitman – an outgoing and apparently stable 25-year-old former US Marine – drove to his mother’s apartment in Austin, Texas, where he stabbed her to death. He returned home, where he killed his wife in the same manner. Later that…
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Food for Lovers By Oliver Burkeman Amsterdam, 3 May 2021– But surely “one thing leads to another” in the world of decisions and intentions, too. Our decisions and intentions involve neural activity – and why would a neuron be exempt from the laws of physics any more than a rock? So in the fruit bowl…
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To be or not to be part II by Oliver Burkeman Amsterdam, 3 may 2021– According to the public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari, free will is an anachronistic myth – useful in the past, perhaps, as a way of motivating people to fight against tyrants or oppressive ideologies, but rendered obsolete by the power of…
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Food for people who think A series of nine articles number 01 Amsterdam, May 3d 2021–Towards the end of a conversation dwelling on some of the deepest metaphysical puzzles regarding the nature of human existence, the philosopher Galen Strawson paused, then asked me: “Have you spoken to anyone else yet who’s received weird email?” He navigated…
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