Further to “Two of the four horsemen of the new atheist Apocalypse clash over free will”: In the increasingly crowded field of books arguing for or against free will, Cal State U’s Mark Balaguer’s new entry, Free Will, is a heads-up:
Balaguer discusses determinism, the view that every physical event is predetermined, or completely caused by prior events. He describes several philosophical and scientific arguments against free will, including one based on Benjamin Libet’s famous neuroscientific experiments, which allegedly show that our conscious decisions are caused by neural events that occur before we choose. He considers various religious and philosophical views, including the philosophical pro-free-will view known as compatibilism. Balaguer concludes that the anti-free-will arguments put forward by philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists simply don’t work. They don’t provide any good reason to doubt the existence of free will. But, he cautions, this doesn’t necessarily mean that we have free will. The question of whether we have free will remains an open one; we simply don’t know enough about the brain to answer it definitively.
He describes his interests as “metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, free will, and metaethics.” He is also the author of Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem (2012). Trust us, if you think free will is an “open scientific problem,” you are not friends with new atheist neuroscientist Sam Harris. And if you think it is anything other than a chance to parade your knowledge of bonobo parenting, you are probably not friends with these people. You might be friends with these people though. The company we keep makes a difference.
See also: “I will” means something after all
Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose
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