Free Will: A new book says yes (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, April 03, 2015, 00:10 (3523 days ago) @ David Turell

A book review in the Guardian:-http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/01/freedom-regained-julian-baggini-review-possibility-free-will-"There is a similar doublethink in our own time, but it is now freedom, not God, which is at stake. Rarely has the idea of freedom been so popular in practice and so disdained in theory. Almost everyone assumes that they are free, except for a small band of neuroscientists and geneticists for whom neural firings or inherited genes lie at the root of everything we do, including our sentimental attachment to the myth of free will. For them, as Julian Baggini remarks in this excellent book, “consciousness is just the noise made by the firing of neurons”. Like the closet atheists of Victorian England, however, these people continue to choose from menus, vote Lib Dem or select posh schools for their children, for all the world as though they were possessed of the very liberty they deny. For them, social existence is one enormous fiction, in which we suspend our theoretical disbelief in free will and pitch in with the deluded, freedom-loving masses for the sake of a quiet life.-"Yet some of the versions of freedom these scientists throw out are not worth having in the first place. No reputable philosopher for a very long time has taught that when we decide to put the cat out, we make something called a conscious act of will a millisecond before we rise from our armchairs. To say that I downed the glass of Scotch freely is to say that nobody was holding a gun to my head. It is to describe a situation, not report on an inner experience. Free will in this sense is most certainly a myth, and one, as Baggini points out, that was scarcely known to the thinkers of antiquity. He might have added that for a medieval thinker such as Thomas Aquinas, the will is a matter of love and desire, not of steel-hard determination.-********
"For most people, Freedom Regained will seem like a kind of Maginot line, defending a territory that is not under attack. This, however, is because the new enemies of freedom are not much evident in everyday life. They are mild-mannered, soft-spoken men and women in senior common rooms, not wild-eyed dictators raving through public address systems. Among its other virtues, the book reveals how many of these soft-spoken types engage in one of the oldest of all debating devices: setting up a straw man of the concept under fire so as the more conveniently to bowl it over. It is just what Dawkins does with God."