{"id":3129,"date":"2019-08-12T16:01:12","date_gmt":"2019-08-12T23:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/?p=3129"},"modified":"2019-08-12T16:19:08","modified_gmt":"2019-08-12T23:19:08","slug":"is-there-really-a-naturalistic-case-for-free-will","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/2019\/08\/12\/is-there-really-a-naturalistic-case-for-free-will\/","title":{"rendered":"Is There really a Naturalistic Case for “Free Will”?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The Naturalistic Case for Free Will: The Challenge<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0Christian List opens a series of posts at The Brains Blog<\/a> discussing some key ideas from his book ‘Why Free Will is Real’ (Harvard University Press, 2019).<\/p>\n

But if Free Will is defined, even just on a “first gloss”, as “an agent\u2019s capacity to choose and control his or her (or its?) own actions”, then surely it does<\/em> exist – even for an agent as simple as a programmed light switch (which chooses whether to switch on or off depending on what it perceives by way of motion and\/or warm objects in its environment). So the “Free Will” that is denied by some must certainly be more than this (though rather than deny its existence, I would rather say that I have never seen a coherent definition of it).<\/p>\n

What neither the light switch nor the human agent possesses is the capacity to change its own programming for past decisions. A human, or even a suitably programmed learning agent, can of course modify the part of its “program” that will make future<\/em> decisions, and even may modify its own learning algorithm; but neither he, she nor it has the capacity to modify the program with which it started.<\/p>\n

What is relevant for ethical and legal discussions though is not some mythical mystical property that is possessed uniquely by humans, but rather the property of responsibility<\/em> – by which I think we should mean the capacity to modify ones future behaviour on the basis of responses<\/em> (praise, censure, punishment, reward, etc.) that one receives, or perceives as being received by others as reactions to past decisions.<\/p>\n

<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In The Naturalistic Case for Free Will: The Challenge,\u00a0Christian List opens a series of posts at The Brains Blog discussing some key ideas from his book ‘Why Free Will is Real’ (Harvard University Press, 2019). But if Free Will is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3129"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3133,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3129\/revisions\/3133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}