“Interestingly enough, philosophers have long been in the business of offering advice on how to be happy. Or at least not too sad.” Spinoza is one of the great philosophers offering advice on how to be happy: “As Spinoza saw it, people are slaves to their emotions and chained to what they love, such as fame, fortune and other people. This inevitably leads to sadness … .” In Spinoza, Self Help and Agency, Mike LaBossiere explains Spinoza’s advice about how we can free ourselves from our emotions … and then points out “one crushing and obvious problem with Spinoza’s advice.” Along the way he makes quite a few interesting points about free will and determinism.
free will
The dark side of free will
In this video Gregg Caruso explains how not believing in free will would be good for us. “What would happen if we all believed free will didn’t exist? As a free will skeptic, Dr. Gregg Caruso contends our society would be better off believing there is no such thing as free will.”
How thankful were you on Thanksgiving?
The answer may depend on whether you believe you have free will.
Philosophical implications of the urge to urinate
The state of our body affects how we think the world works. For example, belief in free will is negatively correlated with the desire to urinate. Daniel Yudkin explains some recent research leading to this conclusion.
Does science prove we aren’t free?
Are we free? In his review of Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will by FSU philosopher Alfred Mele, Daniel Dennett agrees with Mele that neuroscience gives the wrong answer. “The mistakes are so obvious that one sometimes wonders how serious scientists could make them. What has lowered their threshold for careful analysis so catastrophically? Perhaps it is the temptation of glory. What a coup it would be if your neuroscience experiment brought about the collapse of several millennia of inconclusive philosophising about free will! A curious fact about these forays into philosophy is that almost invariably the scientists concentrate on the least scientifically informed, most simplistic conceptions of free will, as if to say they can’t be bothered considering the subtleties of alternative views worked out by mere philosophers.”
Both free and determined?
The more we understand about the world and especially our brains, the more it seems that our decisions are determined by forces — our genes, our neurons, our upbringing, for example — that are beyond our control. And yet we experience making choices. In “The Benefits of Binocularity,” Erik Parens explains the “better way to go about trying to understand what sorts of beings we are is to see ourselves as both free subjects and as determined objects, and to accept that we aren’t wired for seeing ourselves in both ways at once. Using either lens alone can lead to pernicious mistakes.”
Marshmallows and cigarettes
According to Walter Mischel, the key to self-control is learning to mentally “cool” the “hot” aspects of your environment, those things that pull you away from your goal. How does his research and personal experience with self-control fit with philosophical questions about free will, determinism, compatibilism, etc.?
Could you have done otherwise?
The implications of the free will debate. Interesting discussion by FSU philosopher Alfred Mele of what neuroscience does and doesn’t tell us about free will. “An important implication of the free will debate – that is, the actual debate taking place in scientific and scholarly books and articles and in books and articles for the general public – is that we can easily be misled by scientific findings if we don’t interpret them carefully. When we pay attention to details, we see that the neuroscientific challenge to free will is misguided.”
Anorexia, brain activity, and hormones in the womb.
Anorexia visible with brain scans and womb hormones ‘lead to anorexia’. These two articles are of interest with respect to the mind-body problem and the question of how much is up to you. Are the brains of persons with eating disorders different because they have eating disorders, or do they have eating disorders because their brains are different? Or is this a confused question because there is only the brain? And is your brain programmed in the womb?
Punishment and belief in free will
The surprising link between homicide rates and belief in free will. Do we punish criminals because we believe they freely chose to commit the crimes and so deserve punishment? Or do we believe criminals acted freely because we desire to punish them? A reason to think we believe in free will because we desire to punish: “more crime-ridden places … also tend to believe more strongly in free will, presumably out of a desire to see criminals punished.”
Socratically Speaking 