Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Despite Augustine having satisfactorily settle this issue 1600 years ago, some people, some of whom even comment this blog, still believe that if God knows what I am going to do, then I must not have free will. I think I have identified the source of this confusion: if you or I know with 100% certainty that X will occur, then it must be necessary that it will occur. That is because we are beings embedded in time, and we can never know with certainty what contingencies will arise in the future. But for any sophisticated thinker who has held both divine omniscience and human free will to exist, that is not at all the case for God: God exists outside of time, and sees the past, present, and future all at once. So all contingencies are know to Him at a glance. That fact that He knows with certainty that, say, a butterfly will land on my nose tomorrow in no way means that the butterfly could not have done otherwise. God simply sees what it actually does do.

Several commenters went nuts when Bob posted about not being able to thwart God's plans, declaring that his viewpoint denied free will. But consider: I know Bob will be at a conference Friday evening. I know that after conferences, Bob goes to sing Karaoke. Does my knowing this interfere with Bob freely choosing to sing Karaoke? Of course, I only know it is highly likely that Bob will go sing, but if my knowledge improved more and more (by monitoring his movements, perhaps measuring his vital signs, etc.), would this make Bob less and less free? Given that Bob will sing karaoke Friday night, I can now incorporate that fact into my plan for world domination. Does the fact that Bob's action helps fulfill my plan mean he does not have free will?

P.S. Huff was recently shocked when I said that it would make no difference whatsoever for my opinion as to whether humans have free will if some physicist should announced tomorrow, "My model shows the universe is completely deterministic." Consider New York City and a mapmaker. The city is the concrete reality; the map is an abstraction from that reality. Suppose a mapmaker makes a map of New York and shows it to me and says, "See, your neighborhood is nowhere to be found on my map"? I think the correct reaction is, "Somehow, then it was missed by your abstraction. I live in the neighborhood. I have direct, concrete experience of its existence. The fact that it is missing from some abstraction does not shake my confidence in its existence in the least."

But P.S. cannot blow my case down . He writes: "It is possible that science will one day provide powerful evidence that the brain and body function in a perfectly deterministic manner. That discovery would leave little opening for free will." But this is based upon a misunderstanding of the relationship of science to the entirety of experience, and results in a flawed "free will of the gaps" understanding of the concept: free will is some mysterious "other" thing that operates in the "gaps" between causal physical processes, and if there are no gaps, there is no "room" for free will. Note: This is exactly the sort of flawed understanding of free will that leads many scientifically minded people to reject the concept, since it posits some "spooky" force jiggering around with physical processes. The fact is that a finding that "the brain and body function in a perfectly deterministic manner" would say nothing a...

Peter Winch, in The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy , writes: Burnet puts the point very well in his book on Greek Philosophy when he points out (on pages 11 and 12) that the sense in which the philosopher asks ‘What is real?’ involves the problem of man’s relation to reality, which takes us beyond pure science. ‘We have to ask whether the mind of man can have any contact with reality at all, and, if it can, what difference this will make to his life’. Now to think that this question of Burnet’s could be settled by experimental methods involves just as serious a mistake as to think that philosophy, with its a priori methods of reasoning, could possibly compete with experimental science on its own ground. For it is not an empirical question at all, but a conceptual one. It has to do with the force of the concept of reality. An appeal to the results of an experiment would necessarily beg the important question, since the philosopher would be bound to ask by w...

Sam Harris's case against free will . Of course, as philosopher Kevin Vallier notes, that is really shooting fish in a barrel.

Consider these quotes : In his new book Free Will , Sam Harris says, "This [neuroscientific] understanding reveals you to be a biochemical puppet." Jerry Coyne asserts in a USAToday column: "The ineluctable scientific conclusion is that although we feel that we’re characters in the play of our lives, rewriting our parts as we go along, in reality we’re puppets performing scripted parts written by the laws of physics." At least these fellows understand the logical implication of reductionist materialism: if reductionist materialism is true, consciousness is both useless and inexplicable. "Evolving consciousness" certainly cannot aid a "biochemical puppet" in any way whatsoever: his consciousness will have no influence whatsoever on what his body actually does, and so cannot possibly give him an evolutionary edge. As you can see from these quotes, this is no straw man I have invented: those are the words of two of the very leading lights of...

I'm reading Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise . So far, it's a worthwhile book, but... Silver's expertise is in prediction. But sometimes he tries to reach a bit higher, and then he falls flat on his face. For instance: "You might not think of the weather report as an exercise in metaphysics, but the very idea of predicting the weather evokes age-old debates about predestination and free will." We then get a lecture from one Dr. Richard Loft that somehow ties Augustine and Calvin to successful weather prediction, and Aquinas and the Scholastics to... I'm not sure. Bad weather forecasting? But this is complete nonsense. No sensible believer in free will would be swayed by extremely good weather forecasts, just as no believer in strict determinism is going to fold because we can't get the weather right. The idea of free will does not depend upon nothing being predictable -- indeed, it doesn't even depend on human action being unpredictab...