Comments on: An accommodation with the authority of common sense http://idiolect.org.uk/notes/?p=1929 ideas are the new oil Thu, 09 May 2013 13:56:29 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= By: Amelie http://idiolect.org.uk/notes/?p=1929&cpage=1#comment-24218 Amelie Fri, 21 Sep 2012 10:11:45 +0000 http://idiolect.org.uk/notes/?p=1929#comment-24218 Great quote (your link is broken by the way, but the book is right there on Amazon). In modern times many scientists are labelled as atheists when discussing free will. And the way actual atheists behave isn’t helping matters any, as pointed out by Julian Baggini. Anyway, now geology has fallen into the shadows and I wonder why it’s not considered as threatening as evolution. In several of our nature interpreting courses we were told to try and avoid using the terms climate change or global warming so as not to upset the public. It’s pretty outrageous.

]]> By: Alex Fradera http://idiolect.org.uk/notes/?p=1929&cpage=1#comment-24214 Alex Fradera Fri, 21 Sep 2012 09:34:56 +0000 http://idiolect.org.uk/notes/?p=1929#comment-24214 I wonder if it also works the other way. Neuroscience and psychology is popularised on the back of controversial, disruptive claims, often bound up in a ‘big idea’ that recasts a number of phenomena in an unusual way. See The Blank Slate, The Brain That Changes Itself. Maybe they’re not radical enough for what you’re thinking – they still reassure and try and tie the phenomena back to intuitive narratives. But I’m reading Matthew Hutson’s 7 Rules of Magical Thinking, and the cheery battering he gives free will is illuminating. The tenor of that section is that believing in free will is magical thinking, and a false attribution. As per, it’s based on the Libet experiments and follow-ons, and echoes a point of view I hear commonly in rationalist circles, that free will must be an illusion. This pushes hard against our strongly held intuitions (at least mine, as they stand now) but is almost a fashionable orthodoxy to do so. This is despite the fact that the Libet experiments are no slam dunk for what they purport to be showing (eg http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22144-brain-might-not-stand-in-the-way-of-free-will.html ) and that in any case free will is a pretty thorny subject to experimentally verify or disprove.

(There are people working at a higher level to accommodate the science with the intuition, Dennett’s Elbow Room springing to mind, and these are admittedly less publicised, but I think because of their complexity, not that they are more controversial and counterintuitive than the ‘no free will’ perspective that is casually propounded – generally by people who don’t seem particularly phased by it in the first place….)

I wonder what you think. Perhaps this is different to the examples you were thinking of.

Best
Alex

]]>