eBook - ePub
Free Will and Consciousness
A Determinist Account of the Illusion of Free Will
- English
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- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
About this book
In recent decades, with advances in the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences, the idea that patterns of human behavior may ultimately be due to factors beyond our conscious control has increasingly gained traction and renewed interest in the age-old problem of free will. In this book, Gregg D. Caruso examines both the traditional philosophical problems long associated with the question of free will, such as the relationship between determinism and free will, as well as recent experimental and theoretical work directly related to consciousness and human agency. He argues that our best scientific theories indeed have the consequence that factors beyond our control produce all of the actions we perform and that because of this we do not possess the kind of free will required for genuine or ultimate responsibility. It is further argued that the strong and pervasive belief in free will, which the author considers an illusion, can be accounted for through a careful analysis of our phenomenology and a proper theoretical understanding of consciousness. Indeed, the primary goal of this book is to argue that our subjective feeling of freedom, as reflected in the first-person phenomenology of agentive experience, is an illusion created by certain aspects of our consciousness.
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Yes, you can access Free Will and Consciousness by Gregg D. Caruso in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Ethics & Moral Philosophy. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The Problem of Free Will: A Brief Introduction and Outline of Position
- 2 Against Libertarianism
- 3 Against Compatibilism
- 4 Consciousness and Free Will (I): Automaticity and the Adaptive Unconscious
- 5 Consciousness and Free Will (II): Transparency, Infallibility, and the Higher-Order Thought Theory
- 6 Consciousness and Free Will (III): Intentional States, Spontaneity, and Action Initiation
- 7 Consciousness and Free Will (IV): Self-Consciousness and Our Sense of Agency
- Works Cited
- Index
- About the Author