Freedom evolves / Daniel C. Dennett.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dennett, D. C. (Daniel Clement)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Free will and determinism.

Decision making.

Physical Description:

xiii, 347 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Viking, 2003.

Summary:

Four Billion Years Ago, there was no freedom on our planet, because there was no life. What kinds of freedom have evolved since the origin of life? Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? If you are free, are you responsible for being free, or just lucky? In Freedom Evolves, Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea and Consciousness Explained, sets out to answer these questions, showing how we, alone among the animals, have evolved minds that give us free will and morality. In a series of strikingly original arguments drawing on evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, and philosophy, he demonstrates that if we accept Darwin's reasoning, we can build from the simplest life forms all the way up to the best and deepest human thoughts on questions of morality and meaning, ethics and freedom.

Many people assume that determinism implies inevitability. Dennett shows that it doesn't. Many think indeterminism can give us agents some freedom, some elbow room, that we just couldn't have in a deterministic universe. Dennett shows that it can't. Many think that in a deterministic world, there are no real options, only apparent options. This is false, according to Dennett. He investigates the way human culture has made possible the evolution of cooperation and ethical norms, and shows how our problems of self-control create self-deception and lead us into bargaining with our future selves, creating in the process the mature self that can take responsibility for its actions. As in his previous books, Dennett weaves a richly detailed narrative enlivened by an array of provocative formulations and analogies as entertaining as they are challenging. Freedom Evolves does not seek to replace traditional work on ethics with some Darwinian alternative, but rather to place ethics on the foundation it deserves: a realistic, naturalistic, potentially unified vision of our place in nature.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Natural Freedom

Learning What We Are 1

I Am Who I Am 6

The Air We Breathe 9

Dumbo's Magic Feather and the Peril of Paulina 13

Chapter 2 A Tool for Thinking About Determinism

Some Useful Oversimplifications 25

From Physics to Design in Conway's Life World 36

Can We Get the Deus ex Machina? 47

From Slow-motion Avoidance to Star Wars 51

The Birth of Evitability 56

Chapter 3 Thinking about Determinism

Possible Worlds 63

Causation 70

Austin's Putt 75

A Computer Chess Marathon 77

Events without Causes in a Deterministic Universe 83

Will the Future Be Like the Past? 89

Chapter 4 A Hearing for Libertarianism

The Appeal of Libertarianism 97

Where Should We Put the Much-needed Gap? 103

Kane's Model of Indeterministic Decision-making 108

"If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything" 122

Beware of Prime Mammals 126

How Can It Be "Up to Me"? 134

Chapter 5 Where Does All the Design Come from?

Early Days 141

The Prisoner's Dilemma 147

E Pluribus Unum? 150

Digression: The Threat of Genetic Determinism 156

Degrees of Freedom and the Search for Truth 162

Chapter 6 The Evolution of Open Minds

How Cultural Symbionts Turn Primates into Persons 170

The Diversity of Darwinian Explanations 181

Nice Tools, but You Still Have to Use Them 186

Chapter 7 The Evolution of Moral Agency

Benselfishness 193

Being Good in Order to Seem Good 202

Learning to Deal with Yourself 207

Our Costly Merit Badges 213

Chapter 8 Are You Out of the Loop?

Drawing the Wrong Moral 221

Whenever the Spirit Moves You 227

A Mind-writer's View 242

A Self of One's Own 245

Chapter 9 Bootstrapping Ourselves Free

How We Captured Reasons and Made Them Our Own 259

Psychic Engineering and the Arms Race of Rationality 267

With a Little Help from My Friends 272

Autonomy, Brainwashing, and Education 281

Chapter 10 The Future of Human Freedom

Holding the Line against Creeping Exculpation 289

"Thanks, I Needed That!" 297

Are We Freer Than We Want to Be? 302

Human Freedom Is Fragile 304.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [311]-324) and index.

ISBN:

0670031860

OCLC:

50339840