mrh@cybvax0.UUCP (Mike Huybensz) (01/21/85)
References: Recently I saw an ad for a new book on free will: Elbow Room (author's name not recalled) from MIT Press. Has anyone read this? Care to provide a summary? -- Mike Huybensz ...decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!cybvax0!mrh
esk@wucs.UUCP (Eric Kaylor) (02/02/85)
Yes! I've read (most of) _Elbow Room_, and it is great. After all, Dennett (the author) agrees with me -- he *must* be brilliant! :-) The thesis of the book is that "we can have our science and free will too;" in particular, free will can be made perfect sense of within a scientific understanding of the universe and ourselves. Dennett notes the importance of rational evaluation of prospective actions in accounting for free will, though he underemphasizes it in my opinion. And he destroys the myth that determinism (i.e. the thesis that all our actions can be explained by non-probabilistic causes) is incompatible with free will. Excellent book for uncovering the fallacies of religious and "humanistic" critics of science on the one hand, and overzealous "debunkers" like Rosen on the other. --Paul V. Torek, ihnp4!wucs!wucec1!pvt1047 Don't hit that 'r' key! Send mail to this address, not Eric's.
tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch) (02/06/85)
Elbow Room is an MIT press book by Daniel Dennett, who I guess is probably most well known for co-authoring The Mind's I with Doug Hofstadter. Dennett is a specialist in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. He's known for most strongly opposing dualist theories of mind/body separation, pushing instead the point of view that the mind is just a more complex computer, with specialized modules for specific perceptual operations and generalized modules for goal-directed action. The human mind is a higher form of a self-regulating, goal- directed machine. The book is subtitled, "the varieties of free will worth having," which describes most of the book. It's primarily devoted to tearing down the anecdotes and horror stories philosophers use to prove that we have no free will or self-control. Basically, it suggests that the amount of "free" will we have depends on the amount of free will we want and expect to have in normal life. And the amount of self-control we have depends on whether we can realistically pick out an agent of control over us in the external world (i.e. another being like ourselves, not "God" or "fate", etc.). Philosophers to the contrary, such agents practically don't exist (Political philosophers to the contrary too). People who claim they do exist are just telling ghost stories for educated audiences. (Occam's razor: don't multiply entities beyond necessity -- really applies here well. Strange that philosophers ignore it so much.) Dennett quotes Robert Nozick at the beginning of his chapter on self-control: "Just because determinism is true doesn't mean thermostats don't control temperature." The book was great. It really shuts up the pseudo-philosophers among us. Elbow Room is another step in American philosophy's road back to naturalism and common sense. It's a fine book. Tony Wuersch
ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis) (02/27/85)
>Elbow Room is an MIT press book by Daniel Dennett (...) well known for >co-authoring The Mind's I with Doug Hofstadter. >He's known for most strongly opposing dualist theories of mind/body >separation, pushing instead the point of view that the mind is just a more >complex computer(...) The human mind is a higher form of a self-regulating, >goal-directed machine. >And the amount of self-control we have depends on whether we can >realistically pick out an agent of control over us in the external world >(i.e. another being like ourselves, not "God" or "fate", etc.). >Philosophers to the contrary, such agents practically don't exist (...) >People who claim they do exist are just telling ghost stories for educated >audiences. Has it never occurred to the author of the above remarks that the selfsame `Aunt Hillary Effect' which the mechanical viewpoint claims is responsible for our own awareness could just as likely give rise to a `self-regulating, goal-directed' Meta-being ? Don't get me wrong. Objective scientific knowledge MUST attempt to build the simplest mechanical descriptions of all that it explains. After all, the very success of modern science started when it discarded the subjective worldview of the middle ages. Dualist theories of mind/body separation are of no scientific use whatsoever! It remains to be seen how deeply science will be able to explain the problems of awareness. Many feel as I do, that all they will find is the shrivelled skeleton of a soul which will have to be fleshed out by other disciplines (scientists -- read `Metaphysics' here). Perhaps people like me are living their last generation. I doubt it. -michael