| Description |
xv, 347 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (p. [311]-324) and index. |
| Contents |
Learning what we are -- I am who I am -- The air we breathe -- Dumbo's magic feather and the peril of Paulina -- Some useful oversimplifications -- From physics to design in Conway's life world -- Can we get the Deus ex machina? -- From slow-motion avoidance to Star Wars -- The birth of evitability -- Possible worlds -- Causation -- Austin's putt -- A computer chess marathon -- Events without causes in a deterministic universe -- Will the future be like the past? -- The appeal of libertarianism -- Where should we put the much-needed gap? -- Kane's model of indeterministic decision-making -- "If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything" -- Beware of prime mammals -- How can it be "up to me"? -- Early days -- The prisoner's dilemma -- E pluribus unum? -- Digression: the threat of genetic determinism -- Degrees of freedom and the search for truth -- How cultural symbionts turn primates into persons -- The diversity of Darwinian explanations -- Nice tools, but you still have to use them -- Benselfishness -- Being good in order to seem good -- Learning to deal with yourself -- Our costly merit badges -- Drawing the wrong moral -- Whenever the spirit moves you -- A mind-writer's view -- A self of one's own -- How we captured reasons and made them our own -- Psychic engineering and the arms race of rationality -- With a little help from my friends -- Autonomy, brainwashing, and education -- Holding the line against creeping exculpation -- "Thanks, I needed that!" -- Are we freer than we want to be? -- Human freedom is fragile. |
| 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."--BOOK JACKET. |
| Subject |
Free will and determinism.
|
|
Decision making.
|
| ISBN |
0142003840 (pbk.) |
|
9780142003848 (pbk.) |
|
0670031860 (hc) |
|
9780670031863 (hc) |
|
