the way he flat-out rejects Free Will as unscientific is bold and refreshing, especially coming from a Philosopher.
The talk is pretty confused. He starts with defining “free will” as “Power or ability sometimes to do otherwise than what one in fact does”, which he then demolishes.
Skip to 40:25. After describing the problems with elan vital and dormative potency (namely, no explanatory power while claiming to have it, that is playing the role of curiosity-stoppers), he starts supporting the idea of distinguishing when people are “in control” of their behavior and “not in control” for the purpose of determining whether they should be held accountable for their behavior, as an alternative to “free will”.
But this concept of “in control” is never explained, and all arguments he gives are just applause lights. He hails empiricism, science, neuroscience, lack of strange metaphysical speculation, and appeals to audience’s intuition (“It’s so obvious that when I’ll start pointing it out you’re going to go “Duh!”.”).
(I only skimmed the video; most of it introduces some standard ideas.)
The talk is pretty confused. He starts with defining “free will” as “Power or ability sometimes to do otherwise than what one in fact does”, which he then demolishes.
Skip to 40:25. After describing the problems with elan vital and dormative potency (namely, no explanatory power while claiming to have it, that is playing the role of curiosity-stoppers), he starts supporting the idea of distinguishing when people are “in control” of their behavior and “not in control” for the purpose of determining whether they should be held accountable for their behavior, as an alternative to “free will”.
But this concept of “in control” is never explained, and all arguments he gives are just applause lights. He hails empiricism, science, neuroscience, lack of strange metaphysical speculation, and appeals to audience’s intuition (“It’s so obvious that when I’ll start pointing it out you’re going to go “Duh!”.”).
(I only skimmed the video; most of it introduces some standard ideas.)