Daniel Dennett and Free Will

Question

Can anybody explain me, in a nutshell, how free will is compatible with a naturalist view of the world according to Daniel Dennett´s last findings?

Can you also tell me the name/s of some famous contemporaneous opponents of Daniel Dennett´s view of Free Will?

Thank you

Answer 1

I have not read his latest findings. I know his home site http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/den...

I know he is on the board of The Center for Naturalism http://www.centerfornaturalism.org/

I know my own site deals with naturalism http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/ and that I reviewed the Center in today's blog. Perhaps by week's end I will have gotten to your answer, because the blog is running all week.

Thanks for looking at my site.

Answer 2

I can't say that I know of any recent developments of his on the issue, he's put out some more stuff lately but most of it seems to me little different from the lectures on the subject he did in the eighties.

He tackles the problem essentially be defining for himself what free will is.  In his mind, it's free will isn't behaving in indeterministic ways... it's being able to take charge of determinism and to recognise and avoid futile behaviours.

The reason we believe we have free will, he argues, is that we have the cognitive capability to model reality internally.  We can predict what will happen if we had taken a variety of choices.  After that, it doesn't matter of the choice we make is constrained by deterministic effects, because in modelling those versions of reality we are likely to get one of the best outcomes.  Something without free will does not model or predict, it just acts or is acted upon.

There are quite a few people who disagree with this view... many of them not for this particular view but the larger framework of Dennett's ideas.  Gould thought Dennett pushed evolutionary notions into areas where they didn't belong.  And of course anyone who doesn't like evolution in the first place is going to have a bone to pick with him.  Some continue to insist that determinism necessitates fatalism and obliterates responsibility (Kass, Kristol).  There are also a few who suggest that by redefining free will he didn't really resolve the issue at all.

There's a pretty good interview with him below.  Check it out.

Answer 3

Not sure about Daniel Dennet but I consider myself a naturalist and I believe we can still claim freewill with an appeal to the uncertainty principle as well as black holes.

This is why Einstein rejected QM saying "God does not play dice with the universe"

It seems that is precisely what happens.