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Philosophy, Science and Religion: Science and Philosophy

343 classificações

The University of Edinburgh

Philosophy, Science and Religion: Science and Philosophy

343 classificações

Philosophy, Science and Religion mark three of the most fundamental modes of thinking about the world and our place in it. Are these modes incompatible? Put another way: is the intellectually responsible thing to do to ‘pick sides’ and identify with one of these approaches at the exclusion of others? Or, are they complementary or mutually supportive? As is typical of questions of such magnitude, the devil is in the details. For example, it is important to work out what is really distinctive about each of these ways of inquiring about the world. In order to gain some clarity here, we’ll be investigating what some of the current leading thinkers in philosophy, science and religion are actually doing. This course, entitled ‘Science and Philosophy’, is the first of three related courses in our Philosophy, Science and Religion Online series. The first launch is now closed to enrolments. We will launch a new version of the course in July 2018. The course will address four themes each presented by guest lecturers: 1. Are Science and Religion in conflict? (Professor Michael Murray, Franklin & Marshall) 2. Neuroscience and Free Will (Professor Al Mele, Florida State) 3. Creationism and Evolutionary Biology--Science or Pseudo-science? (Dr. Mark Harris and Dr. David de Pomerai, University of Edinburgh) 4. Do Scientific claims constitute absolute truths? (Professor Martin Kusch, University of Vienna) The second and third courses in the Philosophy, Science and Religion series are ‘Philosophy and Religion’ and ‘Religion and Science’. They may be taken in any order and completing all three courses will give you a broader understanding of this fascinating topic. Look for: • Philosophy, Science and Religion II: Philosophy and Religion • Philosophy, Science and Religion III: Religion and Science Check out our trailer to hear more: https://youtu.be/OifqTI5VKek You can also follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/EdiPhilOnline and you can follow the hashtag #psrmooc

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Neuroscience and Free Will

In this module Professor Al Mele presents experiments that purport to show that there is no such thing as free will. He then presents three criticisms of this interpretation of the evidence.

Introduction10:11

Study 2 and 34:35

Conheça os instrutores

Dr J Adam Carter
Researcher
Epistemology - Philosphy
Dr Orestis Palermos
Research Explorer
School of Philosophy
Dr Mark Harris
Senior Lecturer in Science and Religion
School of Divinity
Professor Duncan Pritchard
Professor of Philosophy
University of Edinburgh

Now, I move to the third problem.

Now, here, what I'd like you to do is to

pretend that everything I said by way of criticism so far is false.

Pretend that it's all false.

Sometimes when I do this with audiences,

I can see a look of despair coming over their faces,

like you mean it's all false?

No, I think it's all true,

but pretend it's false,

and let's ask ourselves this question,

if decisions and intentions really do come about at these early times in these studies,

before people are conscious of them,

would it follow that all decisions and intentions are like this?

Because if these studies are going to threaten free will,

they can't just threaten them in

this little restricted domain of actions on which nothing hangs,

they would have to apply to all decisions and intentions.

I want you to recall in this connection,

a quotation that I read to you earlier from Libet,

it's the generalization quotation,

here it is again,

''Our overall findings do suggest some fundamental characteristics of the simpler acts,

that may be applicable to all consciously intended acts,

and even to responsibility and free will.''

Now, just to get a feel for what I want you to be thinking about,

I want to tell you about my own experience as a subject in a Libet style experiment.

This was years ago.

I gave a lecture to a motor control unit at

the National Institutes of Health and it was a lecture on free will in neuroscience,

and the plan for that day was,

I would give my lecture and then I would be a subject in

a Libet style study and then they would take me out to dinner.

So I gave my lecture and it went well I thought,

then it was time to be a subject in the experiment.

So I sat in the chair and I wanted to be a naive subject,

so I wanted to just wait for the urges to flex to

pop up and watch that clock and pay attention to where it was,

where the hand was on it

when I first became aware of the urge and I wanted to

flex in response to the urge and then

report after I flexed where the spot was on

the clock when I first became aware of it and by the way,

the way I reported back then was I just moved

the cursor to the spot on the clock where I

thought it was when I first became aware of my urge.

So there I am,

sitting in the chair.

Waiting for the first urge to flex now to arise

and what I discovered after a little time is that nothing was happening,

that is no urges were coming to mind.

I thought, my goodness,

how do subjects do this?

Then my next question to myself was,

and what am I going to do to go through and

complete the experiment so that I can then have dinner?

What I did is I settled on the following strategy,

what I would do is to say now silently to myself,

and to treat that now saying as

an expression of a decision or intention to do the thing now,

and then I would flex in response to

it and try to keep track of where the spot was on the clock,

when I said to myself silently.

The point I want to emphasize now is this,

that when I said, ''Now,'' to myself,

it was utterly arbitrary.

So I knew I had to do it a fair number of

times and by the way in these studies back then,

you would always do at least 40 trials.

So that you could have a readable evidence.

You needed a bunch of trials so that once you did all the back averaging and so on,

you'd get data that you could use.

So I was saying now,

40 times over the course of an hour or so.

But the precise time at which I said it was arbitrary.

So what I was doing was randomly picking a time to say now.

Now, there's this old fable,

The Fable of Buridan's ass and it's actually relevant here.

So Buridan's ass was hyper-rational donkey and it was so rational,

so hyper-rational, that it would never do a thing unless it had a reason

to prefer doing it to anything else it might do at the time.

So one day the ass was wandering around wherever asses

wander and it found itself equidistant between two bales of hay,

and the bales were equally large and equally attractive.

It was starting to get hungry and it looked to the left and I thought,

''That's nice,'' and it looked to the right and it thought, ''Equally nice.''

It looked back and forth,

couldn't find a reason to prefer either to the other,

and so what it did was to starve to death.

Now fortunately, we are not hyper-rational and so we can just arbitrarily pick.

Now, in the free will literature,

so here's just a little bit of philosophy.

In the free will literature,

one of the views is called Restrictivism and according to the restrictivists,

you're not in any position to freely choose,

to make a free choice or exercise free will unless you're

torn between what you think you should do and what you're tempted to do.

Or some other restrictivists will be a little bit broader and say,

''Unless you're torn between either that or long-term self-interest and

short-term temptation,'' but in the Buridan's ass kind of case,

you're not torn in that way between things of different kinds,

you just have to arbitrarily pick.

That's what I was like and that's what all of these studies are like.

All the science studies that I've been talking about.

In all of them, you are arbitrarily picking.

Now, either the restrictivists are right or they're wrong.

If they're right, then none of these studies is even a study about free will,

because they're all about arbitrary picking.

But suppose that the restrictivists are wrong,

well then the studies could be about free will.

But even then we see how different arbitrary picking is from other cases of deciding.

So think about decisions that are really important to you,

that you think about for a long time before you actually make the decision.

So for example, whether to propose marriage to

a certain person now or to wait a while or maybe not do it ever,

whether to accept a certain job offer when

you have a good job already and you think it might be better,

but you're not so sure,

whether it's time to go for a divorce or not.

These things are not cases of arbitrary picking for the most part.

So, you put a lot of thought into it.

And notice that the instructions in

the neuroscience experiments shove

consciousness aside except for the purposes of reporting.

So you're not supposed to plan in advance of when to flex or which key to press.

You're not supposed to think about it.

You're supposed to be spontaneous.

But many of our decisions are not like that.

They are preceded by conscious thinking and it may be

that the conscious thinking increases the probability of conscious deciding.

So it would be very difficult to generalize from

the supposition that in the studies I've been talking about,

all the decisions are made unconsciously,

to the claim that all decisions even the ones

preceded by conscious reflection are made unconsciously

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