Free Will Quotations
Conversations on Consciousness by Susan Blackmore
location 139
To be frank I had rather expected, before I began, that nearly everyone would intellectually
reject the idea of free will while finding it hard to live their daily life without any such belief.
location 140
I say this for two reasons: first I have seen what students go through when confronted with
philosophical arguments and scientific evidence concerning free will. They see that the whole
system of brain and environment seems causally closed-in other words, that there is no room
for an inner self or a conscious power to intervene-yet they go on finding it terribly hard to
look on everything their bodies do as the product of prior events and their consequences.
location 143
As Samuel Johnson put it so memorably `All theory is against the freedom of the will; all
experience is for it.
location 143
Some students just remain confused, while many say they decide to go on acting `as if' there
is free will even while not really believing in it.
location 144
Second, I have been through all of this myself.
location 144
I long ago concluded that free will must be an illusion, and so over the years I have practised
not believing in it. Eventually, with long practice, it becomes perfectly obvious that all the
actions of this body are the consequences of prior events acting on a complex system; then the
feeling of making free conscious decisions simply melts away.
Next
Conversations on Consciousness by Susan Blackmore
location 139
To be frank I had rather expected, before I began, that nearly everyone would intellectually
reject the idea of free will while finding it hard to live their daily life without any such belief.
location 140
I say this for two reasons: first I have seen what students go through when confronted with
philosophical arguments and scientific evidence concerning free will. They see that the whole
system of brain and environment seems causally closed-in other words, that there is no room
for an inner self or a conscious power to intervene-yet they go on finding it terribly hard to
look on everything their bodies do as the product of prior events and their consequences.
location 143
As Samuel Johnson put it so memorably `All theory is against the freedom of the will; all
experience is for it.
location 143
Some students just remain confused, while many say they decide to go on acting `as if' there
is free will even while not really believing in it.
location 144
Second, I have been through all of this myself.
location 144
I long ago concluded that free will must be an illusion, and so over the years I have practised
not believing in it. Eventually, with long practice, it becomes perfectly obvious that all the
actions of this body are the consequences of prior events acting on a complex system; then the
feeling of making free conscious decisions simply melts away.
Next
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