No Need to Deify: How Determinism Generates Free Will
For much of humanity the simplest and the best explanation to date of human mental capability and free will, notwithstanding the many advances of science, is its derivation directly from God, thereby exempting from corporeal principles the evident interaction between mind and body. No explanation wh...
| Published in: | The international journal of religion and spirituality in society |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Common Ground Publishing
2014
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| In: |
The international journal of religion and spirituality in society
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| Further subjects: | B
Determinism
B Freewill B Naturalism |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | For much of humanity the simplest and the best explanation to date of human mental capability and free will, notwithstanding the many advances of science, is its derivation directly from God, thereby exempting from corporeal principles the evident interaction between mind and body. No explanation which lacked some such an exception has ever met with widespread favor. In the philosophical sphere the corresponding problem of free will despite determinism is in that sphere considered to be either insoluble, soluble only by the denial of either determinism or free will, or arguably soluble but not yet by consensus. -- Which enigma is one to accept, then: cold monistic perplexity, or warm dualistic mystification? Many prefer the mystification to the perplexity, and structure their lives and indeed their cultures accordingly. In ancient Greece, however, a monistic solution did originate, one which now by means of modern-day control systems theory can incorporate equally modern neuropsychological findings. At its core even in Athens was the psychological "ownership" of the deterministic chain of causation as it passes through the mind. -- When conjecturally recast in modern terms, in a brain plastically prepared by both recent and long-term experience, non-conscious awareness generates alternatives for possible action. After testing for fitness the best scenario incites in succession actual or imagined action, a post facto feeling of willing, and further refinement of the plastic brain. The "will" which cumulatively emerges, goes the argument, is fully determined - physical cause alone producing every physical effect - and yet de facto free. This is how we become otherwise, so as to do otherwise. -- While for many dualism will still provide the preferred solution, for others it is this monistic account which will at last close the intellectual and the emotional explanatory gaps. For them religion may thereafter provide not a metaphysical imperative but a powerful secular metaphor. |
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| ISSN: | 2154-8641 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: The international journal of religion and spirituality in society
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.18848/2154-8633/CGP/v03i04/51072 |