
Important Topics
This is a list of concepts I feel I need to address to make my case that human agency is an illusion.
There are two major themes in my thinking:
- Humans have no material agency
- Power structures require the presumption of agency
Tangentially, even if I were to agree that the world did allow for free will, is determined, semi-determined, or indetermined, my contention is that because humans have no material agency, they still have no responsibility. The metaphor that comes to mind is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. All of our genetics, epigenetics, and heredity along with our socio-environmental programming, any agency we might have to exert is essentially the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
This story is meant to teach that the final straw cannot be seen in isolation. This straw is not responsible for breaking the camel’s back. It’s just one of a thousand papercuts, to switch metaphors for effect.
In either a deterministic or deterministic universe, there are only two possible answers that I can think of, which are:
- Humans require god-like abilities to satisfy causa sui requirements
- Agency is an emergent property AND independent of BOTH in-built processes and inputs
Book References
I receive no compensation from Amazon.com or anywhere else at this time for links to books. I include them for convenience purposes. Book links reference the US instance of Amazon.com. If you receive books from a different instance or wish to view Amazon content in a different language, in most cases, simply click the link and change the top-level domain to the one you usually order from.
For example, the US link to The Righteous Mind is rendered like this:
[US] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307377903/
The ‘dp‘ means ‘detail page‘ (or some such) and the characters after the ‘/dp/‘ represent Amazon’s unique inventory code (ASIN, Amazon Standard Identification Number) for a given product.
Amend it to one of the following and try again.
[Canada] https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0307377903/
[UK] https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0307377903/
[France] https://www.amazon.fr/dp/0307377903/
[India] https://www.amazon.in/dp/0307377903/
[Germany] https://www.amazon.de/dp/0307377903/
Not all books are available in all regions, so not all links will be amenable to this treatment. Obviously, I have no control over which books Amazon offers, stocks, or which warehouses or regions they ship from.
- Define Agency
- Types of Agency
- Agency in a legal content
- Degrees of Freedom
- Agency versus Structure
- Define Free Will
- Free will versus determinism
- Free will and moral responsibility
- Free
- Will
- Moral / Morality
- Responsibility
- Hard Determinism
- Compatibilism (Soft Determinism)
- Impossibilism
- Incompatibilism
- Indeterminism
- Equipoise
- Illusionism
- Illusion of Determinism
- Probability and Chance
- Causality and Causal Chains
- Language Insufficiency
- Laplace’s Demon
- Related Concepts
- Freedom
- Liberty
- Autonomy
- Liberalism
- Identity
- Self
- Cast of Characters
- Dan Ariely
- Book: Predictably Irrational
- Aristotle
- Jean Buridan
- Gregg Caruso
- Book: Rejecting Retributivism
- Book: Just Deserts: Debating Free Will (with Daniel Dennett)
- Book: Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility (Editor)
- David Chalmers
- Daniel Dennett
- Book: Consciousness Explained
- Book: Just Deserts: Debating Free Will (with Gregg Caruso)
- Arthur Stanley Eddington
- Albert Einstein
- Harry Frankfurt
- Joshua Greene
- Jonathan Haidt
- Thomas Hobbes
- David Hume
- Peter van Inwagen
- Daniel Kahneman
- Neil Levy
- Hard Luck
- Christian List
- Book: Why Free Will Is Real
- John Locke
- Karl Marx
- Alfred Mele
- John Stuart Mill
- Derk Pereboom
- Steven Pinker
- Bertrand Russell
- Robert Sapolsky
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Galen Strawson
- Book: Freedom and Belief
- Peter F Strawson
- Richard Thaler
- Manuel Vargas
- Bruce Waller
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Dan Ariely