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Freedom Evolves

Author:
Daniel Dennett (author)
Language:
English
Original language:
English
Publisher:
Viking Books
Categories:
Philosophy, psychology and science
Publication year:
2003
ISBN:
0-670-03186-0
Pages:
347
Has read?
Yes
Debut?
No
Images:
Back flap of Freedom Evolves.Back of Freedom Evolves.Spine of Freedom Evolves.Front of Freedom Evolves.Front flap of Freedom Evolves.
High-res images:
[Back flap (12.21 MB)] [Back (22.16 MB)] [Spine (3.21 MB)] [Front (23.42 MB)] [Front flap (12.05 MB)]
Table of Contents:
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  • Preface

Chapter 1: Natural Freedom

  • Learning What We Are
  • I Am Who I Am
  • The Air We Breathe
  • Dumbo's Magic Feather and the Peril of Paulina

Chapter 2: A Tool for Thinking About Determinism

  • Some Useful Oversimplifications
  • From Physics to Design in conway's Life World
  • Can We Get the Deus ex Machina?
  • From Slow-motion Avoidance to Star Wars
  • The Birth of Evitability

Chapter 3: Thinking About Determinism

  • Possible Worlds
  • Causation
  • Austin's Putt
  • A Computer Chess Marathon
  • Events without Causes in a Deterministic Universe
  • Will the Future Be Like the Past?

Chapter 4: A Hearing for Libertarianism

  • The Appeal of Libertarianism
  • Where Should We Put the Much-needed Gap?
  • Kane's Mode of Indeterministic Decision-making
  • "If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything"
  • Beware of Prime Mammals
  • How Can It Be "Up to Me"?

Chapter 5: Where Does all the Design Come From?

  • Early Days
  • The Prisoner's Dilemma
  • E Pluribus Unum?
  • Digression: The Threat of Genetic Determinism
  • Degrees of Freedom and the Search for Truth

Chapter 6: The Evolution of Open Minds

  • How Cultural Symbionts Turn Primates into Persons
  • The Diversity of Darwinian Explanations
  • Nice Tools, but You Still Have to Use Them

Chapter 7: The Evolution of Moral Agency

  • Benselfishness
  • Being Good in Order to Seem Good
  • Learning to Deal with Yourself
  • Our Costly Merit Badges

Chapter 8: Are You Out of the Loop?

  • Drawing the Wrong Moral
  • Whenever the Spirit Moves You
  • A Mind-writer's View
  • A Self of One's Own

Chapter 9: Bootstrapping Ourselves Free

  • How We Captured Reasons and Made Them Our Own
  • Psychic Engineering and the Arms Race of Rationality
  • With a Little Help from My Friends
  • Autonomy, Brainwashing, and Education

Chapter 10: The Future of Human Freedom

  • Holding the Line against Creeping Exculpation
  • "Thanks, I Needed That!"
  • Are We Freer Than We Want to Be?
  • Human Freedom Is Fragile
  • Bibliography
  • Index

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