Free Will

More from Susan Blackmore's excellent Conversations on Consciousness, and a perennial problem: do we have free will? As before I will only offer outlines of and quotes from their answers; buy the book for the Full Monty. Be aware that quote context is important, and I'm focussing on those comments...

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The God That Hides Himself

In a piece called The mystery of faith that is baffling but beyond doubt in Saturday's Times (behind a paywall, sadly), the Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe, Geoffrey Rowell wrote about something that does indeed baffle; what is the justification for belief? Natural theology looks to establish good reason for...

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The P-Zombie

Continuing to summarise responses in Susan Blackmore's excellent Conversations on Consciousness, I now come to the problem of the philosopher's zombie - a being indistinguishable from any other human being but which lacks any mental content, such as feelings, thoughts and, in fact, consciousness: do you believe in the possibility...

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Gene-machine Darwinism and Responsibility

Many folk complain that an 'ultra-Darwinist', or 'gene-machine' Darwinist, view of the world renders us incapable of assigning blame to individuals. The implication is that we are creatures at the mercy of our genes, mere puppets, so cannot be blamed or praised for our behaviour. Is this true? The view sometimes assigned to sociobiologists,...

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