Christian List: Why free will is real

WHY ‘ WATER ’ IS NOT AN INDEXICAL Christian Nimtz

Adherents of two-dimensionalist semantics have devised a powerful argument to show that the Kripke-Putnam semantics is in need of an overhaul. Kripke and Putnam take “Water is H2O” to be necessary as well a posteriori. But that cannot be true. For to claim that a proposition is necessary is to claim that it is true in all contexts, whilst to maintain that it is a posteriori or informative is to...

Three Kinds of Collective Attitudes Christian List

This paper offers a comparison of three different kinds of collective attitudes: aggregate, common, and corporate attitudes. They differ not only in their relationship to individual attitudes – e.g., whether they are “reducible” to individual attitudes – but also in the roles they play in relation to the collectives to which they are ascribed. The failure to distinguish them can lead to confusi...

The Scope of Man's Free Will

My Brain Made Me Do It: the Exclusion Argument against Free Will, and What's Wrong with It Christian List and Peter Menzies

'Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I, as the conscious witness of my thoughts and actions, could not inspect or influence… The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness – rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it.' (Harris 2012, pp. 7-8)

Machine free will: is free will a necessary ingredient of machine consciousness?

Sooner or later, machine consciousness will have to address the elusive notion of free will either to dismiss it or to produce a machine implementation. It is unclear whether freedom and consciousness are independent aspects of the human mind or by-product of the same underlying structure. Here, the relevant literature is reviewed focusing on the connection between determinism and freedom-usual...