Sumo

believes philosophical investigations are neither superior to, or prior to, investigations in the natural sciences. Concern about free will is one of the key issues behind most of the resistance to materialism generally and neo-Darwinism in particular, he says. Dennett spells out just how the process of natural selection can generate organisms with greater choice in their actions. " We are now finding increasing complexity throughout the developing spectrum of organic life. The more complex creatures become, the wider is the range of activities open to them. And with that increase goes a steadily increasing degree of freedom, " he says. " The freedom of the bird to fly wherever it wants is definitely a kind of freedom, a distinct improvement on the freedom of jellyfish to float wherever it floats, but a poor cousin of human freedom. " He sees Descartes' split between body and soul as one of the key problems needing to be confronted. People are still " made anxious by the thought that if science shows, as it were, that there's nobody home in a human body, then there is nobody to blame and there is nobody to take pride, " he says. " So the task for the naturalist like me is to show how there can still be persons without being Cartesian persons, without there being a little immaterial soul that animates and controls the body like a puppeteer. That is a hard thing to show, but I think I can. " " My main task – and it feels like moving a mountain – is to get people to realize that determinism and inevitability are not synonyms. There is no interesting relationship between determinism and inevitability. If your world is determined, it doesn't mean that your future is inevitable, " he says. The way to get at this is by taking the word 'inevitable' and looking at what it means, he believes. " It means unavoidable. Its opposite is avoidable or evitable. So, what you have to show is that you have an evolutionary process in a deterministic universe, then what you get is growth and the eventual explosion of evitability. " As complexity evolves, more and more things become avoidable. " What is ironic is that it is the very predictability that science gives you increases that evitability. It is because we can foresee the outcomes of various circumstances that we can …