Foreknowledge in research participants can undermine the validity of psychological research. Three studies examined a potentially major source of foreknowledge: participant crosstalk in an undergraduate subject pool. Participants in all three studies attempted to win extra experimental credit by guessing the number of beans in a jar-a nearly impossible task without foreknowledge of the answer. ...

Physical science, it appears, leaves no place for divine action. Modern science presupposes that the universe is a closed physical system, that interactions are regular and lawlike, that all causal histories can be traced, and that anomalies will ultimately have physical explanations. But traditional assertions of God acting in the world conflict with all four of these conditions: they presuppo...

Orthodoxy, and other so-called world religions that were complicit with colonialist expansion and its repression of the “other peoples” (indigenous), their rites and beliefs. For centuries, colonial societies have denied that indigenous peoples had “religions” at all; as the great photographer of Native North American cultures Edward S. Curtis stated, “There seems to be a broadly prevalent idea...

This paper develops a sympathetic critique of recent experimental work on free will and moral responsibility. Section 1 offers a brief defense of the relevance of experimental philosophy to the free will debate. Section 2 reviews a series of articles in the experimental literature that probe intuitions about the ‘‘compatibility question’’—whether we can be free and morally responsible if determ...

This paper presents an analysis of the application of the philosophical concept of free will to intelligent machines. It is argued that we need to transfer the concept to a more empirical approach in philosophy in order to be able to answer questions about the design of intelligent systems that are required to operate in areas of society where the concept of free will is necessary. Therefore, f...