Brain yoga. Keeping up with Daniel Dennett's train of thought is a bit like herding cats. Just when you think you've got a handle on one postulate, he launches another, often in a totally opposite direction. Even with his exquisite analogies [see: frog in a beer mug] I couldn't always wrap my brain around his concepts on the first pass. There were many paragraphs, and at least one entire chapter, that I had to read twice. That's not to say this book isn't fantastic (it is!). Dennett tackles the

Determinism does not mean that our fate was determined before we were born. But much of what happens to us in a lifetime is certainly influenced by that. Determinism is not fatalism. For someone to say, "It does not matter what I do, whatever is meant to happen will happen," is quite absurd. And yet to say we have free will and that I can do whatever I want to do, is also absurd. For me understanding determinism, I think of this instant of my life on a straight line. The straight line is my past...

I am a big fan of Dan Dennett. Free will is a very difficult topic to explain and this is a very careful, thoughtful treatment of the subject. I started to write a detailed summary of the book, but decided cut to the basics: This was an early book of his on the topic of consciousness and free will, and his later books are much better. You can see in this book the seeds of ideas that he will later present in "Consciousness Explained." Most everything in this book is explained better in that one.

"There's no sense wringing our hands because we can't undo the past, and can't prevent an event that actually happens, and can't create ourselves ex nihilo, and can't choose both alternatives at a decision point, and can't be perfect."

Read it in college. Reading it again. He has a terrific beard.

Interesting read, but difficult: Dennett writes for the student of Philosophy. Eminently accessible to a person willing to commit, but, as all philosophical writing, commitment it requires. He explores Free Will in terms of Determinism, that is, the proposal that Free Will as we think of it, is an illusion and that human beings as rational agents are as subject to causation as dominoes. It's an extremely uncomfortable idea for many people, and Dennett doesn't spend a great deal of time acclimati...

This is an excellent little series of essays on free will which only occasionally gets bogged down in "philosophese". Dennett very deftly takes on the fears based on the sneaking suspicion that we don't actually have "free will" by first asserting that we should buck up and not scare ourselves too much with deterministic bugbears. Then he makes the case that determinism could very much feel similar to free will. Then he points out that when many people talk about having even "free-er" will than

I had to go and google "compatibilism" after finishing it lmao. sometimes an argument is too nuanced that you don't see the forest for the trees. It was an interesting dissection of the different false metaphors, "bug-bears", that philosophers use to make the notion of free will more scary/dramatic, but I feel like it could have had a bit more synthesis/construction rather than deconstruction. in general his view can be summarized by saying that free will is an emergent phenomenological aspect o...

What does it mean to have free will? Is free will incompatible with determinism? With indeterminism? What does it mean to control oneself? What does it mean to make a choice? Why do we want free will at all and what do we want when we want it?Dennett examines these perennial philosophical problems and disposes of many of the "bugbears" which plague the often fear-riddled investigations into these topics. Dennett also develops answers, or at least the start of some answers, that embrace the possi...

A nice presentation of the contemporary compatibilist position on free will (ie even though determinism may be how our physical world works, that's no reason to think we don't have free will)

On the pitfalls of premature verdicts of stupidity in the wasp, see Dawkins 1982, pp. 48-50.True, much of these causes occur 'inside' us--is it better to be a hand puppet than a marionette?Note that this "can" is Austin's frog at the bottom of the beer mug.Now it is open for some genius of pessimism to discover for us some sort of contra-Darwinian patterns of motiveless malignancy which would permit us to reconceptualize our view of nature as a sort of Manichaean struggle between Mother Nature a...

I take the debate about free will very seriously. It's one of the few areas where I think a common-sense understanding (that we all have it) is wrong, and a philosophical dissection of the concept will do a lot of good. Many books on the subject, though, are unbearably dry and bog down in technical discussions that eventually bore even tech-y philosophers like myself. This one doesn't. It reaches a conclusion that I am in total agreement with, and it does so without "cheating" by avoiding any of...

This book should be called Varieties of Determinism Worth Wanting, or Varieties of Determinism Worth Having the Illusion that We Want, But are Incapable of Because Everything is Pre-ordained, Anyway.Whatever the title, this book doesn't describe any credable model of freedom.

Dennett spends half his time making the case for determinism, and the other half laying out the argument for why it's really not that scary. He uses very clear language to keep the book accessible even to people without backgrounds in philosophy, which is good. Philosophers are weird, y'all.

"The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the overexamined life is nothing to write home about either." pg. 87

This is one of my favorite books of all time.

Much more clear and focused than his later 'Freedom Evolves'. Probably recommend this to those new to the free will discussion who haven't yet familiarized themselves with compatibilism.

An easy read for those interested in the topic. Basically, Dennett argues that humans are information-processing creatures with the ability to take in cues from the environment, reflect, learn, deliberate, and maintain control over our operations - and not animals subjected to a life of repeating mindless, pre-determined behaviour. It is, therefore, rational for us to believe in free will - or at least the illusion of free will.“What we want when we want free will is the power to decide our cour...

The book came highly recommended, so I was deeply disappointed. The non-problem that Dennett wants to solve comes from 19th Century physics, which led to the belief that the world is deterministic. How can we reconcile this with our experienced perception of free will? While the whole book is meant to provide an answer to this question, I could not find them. To the best of my knowledge, after reading this book, I believe that Dennett has no answers. First, note that 20th Century physics, based

Reading this, I was struck by how similar Dennett’s so-called compatiblist position is to the so-called incompatibilist positions of Sam Harris and Galen Strawson (the other authors I’ve read on free will recently). The best I can tell, though they put it differently, they all agree that it doesn’t make sense to punish people who have done wrong merely for the sake of punishing them, but it does often make sense to punish people for the sake of deterring them or similar people from continuing to...

This book is a good place to start if you (like me) are unfamiliar with the terms of philosophy and have some questions about free will vs. determinism. My favorite parts of the book were the quotes by other authors (it gave me ideas for what to read next). I did not like that the basis of Dennett's argument for free will was based on the assumption that God does not exist. In many respects, this book swayed me toward the opposing arguments the author was trying to debunk.

This is simply one of the best approaches to the topic of free will that I have ever read. Dennett is impressive in articulating and flushing out the nuances of the varieties of free will and is even better at convincingly marrying the groundwork of scientific deterministic principles with a compatible variant of free will. Libertarians should read this book.

More formal philosophy in background would have helped. Everything he said was well argued and made sense, but he was generally reacting to and responding to quesions in contemporary and historical philosophy.

A real slog that only a technical and philosophy nerd could love. Great topic, but not an engaging read for most people, I would wager.

Fundamentally disappointing. I went in hoping for a good defence of compatiblism and got nothing other than a few bland assertions

Read for Free Will & Responsibility course.

Rather free-wheeling but yet a good starting point to sort some of the confusions in the free will debate.

Avoid at all costs. Dennett does not define free will the way most of us do. He has his own idiosyncratic definition. That, combined with his personal lexicon and tendency to confabulate, makes this a nightmare in philosophy.If you do read this book, try reading Sam Harris's book Free Will. The contrast in clarity will amaze you...

Dan Dennett's Elbow Room is pretty good. It's about free will, a perennial subject that's intriguing for any person who's ever stopped to wonder if the regularities of the universe mean that we're all somehow less free. It may, at first blush, seem like a fool's errand to wonder about such things, or to even get into the mindset to see what the so-called problem is. But it basically comes down to this. We live in a world where God or Nature has inscribed laws on the way the world works. This goe...

This is an very good and somewhat unusual analysis of the question of Free Will. One of his more purely philosophical works, Dennett breaks down the question of Free Will into several components and addresses these in turn. Although quite easy to follow, it is quite a dense work (much ground is covered over its 172 pages) and he does not describe the historical debate about Free Will (that is 2,500 years old) - so I would recommend that any reader familiarise themselves with the historical appro...