Has Neuroscience Disproved Free Will? | Dr. Daniel De Haan
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2019
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This lecture was given by Dr. Daniel De Haan at Stanford University on November 12th, 2018.
For more information on upcoming lectures, visit thomisticinstitute.org
About the speaker:
Daniel De Haan is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at the University of Cambridge working on the neuroscience strand of the Templeton World Charity Foundation’s Theology, Philosophy of Religion, and the Sciences Project, directed by Professor Sarah Coakley. He is conducting research on the intersections of theology, philosophy, and neuroscience in the Faculty of Divinity and in Lisa Saksida’s Translational Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for all coming. This is a really packed house. That's a really wonderful audience. They must have advertised really well. I hope most of you are here by your own volition. Can everyone hear me okay? Yeah? You can hear me? Oh, speak up. This thumbs up me and it's good. Speak up. All right. A few questions to ask. In answering these questions before you just did, like, can you hear me, |
| 0:23.6 | and your decision or lack of decision to laugh, was that voluntary or involuntary? |
| 0:32.0 | When you chose the seat that you sat in, how did you arrive at that seat? |
| 0:37.4 | You fortunate seat sitters. |
| 0:39.3 | Standing people, are you disappointed? |
| 0:44.3 | You arrived with a pre-planned idea to have a seat, which has been deprived. |
| 0:50.3 | How did you know which seat you were going to sit in? |
| 0:53.3 | Are these sort of decisions and influences voluntary? How did you know which seat you were going to sit in? |
| 1:01.3 | Are these sort of decisions and influences voluntary, non-voluntary, caused by free will? |
| 1:04.8 | It was the only seat available and you were the last one in the room, so you were very lucky. |
| 1:05.7 | It was one of you right here. |
| 1:08.6 | You had less of a choice than others. These are questions to have in mind and be thinking about throughout this talk as just, |
| 1:14.6 | what do you even mean by free will and what kind of connection does it have |
| 1:18.6 | to these ordinary practices and activities that you do? |
| 1:23.6 | How do you think about free will as it's performative? |
| 1:30.2 | Is free will something you experience, |
| 1:34.3 | or is it more something that's explanatory of other things you experience? |
| 1:38.1 | Do you think more in terms of the voluntary and the non-voluntary, involuntary, or maybe the intentional, unintentional? |
| 1:42.2 | Which of these are concepts that are articulating something that's descriptive of what you actually |
| 1:47.0 | experience, that you perform, as opposed to something that's meant to be explanatory, |
| 1:51.0 | not necessarily something you experience, but explains those things that you experience. |
| 1:56.0 | How do you think about free will? |
... |
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