Freedom Evolves

Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? Renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett emphatically answers yes!” Using an array of provocative formulations, Dennett sets out to show how we alone among the animals have evolved minds that give us free will and morality. Weaving a richly detailed narrative, Dennett explains in a series of strikingly original arguments—drawing upon evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, and philosophy—that far from being an enemy of traditional explorations of freedom, morality, and meaning, the evolutionary perspective can be an indispensable ally. In Freedom Evolves, Dennett seeks to place ethics on the foundation it deserves: a realistic, naturalistic, potentially unified vision of our place in nature.

Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.

Preface	p. xi
Natural Freedom
Learning What We Are	p. 1
I Am Who I Am	p. 6
The Air We Breathe	p. 9
Dumbo's Magic Feather and the Peril of Paulina	p. 13
A Tool for Thinking About Determinism
Some Useful Oversimplifications	p. 25
From Physics to Design in Conway's Life World	p. 36
Can We Get the Deus ex Machina?	p. 47
From Slow-motion Avoidance to Star Wars	p. 51
The Birth of Evitability	p. 56
Thinking about Determinism
Possible Worlds	p. 63
Causation	p. 70
Austin's Putt	p. 75
A Computer Chess Marathon	p. 77
Events without Causes in a Deterministic Universe	p. 83
Will the Future Be Like the Past?	p. 89
A Hearing for Libertarianism
The Appeal of Libertarianism	p. 97
Where Should We Put the Much-needed Gap?	p. 103
Kane's Model of Indeterministic Decision-making	p. 108
"If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything"	p. 122
Beware of Prime Mammals	p. 126
How Can It Be "Up to Me"?	p. 134
Where Does All the Design Come from?
Early Days	p. 141
The Prisoner's Dilemma	p. 147
E Pluribus Unum?	p. 150
Digression: The Threat of Genetic Determinism	p. 156
Degrees of Freedom and the Search for Truth	p. 162
The Evolution of Open Minds
How Cultural Symbionts Turn Primates into Persons	p. 170
The Diversity of Darwinian Explanations	p. 181
Nice Tools, but You Still Have to Use Them	p. 186
The Evolution of Moral Agency
Benselfishness	p. 193
Being Good in Order to Seem Good	p. 202
Learning to Deal with Yourself	p. 207
Our Costly Merit Badges	p. 213
Are You Out of the Loop?
Drawing the Wrong Moral	p. 221
Whenever the Spirit Moves You	p. 227
A Mind-writer's View	p. 242
A Self of One's Own	p. 245
Bootstrapping Ourselves Free
How We Captured Reasons and Made Them Our Own	p. 259
Psychic Engineering and the Arms Race of Rationality	p. 267
With a Little Help from My Friends	p. 272
Autonomy, Brainwashing, and Education	p. 281
The Future of Human Freedom
Holding the Line against Creeping Exculpation	p. 289
"Thanks, I Needed That!"	p. 297
Are We Freer Than We Want to Be?	p. 302
Human Freedom Is Fragile	p. 304
Bibliography	p. 311
Index	p. 325
Table of Contents provided by Rittenhouse. All Rights Reserved.

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