Citation for this page in APA citation style.           Close


Core Concepts

Adequate Determinism
Agent-Causality
Alternative Possibilities
Causa Sui
Causality
Certainty
Chance
Chance Not Direct Cause
The Cogito Model
Compatibilism
Conceptual Analysis
Control
Could Do Otherwise
Creativity
De-liberation
Determination
Determination Fallacy
Determinism
Disambiguation
Either Way
Ethical Fallacy
Extreme Libertarianism
Event Has Many Causes
"Free Will"
Free Will in Antiquity
Free Will Mechanisms
Free Will Requirements
Future Contingency
Hard Incompatibilism
Illusion of Determinism
Illusionism
Impossibilism
Incompatibilism
Indeterminacy
Indeterminism
Libertarianism
Liberty of Indifference
Luck
Modest Libertarianism
Moral Responsibility
Moral Sentiments
Naturalism
Necessity
Noise
Non-Causality
Pre-determinism
Predictability
Probability
Pseudo-Problem
Random When?/Where?
Rational Fallacy
Responsibility
Same Circumstances
Science Advance Fallacy
Second Thoughts
Semicompatibilism
Soft Causality
Standard Argument
Temporal Sequence
Tertium Quid
Torn Decision
Two-Stage Models
Ultimate Responsibility
Uncertainty
Up To Us

Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
G.E.M.Anscombe
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Augustine
A.J.Ayer
Mark Balaguer
William Belsham
Isaiah Berlin
Bernard Berofsky
Susanne Bobzien
George Boole
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Carneades
Ernst Cassirer
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Donald Davidson
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
John Martin Fischer
Owen Flanagan
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Carl Ginet
Nicholas St. John Green
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
William James
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Christine Korsgaard
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Leucippus
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
John Locke
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Alfred Mele
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Friedrich Nietzsche
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Karl Popper
H.A.Prichard
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
G.H. von Wright
R. Jay Wallace
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

Margaret Boden
Neils Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Max Born
Stephen Brush
Arthur Holly Compton
Abraham de Moivre
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Albert Einstein
Richard Feynman
A.O.Gomes
Joshua Greene
Jacques Hadamard
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
Pierre-Simon Laplace
David Layzer
Ernst Mach
Henry Margenau
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
Jacques Monod
Steven Pinker
Max Planck
Henri Poincaré
Erwin Schrödinger
Herbert Simon
B. F. Skinner
William Thomson (Kelvin)
John von Neumann
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg

 
Creativity
Creativity requires that new information come into the world. It must be information that was not implicit in earlier states of the world.
Human creativity requires the same freedom of thought and action needed for free will, our Cogito Model.
If everything created was predetermined, then all the works of Mozart would have been implicit in the first beat of an aboriginal drum.
Einstein's E=mc2 would have been in the first Aristotle syllogism.
Cosmological systems are creative, because atoms and molecules did not exist in the first three minutes of the universe. And the great astrophysical structures made from atoms, like galaxies, stars, and planets, did not exist in the first million years.

Biological systems are creative. Darwinian evolution accounts for the creation of new species of organisms.

Many organisms create informational structures outside of themselves, in the world, like beehives, bird nests, and beaver dams.

Humans are the most conspicuous creators and consumers of new informational structures, altering the face of planet Earth. And they create the constructed ideal world of thought, of intellect, of spirit, including the laws of nature, in which we humans play a role as co-creator. We call this the Sum.

All creative processes have the same underlying physics as the cosmic creative process.

Biological processes add the element of natural selection. This is accomplished by something Jacques Monod called the teleonomic information, 1 the purposive element in all life.

For Teachers
For Scholars
Notes:

1. Monod, Jacques (1971), Chance and Necessity, p. 14.

This allows us to put forward at least the principle of a definition of a species' "teleonomic level." All teleonomic structures and performances can be regarded as corresponding to a certain quantity of information which must be transmitted for these structures to be realized and these performances accomplished. Let us call this quantity "teleonomic information." A given species' "teleonomic level" may then be said to correspond to the quantity of information which, on the average and per individual, must be transferred to assure the generation-to-generation transmission of the specific content of reproductive invariance.


Chapter 3.7 - The Ergod Chapter 4.2 - The History of Free Will
Part Three - Value Part Five - Problems
Normal | Teacher | Scholar