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Arguments for the existence of a soul part III (free will)

submitted by Nicki Hansen

(gwiz665)
1 decade 4 years 11 months 1 week ago

YT:
"Professor Kagan discusses in detail the argument of free will as proof for the existence of an immaterial soul. The argument consists of three premises: 1) We have free will. 2) Nothing subject to determinism has free will. 3) All purely physical systems are subject to determinism. The conclusion drawn from this is that humans are not a purely physical system; but Professor Kagan explains why this argument is not truly compelling. In addition, near-death experiences and the Cartesian argument are discussed at length."

Previous lecture: http://www.videosift.com/video/Plato-s-Phaedo-and-Arguments-for-the-existence-of-a-soul-II

Next lecture: http://www.videosift.com/video/Arguments-for-the-existence-of-the-soul-IV-Plato-s-Forms

Playlist of the entire course: http://www.videosift.com/playlists/mauz15/Philosophy-of-Death-Yale-University

7 Comments

Tags for this video have been changed from 'free will, yale courses, lecture, death, philosophy, metaphysics, what is the self' to 'free will, yale courses, lecture, death, determinism, metaphysics, what is the self' - edited by mauz15

Moving this video to gwiz665's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

*beg

Sending this video to Beggar's Canyon to plea for a little attention - beg requested by original submitter gwiz665.

I haven't made it very far into the video, but I'm assuming the rest of it works under the original premises: We have free will, and the universe is deterministic.

I'm not confident in either of these assumptions. As far as we know, quantum physics is not deterministic (it's all probabilities). It may be deterministic, but we haven't found this to be the case so far. If quantum behavior is used in the brain (which some scientists think) then that could be a source of our inherent unpredictability even without the existence of "free will".

Free will is also suspect. As a notable neural biologist said, the more we learn about the brain, the less room there seems to be for free will (sorry, I forgot his name). Social Psychology has also documented the profound effect that the world around us has on our actions. One conclusion within Social Psychology is that "humans are primarily a product of their situations and genetics".

There is also the problem that the "soul" is currently undefinable. The general argument seems to be that "we do not completely understand human cognition, so there must be a super-physical component". That may very well be the case, but there are also plenty of cognitive models that fit our current understanding of the mind without the need for anything supernatural.

*length=48:02

The duration of this video has been updated from unknown to 48:02 - length declared by ReverendTed.

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