Elbow room
In Elbow Room, Dennett shows how the classical formulation of the problem in philosophy depend on misuses of imagination, and he disentangles the philosophical problems of real interest from the "family of anxieties" they get enmeshed in-imaginary agents, bogeymen, and dire prospects that seem to threaten our freedom.
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Dennett has you covered there too. His book "Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting" is a must-read on this topic.
- Dennett did better, IMO, in "Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting"
- I recommend reading "Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting" by Daniel Dennett to get a better handle on what the term "free will" might actually mean.
- I recommend Dennett's review of Harris's book to people who recommend it: https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/13814
Also Elbow Room, or, better, Freedom Evolves.
- Does such a detector imply that there is no freewill? Would determinism imply it?
Imagine the predictor works, what does that mean? One second prior to the action, the course you would take is set. This is actually probably a point in favor of the possibility of freewill; humans are course-taking machines, we have a whole life (and our evolution before that) to acquire dispositions that will one day help us survive. What kind of freewill do we want? Do we want to be "free to dodge a brick when thrown at us" or "free, one second before the brick arrives, to duck or not duck". Which of these is the important one? The kind of freewill we really want isn't the kind where we are free floating actors, it is the kind where our history, personal and evolutionary, dictates our present. The point is, real freedom is not about being without limits, it is about having sensible responses to ones environment; creatures evolve the freedom to avoid being eaten, the freedom to anticipate others' actions, the freedom to manipulate other agents with our clever words. Dan Dennett makes a better case for this than I, please look into his wonderful books on the topic.
Daniel Dennett: --Elbow Room --Freedom Evolves
- Maybe you discovered Dennett after 1992, but he was a well-known and widely published philosopher long before.
"Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting" was a landmark work and was published in 1984.
"The Minds I" (w/Hofstadter) was, relatively speaking, a hugely popular work published in 1981.
In 1993, the cover of "Dennett and his critics" began
> Daniel Dennett is arguably one of the most influential yet radical philosophers in America today.
Doesn't sound much like someone who "became widely known" after a book published in 1992.
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