Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting
I've been reading Dan Dennett's Elbow Room, The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting for the last week or so, and I have very mixed feelings. While he takes some very interesting approaches has some excellent points to be made regarding various deterministic (and nondeterministic) perspectives on the problem of free will, it seems to me he still hasnt quite situated himself outside of the problem of universal causation. It would seem that Dennett, within his theory of evolution and free-floating rationales, views Free Will, at least in some minimal sense as having a real ontological existence. As mother nature has formed creatures able to respond to the environment in ways which take into account, through predictive behavior, at least some possibility of alternate futures, Dennett views these deliberative behaviors as unique in the causal nexus. These representations of alternate futures which may never come into being (here Dennett has an excellent description of the future ...