Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute is presenting the seminar, Free Will and the Brain: Some Current Confusions at 12:15 p.m., Monday in the Medium Conference Room at the Santa Fe Institute.
Abstract: There has been a recent explosion of writing by neuroscientists and psychologists about how “science shows us” that we don’t have free will.
The problem with this work is that it confuses several quite different issues.
Once we sort it out, we find that there have been in fact some important discoveries about the nature of our autonomy, such as it is.
These will not require us to radically change our policies regarding responsibility and punishment (as some have suggested) but they call for some significant reforms in our thinking.
SFI Host: Doug Erwin
The Santa Fe Institute‘s mission is to foster a transdisciplinary research community that endeavors to expand the boundaries of scientific understanding.
Its aim is to discover and comprehend the common fundamental principles in physical, computational, biological, and social systems that underlie many of the most profound problems facing science and society today.
