Galen Strawson on Free Will Pessimism

Melvyn Bragg is the interviewer:

The issue about whether or not "science" tells us the Universe is deterministic or random doesn't really have any relevance, because science presupposes human agency: reductionist science describes conditions that need to be established in a laboratory, and the only way to do this is for a human being to carry out whatever steps are necessary to bring those conditions about. If the subject of the scientific theory is a natural phenomenon then there must be some necessary context in which it occurs and again the science requires that a human being makes those particular observations, of monkeys in the forest in Costa Rica, say, or scientists in a laboratory in Berkeley.

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Vitaly Vanchurin on an idea inspired by modern cosmology: 


Link to his publications on INSPIRE. 

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Alison Gopnik has an interesting perspective: see Alison Gopnik - The Evolution of Human Intelligences.

It should be clear from that that a lot of this is going on in language. See Jazz Maia and Steve Keen on Hope, ... Sara Imari Walker on Life.

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Mr Rogers' famous appeal to the Senate Subcommittee on Communications in 1969:


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