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Sunday, January 27, 2019
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This post is a collection of quotes about free will. There are 9 quotes divided into 3 sections.
A. Free will is a faculty that allows a being to make independent choices (3)
B. Consciousness would be evolutionarily useless without free will (3)
C. Emotion guides behavior but does not dictate behavior (3)
Jacob Bronoswki (1908-1974, mathematician):
1. "What we really mean by free will... is the visualizing of alternatives and making a choice between them." (The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination, 1978)
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914, philosopher):
2. "The truth is, the mind is not subject to 'law' in the same rigid sense that matter is." (The Law of Mind, 1892)
John Dewey (1859-1952, philosopher):
3. "Individuality is the source of whatever is unpredictable in the world." (Time and Individuality, 1940)
David Chalmers (1966-now, philosopher)
4. "Why doesn't all this information-processing go on 'in the dark', free of any inner feel? ...We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery." (Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, 1995)
Amit Goswami (physicist):
5. "In this view, consciousness imposes 'downward causation'. In other words, our free will is real. When we act in the world we are really acting with causal power." (Scientific Proof of the Existence of God, 1997)
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980, philosopher):
6. "Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom." (1936, Imagination: A Psychological Critique)
G. E. Moore (1873-1958, philosopher):
7. "Moral conduct, or duty, is defined as the obligation to select that action which will achieve more good than any alternative action..." (Goodreads.com)
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986, philosopher):
8. "I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom." (The Blood of Others, 1946)
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939, psychologist):
9. "The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains passions." (The Ego and the Id, 1923)
