determinism | The Short Version

Review of Daniel Dennett’s Elbow Room

May 23, 2017 by Norm Bearrentine Leave a Comment

(I wrote this review in 2010, but never got around to posting it here. He published a more recent edition in 2015 that I may review at some point; there were many issues I didn't get to in this one.) This book reminds me … [Read more...]

When I realized that the idea of god was a joke, I thought that was the end of the story. Later I found that Christianity had shaped my values, and while some were worth keeping, many had lost their foundation—the meaning of life, for example. Something similar happened when I realized that the idea of free will was a joke, and I’ve spent the decades since both those realizations discovering and editing what Julia Galef calls the “orphan beliefs” they left behind. It’s a tricky business, and this blog has been a chronicle of my efforts to puzzle it all out, including reviews of related books. I hope you find it helpful.