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Books

The Things We Do and Why We Do Them by Constantine Sandis

Constantine Sandis’s critiques of our actions are under scrutiny by Les Reid.

A man is sitting in a restaurant, looking at the menu. “I wonder what my neurons are going to choose tonight,” he says. That joke comes courtesy of John Searle, at the expense of all the determinists, who say that free will is an illusion and that human action is no different from any caused physical process. By opposing them, Searle takes the side of the libertarians (also known as ‘Free Willies’, but not in a serious publication like this), who are opposed to determinism in claiming that conscious agents have a power of choice which chemicals in a reaction do not.

The debate between determinists and libertarians has been rumbling on for centuries.

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