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Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life

Compatibilists generally claim that a person is free as long as he is free from any outer or inner compulsions that would prevent him from acting on his actual desires and intentions.

Sam Harris • Free Will

He maintained that material objects only exist through being perceived. To the objection that, in that case, a tree, for instance, would cease to exist if no one was looking at it, he replied that God always perceives everything; if there were no God, what we take to be material objects would have a jerky life, suddenly leaping into being when we l

Bertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy

pessimism also has its own ontological argument: existence is that beyond which nothing worse can be conceived.

Eugene Thacker • Infinite Resignation

“I think in 50 or 100 years time we will have discovered the entity that is consciousness,” he told me. “It will be taken for granted that it wasn’t produced by the brain, and it doesn’t die when you die.”

Alex Blasdel • The New Science of Death: ‘There’s Something Happening in the Brain That Makes No Sense’

The existence of free will meant that we couldn’t know the future. And we knew free will existed because we had direct experience of it. Volition was an intrinsic part of consciousness. Or was it? What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew s

Ted Chiang • Stories of Your Life and Others

Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.

Sam Harris • Free Will

In ordinary language, we frequently speak of machinery or ideas ‘doing’ things in our lives. But they do nothing. People – human persons – produce, operate and apply their creations. The problem with assigning agency, even informally, to the nonhuman is that this disguises the strength of human control, limited though it is in other respects. It le... See more

Bennett Gilbert • On hope, philosophical personalism and Martin Luther King Jr | Aeon Essays

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.