Talk:Freedom Evolves

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents 1 NPOV 2 where's the "E" word? 3 Kill this page 4 Death by assimulation 5 Improvement suggestion

[edit] NPOV

He says:

"moreover if people could opt out of moral responsibility, wouldn't they have to be locked up like dangerous animals"

yet this is precisely what *does* happen doesn't it??

Needs some NPOV work. --Anonymous

Yeah, it's based too heavily on the original author's interaction with the book. --User:Bbtommy (not logged in)

Wow.. it doesn't just need SOME NPOV, it needs to be rewritten entirely. The whole article is the author's biased opinion, both against the philosophy and the man. --Augur

Agreed. This is a horrible mess. I'm dropping one paragraph as it has no content except bias.

This is basically a review of the book; it goes completely against the intention of Wikipedia. Maybe this should go up for deletion? --rem120

Guys, I gave it a bit of a rewrite- I think it is a lot more NPOV, and explains it a bit better. But I'm starting to read the book, so I can probably improve on it. BTW, does anyone know whether the link to the Amazon page about it is kosher? It contains a lot of reasonable quality reviews, but I worry it might be construed as commercial. (and no, it defintely should not go up for deletion!) --maru 19:08, 6 May 2005 (UTC)

Consider these two sentences:

"But it appears his view of free will is not particularly original or threatening"

And:

"The views are solidly presented, if not particularly new or groundbreaking."

Can these be described as maintaining NPOV at all? --Chasuk 16:15(PST), 14 July 2005

Chasuk- the current version of the article needs to be changed, preferably by someone who has actually read the book. "we can still be free in some other important senses. The important point for a compatibilist case is exactly what senses these might be, but Dennett is not very clear about this." <-- this is really offensive. Dennett has always been clear about the type of freedom we have: we are free to the extent that our brains allow us to make use of what we have learned in the past in order to help us generate useful behavior now and in the future. Dennett has emphasized the fact that we control our behavior, which is enough for morality. We need not worry about having more than an illusion of the God-like determinism-defying behavioral choice that philosophers have long seen as a requirement for human moralality. If someone wants to say that Dennett's work is not new, they need to cite other authors who did what Dennett does: weave materialism and evolutionary thinking into a naturalistic account of meaning, morality and freedom. --Memenen 02:39, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

The stuff about Dennett invoking quantum randomness is completely and totally wrong. Dennett's gone on at length about how quantum randomness is irrelevant and not a potential source of free will. This article isn't just biased, it's deeply ignorant and needs to be rewritten from scratch, or else removed entirely. It's worse than worthless. Alienus 16:26, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] where's the "E" word?

The current article is amazing....probably the only description of this book that does not discuss the importance of evolution in Dennett's argument (mentioning "evolves" in the title of the book does not count). --68.109.166.14 02:43, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I added some data about it and the game theoretical justifications. --maru 19:08, 6 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Kill this page

Should we even have a page that's nothing more than a book review? Dennett's ideas should be covered under his own page, or on pages appropriate to the ideas themselves (compatibilism, behaviorism, etc), not here. Anyone think this page should be allowed to live? --Alienus 22:20, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

There are many good wikipedia articles about books. If you destroy this page, it will just be created again. --JWSchmidt 00:34, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

No kidding. --Maru (talk) Contribs 01:12, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps there are many good articles, but this isn't one of them. Nor, for that matter, do I see anyone working to improve it. I think it's time for us to either put up or shut up, so to speak. --Alienus 03:52, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Why? What deadline is there? --Maru (talk) Contribs 04:33, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

I don't see any reason to think we'll EVER achieve a useful page on this topic, so it's not a matter of deadline but viability. Alienus 05:02, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

If you really feel that way, then go ahead and list this article on Articles for Deletion. I can tell you what will happen though: it will overwhelmingly be voted to keep, and I will improve the article with my copy sooner than I had planned or wanted to. That is all. It will definitely not be deleted. --Maru (talk) Contribs 05:11, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

I don't get it. Why did you restore the text I deleted? It's an opinionated book review from some guy's personal website. It's totally subjective. It is inappropriate to Wikipedia, and should never have been put in this article in the first place. I don't think that the article should be deleted, and a vfd will most likely result in a vote to cleanup rather than to delete. If you want to keep or rehibilitate portions of the review, go aherad. But there's no reason to keep the POV portions. — goethean ॐ 15:48, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

I restored it because there was, for all its POV, a lot of good information in there. It is not ideal, but if we deleted everything but the ideal on Wikipedia, we'd be left with no articles. --Maru (talk) Contribs 16:16, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Death by assimulation

What little content of value there is in this article should be scraped up and tossed back in with Daniel_Dennett. Alienus 07:15, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

I think it is a waste of time to delete this wikipedia article. If it is deleted, it will simply be created again. As an alternative to deletion, I suggest that we start an article improvement process. As a first step, I suggest that everyone with a copy of the book agree to contribute a summary of the contents of one chapter and that we continue to add chapter descriptions to the article until the entire book is described. --JWSchmidt 16:00, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm impatient with that approach, so I made an attempt at removing some of the obvious problems. What now? Alienus 22:11, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

We should add a description of Dennett's treatment of evitability. --JWSchmidt 00:46, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Improvement suggestion

Could some further explanation be added about the book's conclusion that "Evitability ... actually requires, that human action be deterministic" i.e. what is the argument that leads to this? SP-KP 02:05, 19 February 2006 (UTC)