Georgeo57

Exploring the Illusion of Free Will
www.causalconsciousness.com

When asked by Susan Blackmore to comment on the prospect that free will is an illusion, fellow philosopher John Searle exclaimed, "That would be a bigger revolution in our thinking than Einstein, or Copernicus, or Newton, or Galileo, or Darwin."  

In his 1943 book Physics and Philosophy, British physicist, astronomer and mathematician Sir James Jeans writes, "Practically all modern philosophers of the first rank -- Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Mill, Alexander, as well as many others -- have been determinists in the sense of admitting the cogency of the arguments for determinism, but many have at the same time been indeterminists in the sense of hoping to find a loophole of escape from these arguments.  Often they conceded that our apparent freedom is an illusion, so that the only loophole they could hope to find would be an explanation as to how the illusion could originate."