Freedom Evolves

Table Of Contents

freedom evolvesPreface

Chapter 1: Natural Freedom
Learning What We Are
I Am Who I Am
The Air We Breathe
Dumbo’s Magic Feather and the Peril of Paulina

Chapter 2: A Tool For Thinking About Determinism
Some Useful Oversimplifications
From Physics to Design in Conway’s Life World
Can We Get The Deus ex Machina?
From Slow-motion Avoidance to Star Wars
The Birth of Evitability

Chapter 3: Thinking About Determinism
Possible Worlds
Causation
Austin’s Putt
A Computer Chess Marathon
Events without Causes in a Deterministic Universe
Will the Future Be Like the Past?

Chapter 4: A Hearing For Libertarianism
The Appeal of Libertarianism
Where Should We Put the Much-needed Gap?
Kane’s Model of Indeterministic Decision-making
“If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything”
Beware of Prime Mammals
How Can It Be “Up to Me”?

Chapter 5: Where Does All The Design Come From?
Early Days
The Prisoner’s Dilemma
E Pluribus Unum?
Digression: The Threat of Genetic Determinism
Degrees of Freedom and the Search for Truth

Chapter 6: The Evolution Of Open Minds
How Cultural Symbionts Turn Primates into Persons
The Diversity of Darwinian Explanations
Nice Tools, but You Still Have to Use Them

Chapter 7: The Evolution Of Moral Agency
Benselfishness
Being Good in Order to Seem Good
Learning to Deal with Yourself
Our Costly Merit Badges

Chapter 8: Are You Out Of The Loop?
Drawing the Wrong Moral
Whenever the Spirit Moves You
A Mind-writer’s View
A Self of One’s Own

Chapter 9: Bootstrapping Ourselves Free
How We Captured Reasons and Made Them Our Own
Psychic Engineering and the Arms Race of Rationality
With a Little Help from My Friends
Autonomy, Brainwashing, and Education

Chapter 10: The Future Of Human Freedom
Holding the Line against Creeping Exculpation
“Thanks, I Needed That”
Are We Freer Than We Want to Be?
Human Freedom Is Fragile

Bibliography
Index