All Entries Tagged With: "Murray Gell-Mann"
Sapient Apes Ascendant: The Costs and Benefits of Human Agency
If the messages that are embedded in folklore mean anything, then until very recently humans were terrified of the natural environment (Grimm, et. al., 1915). In many cases, the scariest part of folk tales involves foolish individuals–often kids, in order to emphasize the cautionary nature of the tales–who fall prey to one of the many [...]
When You’re Wrong…You’re Right? Stephen Hawking’s Implausible Defense of Determinism
One can hardly broach the subject of free will or human agency without acknowledging the long-standing and unresolved philosophical debate regarding agency vs. determinism (Campbell, et. al., 2004). To provide an illustration of the extent of disagreement over this dualism, determinists, such as Hawking and Mlodinow (2010), have argued that agency and free will are [...]