This is philosophy bytes with me, David.
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
Philosophy Bytes is available at www.philosophybytes.com.
Philosophy Bytes is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.
One way to exercise my freedom would be to act unpredictably, perhaps not to have a typical introduction to a philosophy Bytes interview, or to cut it abruptly short mid sentence.
That's the view of the famous philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett.
He also believes that humans can have free will even if the world is determinist, in other words, governed by causal laws.
And Daniel Dennett, welcome to philosophy bites.
Delighted to be with you.
The topic we're going to focus on is free will worth wanting?
That seems a slightly strange way into the free will topic, which is usually a question of do we have free will?
Not whether we want it or what's worth wanting.
How did you come at it from this point of view?
Well, I came to realize that many of the issues that philosophers love to talk about when the topic was free will were just irrelevant to anything important.
There's a sort of bait and switch that goes on.
People get excited and worried about free will.
I don't think any topic is more anxiety provoking or more genuinely interesting to everyday people than free will.
But then philosophers replace the interesting issues with technical metaphysical issues which are simply not that important.
Who cares?
We can define lots of varieties of free will that you can't have or that are inconsistent with determinism.