Do you believe in free will?
Well… what choice do you have?
Pigweed and Crowhill tackle one of philosophy’s oldest problems: Are we really making choices, or are our decisions simply the inevitable result of physics, biology, genetics, experience, and everything that happened before?
Pigweed makes the case for determinism, tracing the chain of cause and effect from billiard balls all the way back to the Big Bang. Crowhill tries to defend free will — first considering Cartesian dualism and quantum uncertainty, then asking whether a purely physical description of the human mind can ever be a complete explanation of rational thought.
Along the way, they wrestle with some harder questions: What does “free will” actually mean? Does being influenced make a choice less free? Could everything be determined while we still genuinely make decisions? And if nobody could have done otherwise, what happens to moral responsibility, punishment, praise, blame — and regret?
Plus: Laplace’s Demon, Thomas Aquinas, compatibilism, Jonathan Edwards, the French Revolution, egregores, a suspicious-looking IPA, and perhaps the greatest philosophy joke ever told.
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