Publisher's Synopsis
Most of us see ourselves as free human beings, even though we are subject to the natural laws that rule everything in the world. Fortunately, our humanity need not be diminished when we see the brain as a complicated machine. Deliberation and Reason looks at how we, as humans, decide what to do. We all feel that we make free decisions, but we know that our brains are objects in the physical world, bound by the laws of physics. Here Richard Baron offers a novel way out of this age-old dilemma. We are not really free, but that does not matter because we can still see ourselves as if we were free. Merely seeing ourselves like that is good enough. It can support our self-conception as creatures who are free as well as rational. And it makes room for the feeling that we have of being in control of our lives. We can use the same approach to accommodate our sense of freely deciding what evidence is important, and how it should be used, when we try to discover new truths. Going beyond freedom, the book explores how we see our actions and beliefs as rational, and why we can have confidence in our beliefs despite the claims of sceptics that we know nothing. Finally, the picture that is built up allows us to locate ourselves as fully human subjects, within the objective world as scientists see it.
