The Problem of Induction and the Problem of Free Will

This article is a sequel to my monograph 'Inference Belief and Interpretation in Science'. It looks at the self of an individual as a complex system and explores the roots of free will to self-linked psychological resources. The apparent conflict between free will and determinism is examined in the light of the complexity of the self-linked processes. 


Click here to read

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Read my Bengali article on Philosophy of Mathematics

Starting from the work of Gottlob Frege and the success and failure of the logicist trend in the philosophy of mathematics, and then having a brief look at Zermelo-Frenkel set theory, I address a few basic issues in Mathematical Realism , also termed Platonism in mathematics. While prominent names in mathematics are known to have adopted the Platonist position, the latter is not free of problems of interpretation rooted deeply in our view of what mathematical truth is all about. I then counterpose the intuitionist view of mathematics against the Platonist view and briefly outline David Hilbert's project of looking for the consistency of Mathematics, aiming to reconcile the finitary approach with the Platonist point of view. This also engendered the possibility of a resolution between the realist and the intuitionist points of view, but that possibility was thwarted to a considerable extent by Goedel's incompleteness theorems. This leads to the position that different trends i...
Read more

Read my Bengali article on the pervasive role of Inductive Inference in the sciences

Science is commonly assumed to be the last word in logic and objectivity. In reality, there is a pervasive role of Inductive Inference in the construction of scientific theories, where cognitive factors entrenched in the human psyche assume relevance.  These include a wide spectrum of beliefs that the human mind makes use of in navigating through an unknown and uncertain world. At the end of the day, the sciences emerge  as an interpretation of reality......   Click to read
Read more

Doppler Effect for Accelerated Motion

The familiar Doppler shift formula assumes that the source and the observer are in uniform motion. However, it is not difficult to generalize to the case of the source and the observer being in arbitrarily specified motion. The present article is adapted from a chapter of my book 'Basic Physics: Principles and Concepts'. Click here to read 
Read more