Elbow Room

The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting

De: Daniel C Dennett

Narrado por: Don Hagen

In this landmark 1984 work on free will, Daniel Dennett makes a case for compatibilism. His aim, as he writes in the preface to this new edition, was a cleanup job, "saving everything that mattered about the everyday concept of free will while jettisoning the impediments". In Elbow Room, Dennett argues that the varieties of free will worth wanting - those that underwrite moral and artistic responsibility - are not threatened by advances in science but distinguished, explained, and justified in detail.

Dennett tackles the question of free will in a highly original and witty manner, drawing on the theories and concepts of fields that range from physics and evolutionary biology to engineering, automata theory, and artificial intelligence. He shows how the classical formulations of the problem in philosophy depend on misuses of imagination, and he disentangles the philosophical problems of real interest from the "family of anxieties" in which they are often enmeshed - imaginary agents and bogeymen, including the Peremptory Puppeteer, the Nefarious Neurosurgeon, and the Cosmic Child Whose Dolls We Are.

Putting sociobiology in its rightful place, he concludes that we can have free will and science, too. He explores reason, control and self-control, the meaning of "can" and "could have done otherwise", responsibility and punishment, and why we would want free will in the first place. A fresh listening of Dennett's book shows how much it can still contribute to current discussions of free will.

This edition includes as its afterword Dennett's 2012 Erasmus Prize essay.

©1984, 2015 Daniel C. Dennett (P)2015 Gildan Media LLC

Reseñas de la Crítica

"True classics are dazzling when they are written and should be dazzling forever. Daniel Dennett's Elbow Room makes the cut as he captures what a thorough analysis of the problem of free will looks like. Bravo!" (Michael S. Gazzaniga, professor of psychology and director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind, University of California, Santa Barbara)

Two Elbow Room Books

I was looking to buy Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson and without realizing there were two books with the same title got this one by my mistake. That being said, I found Dennett's Elbow Room to be too professional for me. It seemed I was looking up every other word to find the meaning.

You will be disappointed

The description made me so excited, because it sounds like a really interesting and deep book.
Boy was I let down. The author try’s way to hard to fill his pages with really big words. It takes him a whole chapter to ramble on about what could easily be expressed in a few sentences.
I’ve been listening to it for 3.5 hours now and I can’t tel you a single point that has been made.
The narrator almost whistles with ever s sound.
It is free after all. So I’m not so disappointed.
But I was for sure let down.

Boring sophistry denying the obvious

I've heard Sam Harris and Sapolsky's takes (anti free will/incompatibilist) and found them convincing. They are also extremely clear and engaging. You can feel the well-intentioned honesty in their writing. It's funny and it carries you along. The Sapolsky/Dennett debate on Youtube seemed to just be them arguing about semantics: they agree that the universe is deterministic, and then just disagree over whether "intelligent self control" (which does of course exist) should be termed "free will".

Dennett, in this book, takes hours and hours (even at 2.5 speed) to say we have the free will of a sufficiently complex deterministic robot. He talks about how we start out with the luck of what nature/nurture gets us (fair enough -- Sapolsky/Harris agree), but then implies that, at some moment, after making enough decisions, we somehow magically acquire skill and responsibility and agency. What possible accumulation of mechanistic complexity could transform into its opposite?

He talks about choice and opportunity and decisions but they're all terms that could apply to domino-bots just as well, which he acknowledges. It's utterly a "wretched subterfuge" to call this free will -- and incredibly boring to boot. Listening to long, rambling thought experiments in this book trying to establish that the term should be used in this silly, neutered way was like listening in on a Soviet bureaucratic meeting over whether to change the logo for the provincial people's group or whatever. Spoiler: they kept it gray. It's just a term with a lot of historical baggage, divorced from the meaning most people hold it to have. It's not worth arguing about, and if a sufficiently complex deterministic domino-bot can have "free will", what's the point of keeping the term?

Good points but rambling

This book successfully convinced me to accept compatibilism at least to some degree. However it overall felt rambling and not focused. The author could have built a more direct case. Felt like this could have been slimmed down to a focused long essay.

reader is excellent

this is a book you need to sit down and really listen to, to fully understand