We regard ourselves as conscious, thinking creatures who are free to act and are, to some extent, in control of (and hence responsible for) our fate and the fate of others. But science presents a quite different picture of the world, one in which everything is explained in terms of very minute basic particles whose behavior is completely governed by laws of nature. Is there a clash between these two images of the world?
How can the mind, free will, and morality exist if the world is nothing but a conglomeration of law-governed particles? Descartes grapples with these questions in his Meditations , but they are also given vivid articulation in recent films like Twelve Monkeys and The Matrix . Using the Meditations and these films as a framework, we will examine various historical (Aquinas, Hume, Leibniz) and contemporary (Thomas Nagel, Harry Frankfurt, Derek Parfit) philosophers' attempts to reconcile the world as we experience it with the world as described by science. |
