Ebook: Freedom Evolves

Learning what we are -- I am who I am -- The air we breathe -- Dumbo's magic feather and the peril of Paulina -- Some useful oversimplifications -- From physics to design in Conway's life world -- Can we get the Deus ex machina? -- From slow-motion avoidance to Star Wars -- The birth of evitability -- Possible worlds -- Causation -- Austin's putt -- A computer chess marathon -- Events without causes in a deterministic universe -- Will the future be like the past? -- The appeal of libertarianism -- Where should we put the much-needed gap? -- Kane's model of indeterministic decision-making -- "If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything" -- Beware of prime mammals -- How can it be "up to me"? -- Early days -- The prisoner's dilemma -- E pluribus unum? -- Digression: the threat of genetic determinism -- Degrees of freedom and the search for truth -- How cultural symbionts turn primates into persons -- The diversity of Darwinian explanations -- Nice tools, but you still have to use them -- Benselfishness -- Being good in order to seem good -- Learning to deal with yourself -- Our costly merit badges -- Drawing the wrong moral -- Whenever the spirit moves you -- A mind-writer's view -- A self of one's own -- How we captured reasons and made them our own -- Psychic engineering and the arms race of rationality -- With a little help from my friends -- Autonomy, brainwashing, and education -- Holding the line against creeping exculpation -- "Thanks, I needed that!" -- Are we freer than we want to be? -- Human freedom is fragile.