Positive Illusions, Perceived Control and the Free Will Debate

Positive Illusions, Perceived Control and the Free Will Debate

It is a common assumption among both philosophers and psychologists that having accurate beliefs about ourselves and the world around us is always the epistemic gold standard. However, there is gathering data from social psychology that suggest that illusions are quite prevalent in our everyday thinking and that some of these illusions may even be conducive to our overall well being. In this pa...

Agency and the Free Will debate [Extended Abstract]

This paper will take a close look of the term agency in Game Studies, identifying how it is presently used (on those occasions when it is) and suggesting how it could be used more cogently. Like so many terms in Game Studies-narrative and immersion as two of the more prominent examples – any author seeking to use the term has first to define it, resulting in a general avoidance of its use. Agen...

The Scope of Man's Free Will

II : From acausality illusions and free will to final theories , mathematics , and music

mathematical forms, handling vast numbers of possibilities at once. In some cases it can help to expose the aesthetic beauty and economy, and the insightfulness, of the theoretical structures that physicists like Dirac, Einstein, Feynman, Salam, Weinberg, and others have used to such awesome effect. Careful serial reasoning systematises and economises large parts of the consistency checking pro...

The costs and benefits of positive illusions

Positive illusions are associated with unrealistic optimism about the future and an inflated assessment of one's abilities. They are prevalent in normal life and are considered essential for maintaining a healthy mental state, although, there are disagreements to the extent to which people demonstrate these positive illusions and whether they are beneficial or not. But whatever the situation, i...