free-willer

Example Sentences

• "[…] most of us are “free-willers.” We automatically assume we can shape the future, including our technology, in almost any fashion we wish, at least within the constraints of the natural environment. A small but vocal school of determinists, however, argues that we delude ourselves."
• "2006, John Taylor: The Mind: A User’s Manual, Chichester: John Wiley, Part 3, Chapter 18, p. 205, Causality and determinism, in a quantum framework, persist down to the very shortest distances that experiments have been performed in high-energy particle accelerators. I see no way that a person could employ forces above (or even approximately near) what are achieved in those gigantic particle machines to achieve the dream of the free willers: uncaused processes."
• "Here's the challenge to a free willer: Find me the neuron that started this process in this man's brain, the neuron that had an action potential for no reason, where no neuron spoke to it just before."
• "1847, Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal entry dated May 1847, in Stephen E. Whicher (ed.), Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic Anthology, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957, p. 310, The Americans are free-willers, fussy, self-asserting, buzzing all round creation."
• "[…] the saviour is no longer the volition of the full-grown spirit of Man, the Free Willer of Necessity, sword in hand, but simply Love […]"
• "1614, John Robinson, Of Religious Communion Private, & Publique, “Of the Baptism of Infants,” p. 96[a], Since all are by nature alike children of wrath, I would know of these free-willers, how some become the children of God, & beleevers, & some abyde vnder the wrath of God?"