Dennett Argument Analysis

992 Words4 Pages

In addition to genetic influence, environmental factors plays a vital role in human activity decisions. Dennett brings up a certain profession that influences people’s actions: advertisement. People are constantly bombarded with imagery and representation that affects their thought process in simple places like the grocery store. When deciding what brand of spaghetti sauce to get, consumers deliberation includes memory of several things. What commercial is catchiest? What colors and overall product design appeal to me the most? What did I buy the last time? What did my parents usually buy? Did I hear anything in the news about the company recently? All of these factor into a person's decision, some more than others, making it easier for them …show more content…

Enough of a certain influence, say an advertisement or social norm, can actually cause neuronal firing to happen in the brain and alter our thought process. Human don’t have the choice of what to think about when bombarded with influences and I would say that their free will choice is more in the control of those external factors than the human themselve. For example, imagine if a person is raised in an area where people always kiss to greet, but they recently moved to a place where a hand wave is the only way people greet. When the newcomer greets someone, they kiss them and the person that they greeted is disgusted. We wouldn’t blame the persons ill behavior on them, even though they did all the actions that are to blame for making the other person feel uncomfortable. The new person made a choice based on influences that they thought of when trying to greet someone themself. I believe that their old society's norms are to blame for the persons disgust. On a broader scale, nobody can truly hold 100% responsibility for their actions and possess free will because there are too many external factors that play into every aspect of our lives. The world, destiny, and past have more free will over our lives than we have of our …show more content…

Robots are designed to do things, or learn to do things, and are ultimately controlled by their maker. When a robot malfunctions, the robot is not blamed, the creator is to blame. Humans that don’t have their own free will cannot create a machine that possesses it’s own. Robot’s programming has been compared to human genes. Similarly to how human genes affect human’s choices and actions, robots programming instruct the robot on what to do with certain stimuli. This may lead some critics to believe then that robot programming has free will but that is also incorrect. Human’s make robots and are influences their actions while genes and the environment are influences human’s actions to even make robots. As far as environmental influences, robots live in the same world as humans do and experience the same environmental influences, even if they interpret them in a different manner than humans. For both humans and robots, the world, destiny, and the past hold are responsible for their creation and

Open Document