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free will

Rumfoord and Friends: Awful Game Masters; A Reflection on Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan | Castronova on The Sirens of Titan

Ted Castronova   Who’s in charge, anyway? We believe that we have free will, but perhaps we are under the control of a higher being. What if that being is under the control of another being? Who is under the control of another, and so on and so on? Andrew Dabrowski of Indiana University’s mathematics department has developed a metaphysical theory …

Freedom, Purpose and Morality in The Sirens of Titan | Shapshay on The Sirens of Titan

The Sirens of Titan is a novel of ideas that takes the reader on an imaginative romp through the solar system. Three timeless philosophical questions are explored in the course of Malachi Constant’s space odyssey: the metaphysical question of whether free will is an illusion; the moral question of whether good ends can justify evil means; and, most prominently, the existential question of the meaning of life—that is, the question of whether an individual human life has a purpose, and, if so, what that purpose is.