A good example of the teaching of Anatta is to be found in the Milindapana which purports to be an account of the meeting between a Bactrian king `Menander' who ruled from about 166 to 150 BCE and the monk, Nagasena.

The first meeting is concerned with the chariot simile. The king politely enquires about Nagasena's name and Nagasena replies to Milinda's question by saying: "I am known as Nagasena and it is by that name that my brethren in the faith address me. But although parents give such a name as Nagasena, this is only a designation used, for there is no permanent individuality involved." The king is unable to accept this denial of individuality and retorted with a practical counter-argument.

A paradox of medieval logic concerning the behaviour of an ass who is placed equidistantly from two piles of food of equal size and quality. Assuming that the behaviour of the ass is entirely rational, it has no reason to prefer one pile to the other and therefore cannot reach a decision over which pile to eat first, and so remains in its original position and starves.

Determinism is the thesis that "there is at any instant exactly one physically
possible future " (Van Inwagen 1983, p . 3)

Can neuroscientists say anything interesting about consciousness? Judging by the stream of books and conferences on the topic, you can safely assume they believe they can. What makes Benjamin Libet different from all the others writing on the subject, though, is that he has actually spent the past 40 years experimenting on the topic. His findings have played a central role in others' speculations. Now he has put his life's work into a single short book.

The core of Libet's findings can be simply summarised. If I sit on the edge of my bed and decide to wiggle my toes, the brain processes necessary for the wiggling to occur begin about half a second before I am aware that I have made the decision. Libet finds this troubling; if the brain processes precede my sense of having made a decision, what part does my conscious decision making play? Who indeed is the "me" that does the "deciding"?

Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? Yes, declares the controversial philosopher Daniel C. Dennett. "Human freedom," he writes in his important new book Freedom Evolves (Viking), "is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species, us."

One might think that Dennett’s ringing endorsement of the reality of human freedom would make him popular with other intellectuals. It doesn’t. On the right, the conservative Weekly Standard denounces him as "a vigorous evangelist for evolutionary psychology." The neoconservative journal The Public Interest has called him "an evolutionary fundamentalist." That view was shared by the late left-wing evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould, who disparaged Dennett as a "Darwinian fundamentalist." Gould’s scientific collaborator Niles Eldredge concurs, dismissing him as an "ultra-Darwinian." The liberal American Prospect accuses him of "cybernetic totalism."

But Dennett has his admirers too. The New York Times Book Review selected his Consciousness Explained as one of the 10 best books of 1991. The Wall Street Journal raved about 1995’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, and declared that Dennett "does one of the things philosophers are supposed to be good at: clearing up conceptual muddles in the sciences." Zoologist Matt Ridley, author of The Origins of Virtue, hails him as the "ebullient, pugnacious and ever pithy sage of Boston."

Born in 1942, Daniel Dennett studied philosophy at Harvard University and Oxford University. His philosophical views can be traced most clearly to the influence of his Oxford teacher, philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Ryle famously attacked Cartesian mind-body dualism, dismissing it as the doctrine of "the ghost in the machine." Dennett is now the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.

Dennett has spent his intellectual career trying to extend the Enlightenment project of putting philosophy and morality on a scientific and naturalistic basis. In a sense, Dennett is updating David Hume in the light of Darwin’s theory of evolution. In doing so, he provides us with fascinating new ways to think about the meaning
of choice, the value of morality, and how the evolution of the human brain and its capabilities has made us more free.

Indeed, Dennett argues that human freedom is dramatically expanding. Language and culture, especially when abetted by modern science and technology, enable us to increase the range of our choices. As our understanding of our genes and brains increases, he believes we will increase our freedom rather than limit it. We will be able to prevent and cure more diseases, improve our social institutions, and even enhance human capabilities. He says that we defend freedom, especially political freedom, because among other things it enables people to make better and better choices over time. As important, Dennett maintains that to whatever extent we were ever at the mercy of our genes and biological evolution, we no longer are. Instead our genes are now at the mercy of our brains.
Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey interviewed Dennett in February.

Psuedo-random number generators provide a useful and well-defined example of the importance of context. We can make a PRNG that is completely indistinguishable in its output from a "true" RNG.

This is analogous to the "free will" vs determinism problem.

Buridan's Ass, who purportedly starves to death because he is equidistant from two piles of food and can't think of a reason for going left rather than right (or vice versa).

What has the virtuous life of a 17th-century philosopher got to do with going out for lunch, the need for a second Enlightenment, basing feeling and emotion in maps of the body - and being furious with your boss? For the past decade, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has been weaving such strands together in his books, the latest of which, Looking for Spinoza, was published in May. He has provided New Scientist with some fascinating discussions over the past year.

You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.
- Alan Watts

Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.
- Alan Watts

You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules… This is in head-on contradiction to the religious beliefs of millions of human beings alive today.
— Francis Crick

"Men are deceived if they think themselves free, an opinion which consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined."
- Benedict Spinoza
Ethics