Atle Ottesen Søvik – författare

Contemporary Western societies are experiencing a transformation toward hypermodernism in that the dominating modern traits—such as delegation, efficiency, and progress—are becoming intensified and more prevalent.Modern technology is becoming increasingly intelligent and autonomous, while at the same time extending and mediating human relations to an increasing degree. Meanwhile, human activity is transforming the environment in existentially profound ways, creating widespread growth of parallel norms and belief systems that fragment our social lives. As heirs to modernity, contemporary societies continue to strive for progress by developing new and more efficient technologies. However, we have also become increasingly aware that sustainability is a crucial condition for persistent human flourishing. While sustainability requires that we avoid extremes, not every balancing act is necessarily beneficial. Achieving sustainability is therefore not identical to maintaining societal balance. In hypermodernity, the challenge is to balance progress and sustainability. What complicates this challenge is that hypermodernity has introduced a myriad of agents which mediates our goals and the means we have of reaching them. These agents include artificial intelligence, institutions, animals, and even our genes. Both natural and human-made objects have become stakeholders. Sustainable progress thus demands less anthropocentric ways of thinking than what we saw in early modernity.When societal structures and institutional norms become less transparent, they are at risk of becoming more volatile and producing new forms of conflict. This book provides improved tools for social planning and decision-making to navigate these hypermodern conflicts.

A major goal for compatibilists is to avoid the luck problem and to include all the facts from neuroscience and natural science in general which purportedly show that the brain works in a law-governed and causal way like any other part of nature. Libertarians, for their part, want to avoid the manipulation argument and demonstrate that very common and deep seated convictions about freedom and responsibility are true: it can really be fundamentally up to us as agents to determine that the future should be either A or B. This book presents a theory of free will which integrates the main motivations of compatibilists and libertarians, while at the same time avoiding their problems. The so-called event-causal libertarianism is the libertarian account closest to compatibilitsm, as it claims there is indeterminism in the mind of an agent. The charge of compatibilists, however, is that this position is impaired by the problem of luck. This book is unique in arguing that free will in a strong sense of the term does not require indeterminism in the brain, only indeterminism somewhere in the world which there plausibly is.

A major goal for compatibilists is to avoid the luck problem and to include all the facts from neuroscience and natural science in general which purportedly show that the brain works in a law-governed and causal way like any other part of nature. Libertarians, for their part, want to avoid the manipulation argument and demonstrate that very common and deep seated convictions about freedom and responsibility are true: it can really be fundamentally up to us as agents to determine that the future should be either A or B. This book presents a theory of free will which integrates the main motivations of compatibilists and libertarians, while at the same time avoiding their problems. The so-called event-causal libertarianism is the libertarian account closest to compatibilitsm, as it claims there is indeterminism in the mind of an agent. The charge of compatibilists, however, is that this position is impaired by the problem of luck. This book is unique in arguing that free will in a strong sense of the term does not require indeterminism in the brain, only indeterminism somewhere in the world which there plausibly is.

What are the basic building blocks of the world? This book presents a naturalistic theory saying that the universe and everything in it can be reduced to three fundamental entities: a field, a set of values that can be actualized at different places in the field, and an actualizer of the values. The theory is defended by using it to answer the main questions in metaphysics, such as: What is causality, existence, laws of nature, consciousness, thinking, free will, time, mathematical entities, ethical values, etc.? The theory is compared with the main alternatives and argued to solve problems better than the existing theories. Several new theories are suggested, such as how to understand mental causation, free will and the truth of ethics and mathematics.