A delightful quirk of relativity theory

Your rejection on the basis of my claim that none of us have free will is logically unsound whether we have free will or not.

> Second absent free will, truth seeking has no more transcendent meaning or inherent value than a fly’s turd seeking. Love, wisdom, justice simply are, and are no better or worse than hate, ignorance or cruelty.

I agree with that. Nothing has any inherent meaning or value. The meaning or value in everything is merely the value we subjectively assign to it. That does not remove that value. The subjective experience is just as good or bad whether or not it's based on values we've merely assigned to it without any choice in the matter.

To me this notion that we need free will to value the feeling of freedom or the beauty of love, wisdom and justice is bizarre. The experience is the same whether or not the underlying choices are free or purely deterministic.

I'm a hard determinist, materialist, atheist, yet I spent a large portion of my youth writing goofy sentimental romantic poetry - the two are not in conflict; I can recognise love is a biochemical reaction following a chain of deterministic events and still feel it.

I just don't agree that the underlying reality of it is that there's anything "free" about it any more than e.g. a movie character has free will.

Yet that movie character will still make choices within their movie world that matters to the character, even though the choices are all illusory, and even the characters existence is illusory.

(I'd go much further and argue that we can't tell if space or time has any existence independent of a single instant of sentience, but it doesn't matter - the only thing that matters is that we experience it as if it has; the fundamental defence of philosophical materialism against philosophical idealism is exactly that: it doesn't matter; we have to act as if reality is as we sense it, whatever we know or believe we know about it)

I don't see the contradiction. I don't go around living my life thinking that what I do don't matter because the choices aren't free. They feel real and feel free, and the consequences are real whether or not the choice was truly free.

The only thing it changes is perhaps how I look back at things, and some views on morality:

I try not to have regrets (I do sometimes, because whatever my views I can not override all feelings, and would not wish to anyway), because while I may wish I had acted differently, I am pretty good at accepting that I couldn't have. I can try to act differently in the future, and hope I actually will, but what happened in the past, happened.

At the same time I can feel angry about how someone else acts but recognise that while that may inform how I act around them in the future because it may say something about how they will act in the future, it feels immoral to me to seek vengeance (that doesn't mean I can't feel a strong urge to, because the feelings are still real).

> As to my second point, I cannot show that. I believe without proof that existence has meaning, justice, truth, wisdom are good and to be sought, and ignorance, slavery, cruelty are bad and to be rejected.

And that's entirely fine, and I would largely agree because it's almost entirely orthogonal to the question of whether free will is real or just an illusion.

As such it's on them to first state a complete hypothesis of what happened to them, because absent that it is not even possible to start disproving it, and so rejecting it out of hand is perfectly justified just as much as it's justified rejecting Russel's teapot.

> What is your benchmark for determinism?

That everything we have so far observed with any kind of precision has turned out to be predictable to our level of precision or to show no sign of deviating from randomness.

Determinism is also a falsifiable theory: All you need to disprove it is to show the existence of a type of events which are biased in ways which can't be explained in a mechanistic or by randomness.

The total lack of such examples, despite a very substantial amounts of claims, which always collapses under scrutiny, gives me as much confidence in determinism as in gravity.

Our understanding of gravity could be massively off too - I'd consider it far more likely that we'll need to revise our understanding of gravity than determinism, because a non-deterministic model would require a fundamental change in logic to accommodate another category of causality which can not be modelled as a computation over a combination of mechanistic determinism and randomness and without just introducing regress (the last part there is essential to rule out "God did it" or "we're in a simulation" answers, both of which just lifts the question one level up).

The first step in falsifying determinism is to actually find a way of determining whether or not an event fits that criteria to show that it's even logically possible for such events to exist. Just that would get your name in the history books. Of philosophy anyway. And if anyone could present a logically sound argument for how such events could exist, it would seriously shatter my world view. I'd love that anyway because it'd force us to rethink a whole lot of things about the world from scratch. Unfortunately I think I'm more likely to meet santa.

> Yet many believe they experience free will everyday and many don’t, because it’s a subjective experience.

People's subjective experience is not in question. I feel like I make free choices every day as well. I feel like I'm exercising one right now in choosing to answer you. That does not give me any reason to presume that feeling reflects the underlying processes. That subjective experience have no bearing on the issue.

Here you are conflating a perceptual task with a kinematic equation. What makes you think that these two concepts make sense to tie together so intimately?

Here's why I believe in free will: The preferences of the energy are subjective, not objective[1]. Its inputs are dictated by the architecture it resides in, but the meaning it attaches to them are determined internally and infinitely[2] more complex. So for example, someone who loves exercising gets very much the same nerve signals as someone who hates it. The difference is in the meaning each attaches to the experience, and meaning is not objective.

[1] AKA 'the hard problem of consciousness' [2] Insofar as internal communication happens across a higher-dimensional manifold than its communication with the architecture. For ease of visualization I imagine a three-dimensional gas interacting with the two-dimensional surface of a building, but I am working on a model that properly accounts for time.