51–60 of 120 posts
Free will is inevitable.
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Do you really think the difference between someone coerced and someone free is "trivial"? Or between someone who is free to make a choice because they are informed versus one who can't make it because they don't know of it? Or between someone who is capable of understanding the consequences of their actions and someone who is not? These differences are - obviously, I might add - very important. And they have nothing…
They are trivial in the sense that you can easily reason about them. Sure, you can construct wildly complex scenarios where available knowledge, resulting consequences, existing constraints, and what not make it non-obvious what can or cannot or should or should not be done but that this will only be a consequence of the complexity of the situation. This is in contrast to [magical] free will where you have fundamenta…
Why is it relevant how easily we can reason about them?
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Only pointing out that there's no meaningful convo to be had at hardware/micro level. IMO there is no free will there. Free will only becomes important on a personal (I do x because it's meaningful to me) or social contexts (I'm responsible for consequences of x action). I doubt the philosophers are trying to say anything about our day to day lives and that's where most of the opposition is coming from (ie no free wi…
This is why the body-mind is said to be the vehicle of the soul. These are all very ancient ideas, determinism especially. As you suspect, people discussing this misses out on how it's all relative, not so absolute.
However I don't think we're living there. We live in our own minds with a limited view and understanding, mostly dealing with social problems day to day, and emotions coloring that view however they see fit.
So IMO the "soul" and "free will" (or whatever other beliefs one may have) are ultimately metaphors for navigating the complex inner world. They can be very important/useful for the individual and society yet non-existent in the "objective world".
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> These differences are - obviously, I might add - very important. And they have nothing to do with magical free will. So why continue to use an unrelated term that has so much baggage? Why not just tackle these issues individually, on their own terms, in language that isn't laundering outmoded intuitions about some magic grounds for responsibility?
Because they _do_ have something to do with _actual_ free will. When you drill down at what "free will" could plausibly and coherently mean, you inevitably end up focusing on these important differences. And then you can _actually_ begin to articulate why someone is culpable and another person isn't. A magical free will believer can't really make sense of that, because if free will is something indescribable and magi…
But this is the problem right there, you call it actual free will and someone believing in magical free will will deny this and call magical free will actual free will. Sure, one can do this, overload the term, and figure out from context what kind of actual free will is meant in each instance. But would it not be much easier to give up on the term free will and use new different terms for different things?
You want to make me cringe? remind me that I got into an email conversation on my theory on this topic with an internet stranger and it turned out that person's name was daniel dennett, who I would assume assumed that I knew who he was and that I was an internet fan boy. I'm not a philosopher, I didn't even know who daniel dennet was, so while certain that my view was covered somewhere long before I was born, I would…
From what I understand of the Many-Worlds Theory, if it's correct, we can have both 'free will' and 'determinism': a man orders pizza, in 90% of possible futures he chooses a Margherita which is his favorite, but in 10% he orders something else.
> A growing chorus of scientists and philosophers argue that free will does not exist. This isn't _new_, this "chorus" has existed for so long that it used to be referred to exclusively as a "khoros." Secondly, it's totally embarrassing that the matter isn't considered settled. The standard argument against free will is sound. The closest thing to an objection you'll see is people moving the goalposts so far that we…
> The standard argument against free will is sound. I must have missed that memo :-P
I had a lot of fun with this lecture series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftIllWczf5w
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This is why the body-mind is said to be the vehicle of the soul. These are all very ancient ideas, determinism especially. As you suspect, people discussing this misses out on how it's all relative, not so absolute.
Well, I still don't think there's any souls/free will etc in the academic or "objective world" that is provably out there. However I don't think we're living there. We live in our own minds with a limited view and understanding, mostly dealing with social problems day to day, and emotions coloring that view however they see fit. So IMO the "soul" and "free will" (or whatever other beliefs one may have) are ultimately…
To me there's no contradiction.
There are knows: We have shared lucid experiences and we can share contemplations of such.
There are unknowns: What is consciousness, what happens exactly in brain in relation to outside (body, family, room, house, area, town).
It all seems interconnected to the point of break-down when not, for minds especially.
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The usual argument is that compatibilists are moving the goal posts, but I simply don't understand that argument. It is moving the goal post because it just changes the definition of free will into some triviality. I had a choice between apples and oranges and I picked the apple because I like apples more. Sure, you can call this free will if you want to but what is the point? The max function had a choice between 1…
I don't know where I myself land, but free will gets more interesting in situations like: * I see a piece of litter on the sidewalk and a garbage can on the other side of the road. Do I pick it up or not. Why/why not? * I never feel like working out. Sometimes I do it, sometimes I don't. Why? Sure, you can reduce these down to apples v oranges and just claim they have more variables to check first, but there's a lot…