At least here in the US, a person’s zip code of birth is a huge indicator of their success and life trajectory. That, to me, would seem to indicate that free will is bullshit.
Not sure that’s true. Free will doesn’t mean anyone can do anything. It means any decisions a person makes are truly decided by them, and they actually could have made a different decision.
People who don’t believe in free will believe that the physical laws of the universe are deterministic. That leptons and quarks behave in ways determined by their state. That this is true even inside your brain, and thus decisions you make are actually just the result of particles interacting. Even quantum effects, though random, are not consciously decided and thus do not affect free will.
The circumstances you are in change the inputs to those equations, but they don’t change the fact that the equations exist.
Hmm almost as if free will isn’t some magical ability to remove yourself from any disadvantageous situation, but a fundamental liberty to choose how you act in response to said situation and see in it a metaphysical meaning that transcends cultural ideas like success? Damn, wouldn’t that be crazy. If only that was true, could you imagine?
Or in other words, “free will” is a macroscopic effect arising from the fundamental laws of the universe. Like most everything else we deal with.
Like… temperature doesn’t really exist, it’s really just an average of kinetic energy of particles. But that doesn’t stop it from being a useful concept!
I reckon we are so incredibly complex, are integrating so much information that from inside it’s hard to see if you’re deciding or selecting by rule your preferred path given what you know
You can call the complexity free will, we’re all so different having had different parents, different childhood experiences, different education, different opportunities so each has their own solution that rises to the top in any situation
But also brain scans have demonstrated that for minor stuff (like raising your hand) action precedes “deciding” to take the action.
Why are we better off behaving that way? Under that outlook, it seems like free will is a trap to hold people accountable for things they wouldn’t actually be responsible for.
If you’re a complex machine whose action could be perfectly predicted (with full knowledge of everything you ever experienced) it’s still reasonable to punish you for breaking rules - the risk of punishment goes into your programming as part of the (deterministic) calculation of what action to take
Because one of the many inputs to people’s actions, if we assume that their actions are deterministic, is their knowledge of how other people will respond, and how they have responded to similar things in the past.
It’s also very often used as an argument against rehabilitation in prisons:
If free will exists, then crime is a choice. If you choose crime, you are a bad person, and punishment is the only way forward.
If you commit the crime again, it’s because the punishment didn’t work, and/or because the person is simply bad, so a longer punishment is needed, and infinitum.
It’s also used to justify the death penalty, which would not make any sense in a deterministic universe.
My take is that there is no free will, but that this fact is irrelevant and we’re all better off just behaving as though we do.
Yeah. It’s a fair take, and this is generally what I was getting at.
John Calvin approves.
At least here in the US, a person’s zip code of birth is a huge indicator of their success and life trajectory. That, to me, would seem to indicate that free will is bullshit.
why would that be a problem for free will?
all it shows is that we cannot freely choose everything, it does not prove that we are not ever able to freely choose.
Not sure that’s true. Free will doesn’t mean anyone can do anything. It means any decisions a person makes are truly decided by them, and they actually could have made a different decision.
People who don’t believe in free will believe that the physical laws of the universe are deterministic. That leptons and quarks behave in ways determined by their state. That this is true even inside your brain, and thus decisions you make are actually just the result of particles interacting. Even quantum effects, though random, are not consciously decided and thus do not affect free will.
The circumstances you are in change the inputs to those equations, but they don’t change the fact that the equations exist.
Hmm almost as if free will isn’t some magical ability to remove yourself from any disadvantageous situation, but a fundamental liberty to choose how you act in response to said situation and see in it a metaphysical meaning that transcends cultural ideas like success? Damn, wouldn’t that be crazy. If only that was true, could you imagine?
deleted by creator
Or in other words, “free will” is a macroscopic effect arising from the fundamental laws of the universe. Like most everything else we deal with.
Like… temperature doesn’t really exist, it’s really just an average of kinetic energy of particles. But that doesn’t stop it from being a useful concept!
I reckon we are so incredibly complex, are integrating so much information that from inside it’s hard to see if you’re deciding or selecting by rule your preferred path given what you know
You can call the complexity free will, we’re all so different having had different parents, different childhood experiences, different education, different opportunities so each has their own solution that rises to the top in any situation
But also brain scans have demonstrated that for minor stuff (like raising your hand) action precedes “deciding” to take the action.
Robert Sapolsky wrote a whole book on this based on this called Determined. I really enjoyed it and pretty much agree
Why are we better off behaving that way? Under that outlook, it seems like free will is a trap to hold people accountable for things they wouldn’t actually be responsible for.
If you’re a complex machine whose action could be perfectly predicted (with full knowledge of everything you ever experienced) it’s still reasonable to punish you for breaking rules - the risk of punishment goes into your programming as part of the (deterministic) calculation of what action to take
Because one of the many inputs to people’s actions, if we assume that their actions are deterministic, is their knowledge of how other people will respond, and how they have responded to similar things in the past.
It’s also very often used as an argument against rehabilitation in prisons:
If free will exists, then crime is a choice. If you choose crime, you are a bad person, and punishment is the only way forward.
If you commit the crime again, it’s because the punishment didn’t work, and/or because the person is simply bad, so a longer punishment is needed, and infinitum.
It’s also used to justify the death penalty, which would not make any sense in a deterministic universe.