Kant held that, when we consider things from a practical point of view, we have to believe in free will whether or not it’s true
2 Likes
I think Kant also held that one’s awareness of free will is stronger than any “rational” argument against free will. I take this to be akin to a “practical” person arguing against Zeno’s paradoxes of motion by simply pointing to the phenomena of motion and saying, “too bad for your argument.”
Step 1 of 12-step programs is admitting that you have no control over your actions and turning said control over to a higher power. This seems like a weird way to go about things if free will is what is relevant here.
What is helpful and what is true are separate discussions. Religious people are typically happier than non-religious. Conservatives are typically happier than liberals. This doesn’t speak to the truth of their beliefs in either case.
I think it’s the fault of the article that it’s framed this way.
I suppose there’s no reason, despite not having free will, that a lot of people could come to agree that there is no free will. And that that could cause us to behave differently, maybe more humanely or whatever. But there are probably many routes to such a state of society (not to say I have any idea how to get onto any of those paths).
2 Likes
If the Snopes article is anything longer than “Because they’re racist morons” they’re wasting their time.
Fine. Some four-dimensional being or god or whatever can see the entire universe run backwards and knows everything that happened.
So if it he sees me die of a fentanyl overdose then in this iteration, then I was pre-determined to die of a fentanyl overdose.
To me, this kind of pre-determinism has the exact same godlike elements and lack of any real world implications as the “if I know the motion of every speck of energy at the Big Bang, I can predict how the entire universe will unfold” style of determinism.
Unless someone is trying to assert that quantum randomness has some implication on free will.
The whole free will whole is heavy on lofty sweeping statements and mostly devoid of any kind of logical argument that could actually be examined imo.
I suspect it’s mostly just a proxy for people who want to argue for more reform/rehabilitation-based punishment. Great, we probably need more of that. But clearly taking it to the extreme where we never hold anyone accountable for their actions, because free will doesn’t exist, isn’t going to work in a society. So….?
1 Like
So if someone doesn’t believe in a higher power and never will, and also thinks the free will debate is a tautological moot point, how do they break out of their addiction?
Seems like they make a decision to get help, followed by some work to stay clean, and probably some major struggles against temptation. Whether or not these actions are free will or pre-ordained means nothing in the grand scheme of things. They’re still hard. There is no short-cut that comes with absolving yourself of free will.
It’s sort of like The Prestige scenario. Imagine someone proves to you that you die every night, and a completely different body with your exact memories wakes up every morning.
Might as well drain the savings on hookers and blow, because fuck that guy, he’s not me, right?
Then you realize that what actually happens every night (or every moment) is functionally no different. But you still don’t blow the savings on hookers and blow. And I still can’t fully wrap my around why.
1 Like
The philosophy of personal identity takes these types of questions seriously, although opinions differ as to whether being replaced with a clone that has your memories is functionally the same as normal survival
BTW, I highly recommend Shelly Kagan’s book Death for an introductory yet careful treatment of these and other questions
1 Like
Can you give me a TLDR of why the personal identity philosophers think I should care about the random collection of particles that wakes up as me tomorrow, and not go blow my life savings on a Vegas hooker orgy right now?
I remember philosophy 101 our professor was teaching us about free will and he offered some guys extra credit if they would attempt to change their fates and prove free will was real by wearing dresses to class instead of their regular clothes like they did every day of their lives up until that point, and they actually did.
Although I’m not sure if we determined that they still didn’t have free will and that this was actually their destiny so I don’t think the demonstration helped.
So let’s assume choosing to wear the dress when presented the opportunity was just a product of their upbringing, their brain chemistry, and a bunch of random events that happened to them throughout their life to that point.
Does it change anything from the scenario where that’s not true?
I guess the question of whether or not humans have free will comes down to if you believe in a soul? Is that what I’m missing?
Who says the person in 30 minutes having the orgy is you either?
1 Like
I guess it is in the Prestige scenario that happens every night.
If you get replaced every millisecond things get really weird.
1 Like
Quantum mechanics is going to foil you again there, as you fundamentally cannot know the positions and momenta of fundamental particles at the same time with anything resembling the precision you would need to make long term predictions. It’s not just unmeasurable. It’s unknowable.
Quantum mechanics is all kinds of fucked up, and if it didn’t keep making weird predictions that keep coming out correct and also are unexplained by any other theory out there, it’d have been laughed out of the room a century ago.
That all said, trying to model something modest that might impact human behavior, like dopamine binding to a dopamine receptor, in a quantum fashion and to try to make a testable prediction to try to understand if this sort of fundamentally unknowable, inherently probabilistic behavior is relevant to that is incredibly if not impossibly complex and is unlikely to happen in our lifetimes.
Some philosophers say there’s no requirement to consider the interests of your future self if your current self doesn’t share those interests or have some pre-existing interest in your future self’s welfare. But they will also argue that to the extent that you do care about your future self, what matters is your future self having similar psychological features to your current self (memories, goals, desires) rather than having physical continuity. That could explain why you might act in the interest of your future clone (even though it wouldn’t be the same organism as you) but not act in the interest of your future body if you knew that its personality, memory, etc. were going to be erased and replaced with new ones. Derek Parfit develops these arguments in the third part of his book Reasons and Persons.
1 Like
The story of how it was done sounds like bullshit. Pretty sure he’s just covering up the people who helped him with that confession.
Speak for yourself
What im taking away from this thread is that smack heads on the street are playing the game of life optimally, or rather, various versions of their past self did.