Agree with Chris and I’ve posted the same before. Free will makes no sense. That doesn’t mean there isn’t randomness. Mostly what we consciously do is narrate and justify our behavior after “choices” are made in parts of the brain that we are not conscious of.
I do believe there are moments in life where you take a stand and decide to change a self-destructive behavior.
In those moments, it’s a lot more than just fighting your willpower or breaking a bad habit or w/e imo. It’s having your little internal Independence Day speech and saying today is the day I fight back. It’s overcoming your internal demons and feelings that you’re not worth having nice things. Overcoming the voice telling you that you deserve to stay stuck in whatever track you can’t get out of.
I’m rambling but you get the gist. It’s overcoming yourself and what you think you’re worthy of. It’s hard and it doesn’t happen every day. But I do believe there’s free will associated with that.
I remember getting off the BART train and walking up the steps at UCSF to take my first community college class in programming - and being terrified. Why the hell was I terrified? Why did I want to turn around and go home? It’s just a class. There was no willpower or difficulty or pain involved whatsoever. It was purely the idea that I was actually going to go through with this and start trying to change my life. That’s scary stuff and hard to overcome sometimes.
I think I’m ok at those moments, maybe average or below average. But I could imagine someone who just can’t overcome them. Those people never grow or change their life and never break out of bad habits. So I dunno if that’s not exercising free will or not being able to exercise free will. Semantics maybe.
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I think Kierkegaard had a point something like this is all probably a crock of shit, but a life lived pretending that it’s true is better than a life where you believe nothing matters. Thinking that he practiced Christianity. I’m not religious, but I think he had a point and I guess I try to practice some kind of humanism.
If you truly believe you have no control over major life decisions than what the hell is the point of anything? Even if it’s true it’s basically impossible to lead a meaningful life believing it.
Chris has talked about that before and expressed that there is no real accountability. What if someone is just born with no moral compass and they love killing and torturing? Well, they had no choice in that. It doesn’t mean they aren’t an awful person and those around that person aren’t wise to do something about it. But whatever, yeah, nothing means anything outside of the game we play with ourselves. We’re built to play the game though.
But they have no choice in the matter either.
If nobody has agency and we introduce someone who does that person should not punch Richard Spencer because Spencer is just helplessly executing a program.
We’re built to get mad. We’re mad machines.
I’ve stupidly been having this talk with @bro for years - she brings it up - and this is around when she starts crying.
(ok - mostly when she was a little younger)
Well, if you’re Nazi punching machine, you punch Nazis. It’s what you do.
I specifically said it’s someone who has agency and therefore is not just a nazi punching machine.
When ICE kidnaps a small child and throws them in a cell where they have to drink out of the toilet, I don’t think you “choose” to get mad. You don’t get mad because you “choose” to be a good, empathetic person. You are a good, empathetic person, so that makes you mad. You can look at this and say bad people aren’t responsible, but if good people are just making some choices - is that better than them just having a good nature?
Ok, you need a comma in there after ‘does’. And, Ok, there is no such person.
The thing about that illusion is: you can’t trust what you see. What else can’t you trust? (everything else)
It’s not an invitation to fatalism. A computer is just a deterministic machine, but it still matters a hell of a lot what software you load onto it. My choices still matter. Being like “I can’t choose what I do therefore it doesn’t matter if I go around touching hot stoves” is not a system of belief which is going to produce good outcomes.
I continue believing that what I do matters even if in an underlying sense, I accept that I don’t really have control over it. There’s nothing new about this. I could get hit by a car today. I do what seems right to me and hope good things come of that, but ultimately my life isn’t really within my control. That’s true whether I can make choices or not.
It leaves no room for retributive justice but incentives still work regardless of free will, so it can be appropriate to punish people for crimes for deterrence. Sometimes people might be unable to live in a community without posing a danger to others, then we have to imprison them humanely. Spending time wishing ill will on others, even awful people, is just damaging to one’s own psyche, there is no point in it.
It might be helpful to punch Richard Spencer for social messaging reasons, or for deterrence. It’s bad/pointless to punch him because he’s a bad person. Is that bad? Is anyone’s life worse because it turns out we don’t have good reasons to hurt people?
Obviously people punching Nazis isn’t top of my list of things I worry about, I mostly regard it as pointless.
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It’s a hypothetical illustrating that if everybody is simply a sentient toaster they should not be punished for burning bread.
You’re supposed to be happy. If you’re a good person (in my book) then doing good things (in my book) will make you happy. And that’s what you are. You’ll be happier if you get mad at injustice. It’s being true to your nature. Be true to it, even truer than you are. If you don’t live as long, so what?
Of course. You’d be a sucky person if it were any different. I mean, maybe you could concoct some fantasy question where you get to save the world or your kids, but that’s not reality. If you can make a good life for your two kids, that’s enough opportunity for heroism. If you even set off to save the world you might do more harm than good anyway. Keep your eye on where you have some impact especially now. When you’re old like me and your kids are old like @bro (or maybe a little beyond that) you can go storm a detention center or go to The Villages and put masks on old people.
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Almost everything we care about remains even if there is no free will. Blame, moral responsibility (in the everyday sense, not the philosopher’s sense), meaning, the subjective feeling of choice. It’s all good. The only thing we lose is retribution for retribution’s sake (we can still have retribution for the sake of secondary positive outcomes) and that’s a crock of shit even if free will does exist! So I don’t see a point in the conversation. Especially when we know from experimental philosophy that telling people they don’t or might not have free will makes people worse! More cheating and other dishonest behavior has been demonstrated across many studies.
I just got off the phone with Camus. He was pretty adamant that none of this stuff is humanly knowable and once having acknowledged that, your time would then be better spent on other things.
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This. I enjoy these philosophical debates to a point, but eventually it comes down to semantics or POV.
Whether or not a Godlike entity could know every outcome in the universe from the moment of the Big Bang (or before), including that all that pure chaotic energy would someday cool to form matter, and eventually lead to the moment I took a programming course at UCSF that changed my life - is irrelevant to the question of how I should live my life. I have no idea what that God knows.
It’s like the something vs. nothing debate of what existed before the Big Bang. Technically it could have been nothing. But to me nothing with the potentially to just spring to life like is something. It’s some other dimension or state of being with a ton of potential energy (or potential something). And to me that’s not nothing. But you can go round and round on that with people who insist it is nothing.
Edit: ponied by zikzak basically.
We had no choice.
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