I'm sure you have all noticed this from various comment boards to Reddit and 4chan. "I'm a Christian but (communist bullshit)" or "I was a Republican but (more communist bullshit)". It never turns out well, the atheists will still say youre an idiot as will progressives. Why placate them? Why does nobody stand up for their beliefs? Are we that scared of cancel culture or are we just that scared of possibly offending someone? Who will be the first to say, "This is what I think. Dont like it? Tough titties, now get out of my way".
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (81)
sorted by:
And that extent, according to you, is zero. So why even use the word "choose" in the first place?
I choose to believe that you have confused your own future time orientation with the existence of time-states other than the present, which means you are constantly judging events with the perfect knowledge of hindsight and then bizarrely imagining that this means something. It doesn't. You're like a scientist who thinks he has discredited the emotion of love because he has successfully isolated the chemical interactions that comprise it.
Brevity and convention.
Taking a step back...
Let's start with "will" (as Schopenhauer defines it). For the sake of this conversation it's sufficient to say that if there is free will, the will is what would exercise that freedom. Given a binary decision, the will would be what decides.
But what is the will?
The simulationists say that the will is remote. That you (or I) are a rational agent distant from the apparent body, directing the body by some means.
Normative religion calls the will the soul, which is an intangible thing which directs the body but has an existence apart from it.
I reject both of those interpretations. I do not believe the will is remote or has an existence apart from the body. The will is completely implemented in wetware, it is a chemical thing, an emergent behavior of a very complex machine.
Now, I mentioned a binary decision before. The will is presented with a choice, and the will is going to arrive at a decision on that choice. But the decision it is going to make is influenced entirely by preconditions. What the will has done before and what the results were.
Suppose the will decides to not decide, but rather to flip a coin.
This too is influenced by preconditions. There is nothing "random" about flipping a coin. Causality influences it in every tumble it does in the air. Our prediction about the future outcome is probabilistic, but when we flip the coin and it lands there was only ever one outcome that was going to happen and that's the one we got. Every flip it did, every molecule of air it bounced off of on the way up and down, all of that was deterministic.
I can't tell you the future in anything other than probabilities.
But I can tell you that there is only ONE future, the one that is going to happen.
In computer sciences we call this sensitive dependence on initial conditions.