...I actually can’t see how the world would be different if I do have free will or if I don’t. (Stephen Weeks)
In order for you to have free will, there has to be a “you” entity in the first place. . . (Matthew C.)
I have an idea where Eliezer is going with this, and I think the above comments are helpful in it.
Seems to me that the reason people intuitively feel there must be some such thing as free will is that there’s a basic notion of free vs. constrained in social life, and that we project physical causality of our thoughts to be of the same form.
That is, we tend to think of physical determinism (or probabilistic determinism if we understand it) as if it were the same sort of thing as the way American law constrains our actions, or the way a psychopath holding a gun to our head would do the same. In either case, we can separate the self from the external constraint, and we directly feel that constraint. The fact that our thought processes don’t feel constrained by an external agent, then, seems to indicate that they are free from any (deterministic or even probabilistic) necessity.
The falsehood here, as I see it, is that there is no “I” separate from the thoughts, emotions, actions, etc. that are all subject to the physical evolution of my brain; there’s no separate thing which is “forced” to go along for the ride. But until we begin to really grasp that (and realize that Descartes was simply wrong in what he thought “Cogito, ergo sum” meant for the self), we have the false dilemma of “free will” versus “physics made me do it”.
...I actually can’t see how the world would be different if I do have free will or if I don’t. (Stephen Weeks)
In order for you to have free will, there has to be a “you” entity in the first place. . . (Matthew C.)
I have an idea where Eliezer is going with this, and I think the above comments are helpful in it.
Seems to me that the reason people intuitively feel there must be some such thing as free will is that there’s a basic notion of free vs. constrained in social life, and that we project physical causality of our thoughts to be of the same form.
That is, we tend to think of physical determinism (or probabilistic determinism if we understand it) as if it were the same sort of thing as the way American law constrains our actions, or the way a psychopath holding a gun to our head would do the same. In either case, we can separate the self from the external constraint, and we directly feel that constraint. The fact that our thought processes don’t feel constrained by an external agent, then, seems to indicate that they are free from any (deterministic or even probabilistic) necessity.
The falsehood here, as I see it, is that there is no “I” separate from the thoughts, emotions, actions, etc. that are all subject to the physical evolution of my brain; there’s no separate thing which is “forced” to go along for the ride. But until we begin to really grasp that (and realize that Descartes was simply wrong in what he thought “Cogito, ergo sum” meant for the self), we have the false dilemma of “free will” versus “physics made me do it”.