Suppose I realized the truth of what you say, and came to believe that I have no free will. How would I go about acting on this belief?
Isn’t the answer to that question “this question is incoherent; you might do some things as a deterministic consequence of coming to hold this new belief, but you have no ability to choose any actions differently on that basis”?
And if there is no way for me to act on a belief, in what sense can that belief be said to have content?
I tried to express my thoughts on the topic in one of the posts. Instead of thinking of ourselves as agents with free will, we can think of agents as observers of the world unfolding before them, continuously adjusting their internal models of it. In this approach there is no such thing as a logical counterfactual, all seeming counterfactuals are artifacts of the observer’s map not reflecting the territory faithfully enough, so two different agents look like the same agent able to make separate decisions. I am acutely aware of the irony and the ultimate futility (or, at least, inconsistency) of one collection of quantum fields (me) trying to convince ( =change the state of) another collection of quantum fields (you) as if there was anything other than physical processes involved, but it’s not like I have a choice in the matter.
Suppose I realized the truth of what you say, and came to believe that I have no free will. How would I go about acting on this belief?
Isn’t the answer to that question “this question is incoherent; you might do some things as a deterministic consequence of coming to hold this new belief, but you have no ability to choose any actions differently on that basis”?
And if there is no way for me to act on a belief, in what sense can that belief be said to have content?
I tried to express my thoughts on the topic in one of the posts. Instead of thinking of ourselves as agents with free will, we can think of agents as observers of the world unfolding before them, continuously adjusting their internal models of it. In this approach there is no such thing as a logical counterfactual, all seeming counterfactuals are artifacts of the observer’s map not reflecting the territory faithfully enough, so two different agents look like the same agent able to make separate decisions. I am acutely aware of the irony and the ultimate futility (or, at least, inconsistency) of one collection of quantum fields (me) trying to convince ( =change the state of) another collection of quantum fields (you) as if there was anything other than physical processes involved, but it’s not like I have a choice in the matter.