Your claims are no more convincing than the article.
You're entirely free to hold your beliefs about this, of course (or are you? perhaps they're predetermined), but don't imagine they're somehow more valid than the alternatives.
They're convincing to me. I have a hard time seeing a reason to ascribe 'free will' to a physical process that was always going to happen in that particular way. A ball doesn't choose to bounce when it is dropped on the ground.
> More interestingly, did you make that assertion of your own free will? :-)
Very cute if unoriginal, someone says that anytime I bring up this argument, and the answer is very simple, of course I didnt!
A 'decision' is a physical process, as in 'physics' physical, if something is not physical, then it is magic, and I dont believe (believe being used in the abstract sense of course) in magic.
Again you are simply asserting it is so. I'll grant you it's a very popular assertion, but you'll forgive me if I don't just take your word for it.
1) I think free will is a concept that has to be approached in a practical matter: as in we get better social outcomes if we assume people have free will.
The concept has utility.
2) Processes with simple rules can still exhibit emergent behaviour.
> 1) I think free will is a concept that has to be approached in a practical matter: as in we get better social outcomes if we assume people have free will.
The concept has utility.
You must understand, this is the most horrifying part! People are sentenced to prisons, torture, and death for "making bad/evil decisions". I'm not saying we should let murderers be murderers, but what I am saying is we should start looking closely into possible "down to the hardware" remedies instead if prison. If we are operating on this whole free-will notion, then that will never happen.
> 2) Processes with simple rules can still exhibit emergent behaviour.
Define emergent in this case, I dont know of any truly emergent behavior that violates the rules of what caused it, you could say 'organic life' was an emergent behavior, but it still obeys physics.
>you'll forgive me if I don't just take your word for it.
I think if we can't get passed an agreement that magic isnt real, that may be a reasonable time to end the discussion.
> we should start looking closely into possible "down to the hardware" remedies instead if prison
That's where hard determinism fails it, because all it can do is to make a very broad statement that our behaviour was predetermined, without going into the details.
Really we can't make "down to the hardware" fixes or even do a post hoc analysis of the cause of behaviour, so it's really useless as a theory, it has no predictive power.
In every culture, in every era, people have usually been pretty sure they had everything figured out, and that they understood life and the world completely.
I don't believe our present time is any more enlightened in this matter than any other.
(Also it seems to me that you keep using the word 'magic' as a weasel word: as if people disagreeing with you are just children who believe in silly things.)
> In every culture, in every era, people have usually been pretty sure they had everything figured out, and that they understood life and the world completely.
I don't think anyone here believes they have everything figured out.
> I don't believe our present time is any more enlightened in this matter than any other.
I think we're slowly getting better over time, as our collective knowledge compounds as time goes.
> Also it seems to me that you keep using the word 'magic' as a weasel word
You made a claim that a 'choice/decision' is not necessarily a physical process, I don't know how else I should interpret that.
> 1) I think free will is a concept that has to be approached in a practical matter: as in we get better social outcomes if we assume people have free will.
> The concept has utility.
This is a thinly veiled argument from consequences. You're not the only one to do this, I see this from many people arguing in favor of free will.
Edit: I would also question the utility of the concept compared to the alternative. Show me some hard numbers for what happens in a society constructed around the lack of a metaphysical free will, and then I may reconsider. (I suspect that this sort of society hasn't existed and may never exist, because free will is such a persistent illusion that it may as well be a phantom limb for most people. We're probably hardwired for it at some level, like the incessant drive for reproduction that most people have.)
They aren't predetermined, free will is not the opposite of determinism.
You cannot have process interacting with itself in non-random and non-deterministic way. It's a contradiction! I mean, it's basically an infinite regression: either something happens outside of your control or you control what you control what you control...
> It's a contradiction! I mean, it's basically an infinite regression: either something happens outside of your control or you control what you control what you control...
But you can have a process interacting with itself in a nonlinear way, and the outcome of those types of processes are difficult to predict.
Even if you write a small non linear program, with each instruction completely simple and clear, it's still very difficult to predict the outcome without running the program.
Now imagine that at a scale ten or twenty orders of magnitude higher.
But then free will requires you to mentally conceptualise future events like "I want to go to cafe" and then translate them into interaction between trillions of neurons, 10 to the power of 29 atoms in that exact non-linear fashion!
So freely chosen decision is actually a translation of human-level concepts to non-linear highly complex set of neurons/atoms/particles and it is working flawlessly?
Yeah, free will is perhaps our sensed experience of the process you describe (the interaction between trillions of neurons, 10 to the power of 29 atoms in that exact non-linear fashion!)
You're entirely free to hold your beliefs about this, of course (or are you? perhaps they're predetermined), but don't imagine they're somehow more valid than the alternatives.