Re:There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
by pessimizer on Friday May 20, 2016 @02:33PM
(#11740314)
"Free will" is just a phrase that people made up to rationalize their desire for retribution, punishment, and forcible conversion.
People who steal more when it is suggested that there is none probably suffer from the same condition that people who feel that people who don't share their religion are inherently unethical suffer from: axiomatic ethical principles, rather than ethical principles that they derive from axioms.
edit: The most interesting positive thing I've ever read on the existence of a thing that we call "free will" is How Brains Make Up Their Minds[1] by Walter J. Freeman[2], a person who I think has gotten closest to the mechanics of how "consciousness" is automated. I don't mean to say that it's convincing, because for me it wasn't; but the number of contortions that it takes for him to make his point in the face of all of his physical theory is astounding, and possibly the best case that could be made.
And he died last month, which I didn't know. How sad.
People who steal more when it is suggested that there is none probably suffer from the same condition that people who feel that people who don't share their religion are inherently unethical suffer from: axiomatic ethical principles, rather than ethical principles that they derive from axioms.
edit: The most interesting positive thing I've ever read on the existence of a thing that we call "free will" is How Brains Make Up Their Minds[1] by Walter J. Freeman[2], a person who I think has gotten closest to the mechanics of how "consciousness" is automated. I don't mean to say that it's convincing, because for me it wasn't; but the number of contortions that it takes for him to make his point in the face of all of his physical theory is astounding, and possibly the best case that could be made.
And he died last month, which I didn't know. How sad.
[1] http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/FreemanWWW/Books/HB/HowBrains.htm...
[2] http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/