Perhaps I've been too deep down the philosophical/metaphysical rabbit hole, but AFAIK there's only three options:
1) Deep down (past the turtles-all-the-way-deep) there's only chaos
2) <strike> Free will and alternative options exist</strike>
3) It's only predetermined order past the turtles.
'I' really 'want' to be convinced of 2, but it's something 'I' lost a long time ago, anyone care to convince me? These days 'I' find some comfort in 1. If it 'turns' out to be 3 'I'll' 'be' very sad indeed :(
Long story short: There's nothing to chose, either it's all been decided already, and your 'thoughts' are nothing but atoms and other things rattling around, generating the illusion of your conciousness, or there's only chaos and we're (also) never 'making' any choices, they are all just rolls of the dice.
His argument, paraphrased for the layman (he wrote in fairly impenetrable terms) was basically:
Say that we do have a deterministic world, where human action is the result of each human being continually processing stimuli, rationally (or emotionally) evaluating it, and then deciding on a course of action. The meaning of "choice" is this process, and the meaning of "self" is all the hidden machinery that lets us go from a stimulus to a course of action. People who believe free will and determinism are incompatible are implicitly positing that there's some entity outside of this process of weighing alternatives and choosing one, but there is no evidence for such an entity and no need to invent one. Rather, our common-sense notions of choice are completely compatible with someone having received a bunch of sensory inputs and then used the internal circuitry of their brain to decide on a course of action, and our common-sense notions of self are compatible with different people having different dispensations to make certain choices under various circumstances. And we can make moral judgments based on our evaluation of whether the choices another makes will be helpful or harmful to our interests.
Interestingly (and this is me adding to the theory after 15 years of life experience), this perspective seems to mirror psychological development. I've found that as I've gotten older, I tend to settle into my own skin. When I was young, it was like I'd frequently "pop out" of my self and my actions and be like "who is this person?" As I've gotten older, it's more like "Yeah, I'm me, and I make the best choices I can with the information available to me, and ultimately I'm responsible for the consequences even if they don't work out." It's like there's less of a divide between that automatic stimulus -> processing -> response cycle and my objective perception of my life.
[1] https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~mnat/~ball0888/oxfordopen/hoba...
The problem to me is that that machinery does not exist. It's not there, how can something (anything at all in them most extreme sense, a human, a 'system', an AI an animal the hidden machinery in the human brain, a bunch of particles or whatever) 'choose' when there's no alternatives? Real hard predeterminism implies that there's nothing to chose at all. Doesn't the theory of conservation of information tell us that information is never created or lost, so that on a grand scale, basically nothing is happening at all? All information that existed at the big bang is still there, and always will be. There's no place for hidden machinery to make more, or make choices. The 'result' of that choice must have existed/been known before, because otherwise information would have been created at that magical 'choosing' moment.
Sure, you can then say that if all your thought processes are deterministic (modulo some inherent randomness), then even the outer stuff isn't really choice, is it? But the fact is, from your perspective the way your life will unfold is completely unknowable to you. And so, you get to experience the unfolding of your life and the "choices" inherent in that.
Freedom means the freedom to express who you are[1], right? Whether they are philosophically "real" choices or not is irrelevant. Have you ever felt the satisfaction of building something?
[1] Some people might call it the freedom to ~decide~ who you are, but one could say the difference is just a matter of perspective, depending on how much you see determinism playing into it.
At the risk of derailing this conversation into semi-unrelated philosophical conversations: Why is it you would prefer 2 to 3?
We'll that is why I asked people to talk me out of it ;)
Most people that I meet either assume 2 from the get go, reasonable because that's how everything appears to us at first glance.
3 Basically means we don't even exist, in the sense that you can't have agency/identity/whatever you want to pinpoint as 'you' if everything is predetermined. The closes analogy to 'real' (this is always a problem when discussing such things) people in our world is the experience a film character 'has' when it's played (none, it's not an agent).
Basically from 3 follows that, however counter-intuitive it seems to 3-type-people, you have no agency, no thoughts, no freedom, no choice I'd argue that you don't even exist or alternitively that you have always existed. Can you even say that causality exists if every location of every particle/wave/force/field/w\e has already been predetermined? AFAIK science does not really know if this is the case, and the only science I understand is the layman's tl/dr. But the general consensus, again AFIAK, seems to be: do more experiments, we're unsure as of yet.
I only know that we live in the macro world, and in the macro world the case for predeterminism is pretty darn strong.
I'd prefer 2 over 3, because 2 is the only place where a possibility exists for ethics and/or freedom. I can't be ethical if I can't 'do' anything. I can't 'do' anything if 'I' don't even exist (which I'd argue is the case in 3).
To me, your concern seems more related to the meaning of life rather than the presence of free will though?
Unfortunately, I fear that’s may be too broad a subject to fruitfully assess on a medium such as this forum..
At the least, I’d argue ‘you’ existing is the only thing you can really be sure of. “I think, therefore I am”. It’s harder to tell if others exist, and there are several branches of philosophy that outright conject that nobody else other than yourself does exist. EG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism
Thinking about what is ethical often precedes acting ethically, because it puts your brain in a good mindset. Since we have good reasons to improve the world, we have good reasons to act ethically, and thus we've good reason to think about ethics. In this way, failing to consider ethics is a form of foolishness, because letting the world go to hell is a foolish thing to do.
This isn't a direct answer to your concern, but it might reduce how important free will is to you. If you're interested on the account I just summarized, see Derek Parfit's On What Matters, Vol 1 Section 38: "The Freedom that Morality Requires" (or just reply and I'll give my best attempt at answering).
What is the argument for why this is better than the alternatives? Self-sacrifice can also be a worship.
He is not arguing that you be a doormat. He is arguing that you be attentive and aware of your own mind's biases.
The supposition being that when you are free from these controls, you will be able to see others as more than just means to ends.
It seems to have a religious "give until it hurts" type of mentality. Because giving doesn't really "count" unless it hurts. Otherwise you're just a rich dude donating money and that's not as edgy as a poet giving his last hot-pocket. Seems very Christian in nature..
But personally, if I were ever poor and starving - please, to whoever has resources (looking at you Bill Gates) - I will be equally grateful for all donations.
I don't think being happy, or contributing to society requires a fixation on giving - or for it to be uncomfortable. Bill Gates seems to be a pretty generous dude, but I don't think he makes being Jesus-like his identity. So in a certain sense, I think working smarter not harder is a healthier and more sustainable mentality.
Are we not reading the same thing? Is this sentence not the crux of the entire message? It seems to me - by the word choice used - that DFW finds sacrifice to be "petty and unsexy" - yet does it to a repetitive extent for the sake of real freedom. I'm making the observation that that also sounds like a type of worship. Maybe it's totally off base, but I don't see why the point is confusing. It's pretty simple actually.
"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive."
Source: have lived for years in both types of culture
This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
“truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them” is just meaningless babbling that you would expect from a writer who needs to sell empty wisdom to demotivated readers. In reality Power and Knowledge are essential if one aims to enable true change.
[1] http://www.vulture.com/2015/06/rewriting-of-david-foster-wal...
That's mostly because he's been dead for 10 years. Also, if you're trying to sell empty philosophy to "average, depressed liberal-arts majors who lack power and knowledge", it strikes me as a particularly bad idea to start with a 1,076-page tome? I mean–he could've at least made it a 12-part series, right?
You're also short-changing those liberal arts majors. After all, many of them go on to law school, with the result that Congress is about 2/3 liberal arts majors. And it's not like the liberal arts have nothing useful to teach. Most graduates would, for example, consider the idea that "in reality power [..] is essential if one aims to enable true change" a tautology in need of an editor.
Congress the beacon of efficiency, progress and wisdom.
Some of the best technologists I've ever worked with were film majors, history majors, philosophy majors, sociology majors, &c.
By far, the most important skill for this kind of work is critical thinking.
He's advocating for Knowledge so that you are not subjected to the whims or your "default settings" but instead are able to exercise _your_ personal Power on the basis of knowing yourself (and others) instead of just performing the script that is given to you by (this subset of our) culture.
Your criticism that "This is just meaningless babbling" which immediately transitions into advocating his point is... interesting.
Also, I don't mean any disrespect here, but the fact that he killed himself kind of taints these sort of speeches for me also. How much better is his proposed lifestyle/world-view really, if it didn't even work for the master-mind himself? (Assuming that the goal is to be happy of course.)
EDIT: Just to clarify, I know he was probably battling depression, but should a person fighting such a severe mental illness really be the one, one listens to for live-advice then?
In reality, technological invention has always gone hand-in-hand with progress in our understanding of how to organise a just and productive society. It's sometimes harder to point at specific examples because this change happened more gradually, but ignorance of this progress doesn't legitimise a wholesale dismissal.
Concepts such as the rule of law, democracy, capitalism etc. didn't appear out of nowhere, nor were they always-existing "goodery truthiness". And there's no technology that could be identified as central to their establishment.
In fact, I'm pretty sure I'd rather live in a society with the technology of the stone age and today's understanding of law&justice, than a society with the technology of today and the stone age's morality.
In as far as technology had an impact on such progress, Jared Diamond argues that it was mostly in increasing the productivity of farming, allowing more and more people to not work the fields, live in cities, and actually start thinking.
> I'm pretty sure I'd rather live in a society with the technology of the stone age and today's understanding of law&justice
I'm sure we could conduct an easy experiment.. but maybe that's too empirical for you
But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom.
The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible-- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
DFW, 2005.