Re:Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?
by CuriouslyC on Monday April 01, 2024 @05:21PM
(#39899512)
The main point of disagreement I have with this is that I don't think the notion that your senses and reality are not always perfectly in sync implies that your perception of free will is false. There's a lot of approximating that goes into taking sensory input and generating an experience, that doesn't invalidate your experience of making decisions.
Also, your doubt in your own free will isn't free, it has a cost. Is that doubt serving you in some way to offset that?
That may well be the case, but it feels deeply epistemologically wrong to me to say “I am certain about X” just because being certain about X might come with certain psychological advantages. Not much good follows from that line of reasoning applied to many other issues.
I also don’t think “it’s quite plausible that there is free will but I’m agnostic about it” is a particularly harmful position to have.
There's of course also a variant of Pascal's wager in here, except that this one is logically sound, in my view: If there is free will, why not make use of it? And if there isn't, my beliefs aren't my choice anyway.
And just like from Pascal's wager, we can't derive any actual information about the nature of the universe and our conscious existence in it from that line of reasoning.