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The difficultly in deciding whether humans have "free will" suggests that the concept of "free will" might be silly sophistry.

• foldr 8y ago
  Similarly, the difficulty in deciding whether or not Goldbach's conjecture holds shows that the concept of "prime number" might be silly sophistry.
  • bloak 8y ago
    Hardly worth replying, but I don't see the similarity. A 6-year-old understands perfectly well what a prime number is, and you can write a program to test for primality in half a line of Haskell (though the performance will not be good). Now what's a "free will"?
    • foldr 8y ago
      I was responding to your original claim, which appeared to rest on the assumption that problems which are difficult to solve are likely to be psuedoproblems. I deliberately chose a difficult problem based on a concept that has a clear definition (prime number) in order to show how silly this line of argument is. If you are just saying that it's difficult to come up with a generally agreed upon definition of "free will", then that's of course true. But that doesn't mean that there aren't any genuine philosophical problems relating to free will. By way of analogy, it's also difficult to define terms like "property", "freedom" and "constitution", but that doesn't mean that all of political philosophy is sophistry.