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If we cannot trust our experience of free will then we cannot trust our experience of anything and there is no such thing as "basic physics". After all, basic
by svieira 8y ago
If we cannot trust our experience of free will then we cannot trust our experience of anything and there is no such thing as "basic physics". After all, basic physics requires that there be a physical world we can observe in such a way as to make true statements about it. If we cannot trust interior observations about choosing freely between alternatives then we certainly cannot trust exterior observations that are mediated through imperfect senses.
Furthermore, if there is no free will there is no morality, since all things are determined and you cannot do otherwise than what you do. (There is no morality involved in the bouncing of a cue ball off of a pool table wall).
- ndiscussion 8y agoYep!
- YjSe2GMQ 8y ago> After all, basic physics requires that there be a physical world we can observe in such a way as to make true statements about it. But that's the point of confusing free will with consciousness. You can experience something (that's the hot stove argument), and inference is perfectly possible for even today's computer algorithms to do (which are certainly not free). Even something as common as a virtual memory system deciding which pages to swap makes predictions/inference based on what it has seen in the past. Morality is still a thing, much like there are worse and better paging algorithms. Think of it as mental models of how things work, much like the rest of science. In this view morality is a study of how things/consciousnesses feel. Edit: another way to look at morality as a science is like this: assume most people genuinely don't want to cause suffering of others, and especially of themselves. But they can still cause harm by being simply wrong.
- fifnir 8y agoI highly recommend Sam Harris's "Free Will" and "The moral landscape"