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But you haven't said what is qualitatively different about them. Consider instead a teacup which falls off the table when I bump it while trying to pick up som

by gwd 6y ago

But you haven't said what is qualitatively different about them. Consider instead a teacup which falls off the table when I bump it while trying to pick up something underneath the table instead. So we have three different "setups" and "triggers: A. Setup: Pan it precarious position on fridge. Trigger: My footsteps walking into the kitchen vibrating the floor, vibrating the fridge, loosening the pan and causing it to fall. B. Setup: Teacup in precarious position on the edge of the table. Trigger: Me bumping the table leg, loosening the teacup and causing it to fall. C. Setup: The entire life history of my spouse (including perhaps things I've said and done). Trigger: Something I said, triggering various thoughts and responses in my spouse's brain, causing them to want to hit me. We class A and B as the same thing (inanimate objects with no choice). Should we classify C the same way? Free will to me is a bit like "dark matter" or "dark energy": I don't know exactly what it is, but when I try to "do the math" without it, things don't add up.

analog31 6y ago
>>> Should we classify C the same way? Probably not if you want to survive. ;-) I'm certainly agreeing that it's an interesting puzzle. One particularly curious thing is that the classification scheme is not just descriptive, but is itself one of the sensory inputs that influences behavior. So it's both a puzzle of understanding human behavior, but also coupled to a social phenomenon. I don't know of a society that doesn't classify C differently, so it may have some survival advantage.
joefourier 6y ago
Why don't things add up? Your spouse's behaviour is governed by the same physical laws as the teacups and pans, but they are certainly not an inanimate objects incapable of choice. The problem, I think, is that humans seem to believe that lower-level explanations invalidate higher-level ones. However, that doesn't mean that you should say there is no difference between "Hello world" and a web browser because both are "just" x86 instructions in the end, or "just" transistors being switched on and off. However, good look debugging a web browser by looking at the behavior of individual transistors, even though that is all there is in the end. I think you are looking at it from the wrong angle - complex human behaviour isn't reduced to simple physical laws, but rather, simple physical laws add up to complex human behaviour.

by gwd 6y ago

analog31 6y ago

>>> Should we classify C the same way? Probably not if you want to survive. ;-) I'm certainly agreeing that it's an interesting puzzle. One particularly curious thing is that the classification scheme is not just descriptive, but is itself one of the sensory inputs that influences behavior. So it's both a puzzle of understanding human behavior, but also coupled to a social phenomenon. I don't know of a society that doesn't classify C differently, so it may have some survival advantage.

joefourier 6y ago

Why don't things add up? Your spouse's behaviour is governed by the same physical laws as the teacups and pans, but they are certainly not an inanimate objects incapable of choice. The problem, I think, is that humans seem to believe that lower-level explanations invalidate higher-level ones. However, that doesn't mean that you should say there is no difference between "Hello world" and a web browser because both are "just" x86 instructions in the end, or "just" transistors being switched on and off. However, good look debugging a web browser by looking at the behavior of individual transistors, even though that is all there is in the end. I think you are looking at it from the wrong angle - complex human behaviour isn't reduced to simple physical laws, but rather, simple physical laws add up to complex human behaviour.