3 ms·
This could have been a lot better. Good premise but the author seems to want to make some relatively unsupported points rather than digging into some real inter
by npunt 4y ago
This could have been a lot better. Good premise but the author seems to want to make some relatively unsupported points rather than digging into some real interesting questions within the premise.
The piece missing to me was that they basically ignore psychology. They allude to people in SV saying 'of course we don't have free will' but kinda miss the reason why people say that: because we can prove that in certain circumstances where we think we have free well we don't really, whereas we can't prove in any circumstances that we do.
Sure this article is not supposed to be about 'do we have free will' and instead about the implications of how much we believe we have free will, but you can't really come to conclusions about that without wading into the messy world of 'what if we just have some free will'. And I don't see the author doing that.
- HEmanZ 4y agoKind of a side point but “free will” means so many different things to so many different people, that conversations about it are pretty useless unless you have a lot of shared understanding about how it’s defined. The author seems to assume some unified understanding of the concept that just isn’t true. E.g: when my evangelical Christian relatives ask if I “believe in free will” the answer is “definitely not”. When a friend who I know is sincere and thoughtful asks, the answer is “yes, but it’s complicated”. When a professor of philosophy asks, the answer is “what kind of question is that?”