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A useful illusion of Free Will is that we can to some degree predict the future state of the world and influence the future state of the world. To make meaningf
by awwaiid 2y ago
A useful illusion of Free Will is that we can to some degree predict the future state of the world and influence the future state of the world. To make meaningful agent type activity you have to have a world full of causality, in other words --- and to have causality it is awfully nice to have some deterministic properties (or science might not work out so well). So! I for one am a hard-compatiblist. I think that not only is "useful free-will" aka Agency compatible with determinism, I think that determinism is necessary!
(concepts probably stolen or bad copies of Daniel Dennett models)
- mrsilencedogood 2y agoIt's clear that huge swathes of physics are deterministic! Or at least anything non-deterministic is on a small-enough order that we can still build rockets and keep clocks on satellites and earth in sync. And I agree that a world completely free of causality would be a useless world. But I think that a world that is completely closed under physics and completely deterministic isn't compatible with a "free will" that could support a system of ethics, which I think is where a lot of people then want to take the "does free will exist" argument once they figure out the first part. So it's a matter of threading the needle.