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> Free will is a useful abstraction. Just like life and continuity of self are. I think it’s more useful to think of them as language games (in the Wittgenstei

• tbrownaw 2y ago
  I suppose if you really wanted to you could view condensing useful abstractions out of a highly detailed system as a kind of language game, but I'm not convinced that that's useful in the context of investigating particular abstractions rather than investigating the nature of the process of making abstractions.
  • throwup238 2y ago
    I think the very concept of an abstraction is a language game, one that speaks to the old Platonic ideals of Greek philosophy - with all the good and bad that implies. This specific language game takes on a very concrete meaning to programmers that can be quantitatively analyzed by a compiler but epistemologically it’s just another abstract concept (I hate philosophical inception).
• sunshowers 2y ago
  You could reasonably consider free will to be an abstraction or a language game, but it is closely linked to moral responsibility, prisons, punishment, etc, which are very much not language games. I don't think free will exists because I don't think supernatural phenomena exist, and there's certainly no natural explanation for free will (Penrose was correct about that). But I have a very non-nihilistic view on things [1]. [1] https://sunshowers.io/posts/there-is-no-free-will/ https://sunshowers.io/posts/there-is-no-free-will/