I believe in determinism and free will.
I’m determined not to get any arguments over free will, and I’ve determined that freely.
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I mean suicide or innevitable death via actions is a choice someone has instead of doing anything. So there is always choice, and “free will”.
More copy and pasting food for thought. Maybe compatibilism is the answer.
For whatever reason, this is the first thing that came to my mind.
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Perhaps more on point, a non-religious argument against free will.
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btw whatever you do, do not look up Schopenhauer’s idea of will. The guy was on some kind of mushroom when he developed that idea.
done
If people actually believe that I suspect they have never done any real deep religious or philosophical thought via religion, philosophical study or therapy. I mean one’s early ego has been conditioned and that conditioning absolutely can be stripped down and remade in a more self determined way. IMO
I don’t find Harris’ argument (or the overall argument) very interesting so I haven’t studied it deeply, but I suspect he would say that supports his argument.
I’m working through it again…have to run out now…a decision we made yesterday mind you. However, it seems that he’s saying that thought moves faster than neurons? That brain activity is there before you choose breakfast? That the meat sack we occupy is slow?
Finally, more recently, direct recordings from the cortex have shown that the activity of just 256 neurons is sufficient to predict with 80% accuracy a person’s decision to move 700 milliseconds before they become aware of it.
btw, I was reading last night that it takes a baseball player 400 milliseconds to decide to swing at a 90 mph pitch. So, clearly, one can train the body to be more aware of one’s surroundings…if one plays baseball.
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I think so, I was into Sam Harris a few years back and free will was one of the things I spent time thinking about. In the end I didn’t make much headway on my thinking in this area because, as a wise man once said
Harris is a big proponent of meditation and experimented with drugs when he was younger, and I think is still into judo
He’s still well into psychedelics, he talks about it a lot.
I thought he stopped doing them after starting his family, even though he has no regrets and recommends for some people. That said, I stopped listening to pretty much any podcast, so if he talks about doing them recently I’ve missed it!
He had a long episode pretty much wholly about doing shrooms in a dark closet, so I think he still does sometimes
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I read in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki earlier this evening
Perhaps it was the Huxley reference, but it immediately made me think of what a decent (not too little or too much) amount of mushrooms is like (or, so I’ve heard). I understand these kinds of things are illegal in Taiwan so I have no plan on exploring my ability to alter my state or consider freedom of will from such a perspective!
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Libertarian free will (libertarian in the philosophical sense, not the political) seems to me to be an extension of the “ghost in the machine” kind of dualism- there is somebody ‘inside’ acting without constraint. On what grounds then, does it justify its actions? Randomness?
OTOH, determinism doesn’t seem to leave room for moral responsibility. You think you are choosing the right thing, but if it’s determined, what makes any action right or wrong?
And compatibilism seems to me the position I would take, but it also seems to be a wimpy compromise.
In that context justice is less about right or wrong. Rather, you can see it as a relatively arbitrary set of rules that increases chances of a group’s cohesion and survival: if you do something that harms the group or anybody within (cheat, steal, murder), you get negative feedback (punch in the face, jail, death).
This is even more apparent when you consider there’s a divide between legality, morality and what is socially accepted: something can be arguably immoral but legal (big corp suing small companies down to bankruptcy), illegal but arguably not immoral (being gay in the U.A.E.), or bringing social shame but being legal and arguably not immoral (a professor speaking against oppressive censorship in academia). At the end of the day what we call “moral” is mostly decided based on the latter: what brings social shame.
That’s not what I call moral.
Yeah…nah. That kind of stuff varies when you cross a bridge where I’m at.
Moral and legal are often not one in the same…enter perspective by the onlooker and you get an explosion of variables nearly incalculable.