this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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Sam Harris and Jay Garfield have a great podcast about free will. Saint Augustine came up with the idea of free agency in order to get God off the hook for Eve's fall. Fascinating stuff.
Sam's explanation of free will is compelling and difficult to argue against. The way we feel about it reveals something about us. He cites examples of people who found comfort in the idea of an absence of free will but also people who are terrified of the idea. Meanwhile, the universe hasn't apparently changed. The more I think about this stuff, the more I come to believe that we construct the world in our imaginations and fit the data to that model, not the other way round. We see what we want to see.
There's also a third group of people who find the absence of free will neither comforting nor terrifying, but just don't give a fuck. The absence of free will is just a simple fact, and it doesn't have any impact on my life whatsoever. I'm still doing what I was always gonna do and my brain will still produce the feeling that I'm in control of myself and my life, just like everyone else. I don't understand what there is to even have feelings about on the matter.
I would argue the vast majority of people are like this, this is the neutral position. You act in the world as if the implications of all of this are meaningless.
Even if you believe there is no free will, it doesn't change how you behave in any significant way, because your are the sum total of your parts.
The Dan Dennett's and Sam Harris' of the world are having an argument that ultimately means nothing to us because we'll act the same way regardless of this information.
Yeah. To me it's not even a fun philosophical exercise like thinking about what came before the big bang or if there is anything 'outside' of the universe. I feel like it's a debate from before modern physics. Like, 500 years ago there was a lively debate on the matter of free will in a religious context. And I guess the only way to still believe in free will and its contradiction with the laws of nature is when you believe in God. But for everyone else it's just so damn obvious free will can't exist and it's just human ego wanting to pretend we have control. 'Free will doesn't exist' is as obvious and unimpactful of a fact to me as 2+2=4.
I disagree with that view, mostly because I don't think that free will means completely random. Imagine the goldbach conjecture, there are two simple rules, divide by two if even, multiply by three and add 1 if odd. If you take any number, it is impossible to determine when that number will enter a loop, unless you go through the whole process. The brain is like that, but a trillion times more complicated. Is the brain deterministic? Yes. But does that mean you can determine what choice someone will make? No.
It does have implications.
Most of humanity believes in some form of next life where they will have to face the implications of what they did in this life. If you are a determinist you either have to accept really depressing Calvinism or conclude that the system makes no sense. Can you really imagine the world being the way it is if billions of people admitted that there was no afterlife or they accepted that literally no actions would impact it? I am willing to bet at least some things would change.
What would a criminal justice system look like where we accepted that A ---> B? Precrime? Livestream scared straight programs? Cutting off all rehabilitation for people serving terminal sentences? I am not sure exactly how it would play out.
What about day-to-day social norms breaking? If someone broke the rules would we make a point to call it out and punish them publicly since we believe that the main purpose is to prevent others from copying them?
We were visiting friends, long drive. Decided to stop at a plaza to get something to eat. A truck was blocking me and then moved. Within about a second
Me: oh nice hamburgers
Wife: sushi, grand opening
4 year old daughter: ice cream!
I slammed my foot on the brake. Sure enough right there was a hamburger place next to a sushi place (with grand opening sign) next to an ice cream place. I just sat there trying to understand the implications of what just happened. 3 people were shown the same thing at the same time and each of them saw exactly what they wanted to. It was like the poem about the blind men examining the elephant but freaken real.
Never going to forget that moment.
I was personally raised agnostic, and after a long existential road including at least one severe crisis and mindfulness / CBT therapy, came to found the idea of a lack of free will be to be incredibly comforting.
My generally similarly minded father, however, seems to find the idea pretty terrifying.
To me the lack of free will and physics of the universe provides a comforting structure that I lacked for life, to him, as someone raised Catholic with a lot of moral teachings about choice, I think it represented a terrifying teardown of the underlying foundation that he's known and built his life on.