this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
294 points (90.2% liked)
Technology
63375 readers
5204 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I am curious to hear why you insist it's inevitable. What intrinsic properties of the universe make you believe that we don't have any choice and all our actions are set in stone?
For me. I think everything is physical, and there's always a cause and effect. There is no magical non-physical consciousness. A combination of your genetics, experiences, and environment determine the "choices" you make/actions you take. Free will is an illusion, IMO.
What is inevitable? At no point have I claimed that our actions are set in stone. That would imply fatalism which equally suggest that things can happen without anything causing them to happen.
Your choice of words is an analytical failure it says that the the will somehow sitting on top of all those processes rather than being a function of them.
I don't think my wording implies that the will is sitting on top of those processes, but rather that it's an emergent property of them. You're the one who's implying a false dichotomy - just because our choices might be influenced by prior causes doesn't mean we don't have agency. I'm asking what makes you think our actions are predetermined, not what makes you think we have some kind of magical free will that defies causality. Can you actually address the question I asked, rather than nitpicking my phrasing?
If your choices are a function of prior events and an emergent property of complex but deterministic processes where does agency come in? We are a complex deterministic process that simulates our own self to both predict a much more complex unconscious self and write rules to influence it going forward.
We call this process being conscious even when its writing just so stories after the fact.