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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

But without free will nobody can decide to tell you something and influence your future decisions. If there is no free will then watching the universe over time is just like playing back a movie, maybe with some unpredictable plot twists due to randomness. Me writing this comment was predetermined - at least with some probability - since the big bang. All the things humans have done, from fighting wars to writing all the books to inventing and building all the human made things in the world, are predetermined. And while I think that there is no free will trying to imagine that everything around me is the result of a mindless process is more than my poor brain can do and therefore in everyday life I just keep pretending I have free will.

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> If there is no free will then watching the universe over time is just like playing back a movie, maybe with some unpredictable plot twists due to randomness.

Yes, rational thinking dictates exactly this conclusion (the apparent randomness being introduced by our current understanding of quantum physics).

> And while I think that there is no free will [...] in everyday life I just keep pretending I have free will.

Well, Rome wasn't built in one day. Our whole culture was built upon the illusion of "free will" (same goes for other beliefs like magic, gods, etc). It's a good exercise to remind oneself about this when we get all worked up over something or somebody.

I call hypocrisy - convincing folks there is no 'free will' has got to be the ultimate in fooling oneself!

I don't convince, I argue.

If the logic has a flaw, please let me know, I'm interested in being as close to the "truth" as possible.

The flaw is, what's the point? If its true, it has no effect. If its not, your arguing a falsehood.

> If its true, it has no effect.

As discussed, it would mean, for example, that we cannot judge anyone (and at the same time claim to be rational).

To give an example: The death penalty should no longer exist, because it is solely "justified" by judgement along the lines of "person X is evil and therefor doesn't deserve to live". There are no evil people, only people who do what they have to do, given the variables in "their system". That means there should be no "punishment", but emotionally neutral measures to prevent the suffering from happening again (i.e. locking the person up). It's pretty clear to me that a much more humane society will be the result of this understanding. And who wouldn't want that?

Edit: "rational" in the sense of "logical".

If there is no free will, then it is spurious to claim anyone is 'rational'. That loses all meaning.

> If there is no free will, then it is spurious to claim anyone is 'rational'. That loses all meaning.

No, it doesn't. I mean, the rational actor model is evidently false for lots of other reasons, but its a purely mechanistic model but for the utility function (on whose nature it is completely neutral), so rationality is just as compatible with the non-existence of free will as it is with the existence of free will (in fact, rationality requires either that there be no free will or that it be confined entirely within the utility function.)

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