• eru@mouse.chitanda.moe
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    15 hours ago

    Do you think knowledge, reasoning, experience, and risks do not play any role in our decisions?

    if you accept physical determinism, then knowledge, reasoning, experience, etc. are part of the physical system (ie. your brain) which makes the decision. they only play a role in that they influence the physical system for the decision making. the problem remains that you are forced to make a certain decision according to physics. the knowledge, reasoning, etc. are significant insofar as they influence the physics.

    in determinism: you change the physics, you change the outcome. knowledge and reasoning changes the physics (the state of your mind), which changes the outcome. their influence on your decision making process does not imply free will.

    Even if there was free will, those things would be vastly more important than it. Free will is totally unimportant

    i gave an example of a tree accidentally falling and killing someone in the other comment, it is hard to imagine free will has nothing to do with why you don’t hold the tree morally responsible.

    anyway, i am going to stop replying, my original reply was just showing that the free will problem is very much an issue for any deterministic position. there are potentially good ways to salvage determinism and i give references to three in my first comment, but the point you put forth is not convincing.

    • Communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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      4 hours ago

      their influence on your decision making process does not imply free will

      This means that nothing about free will is important in any decision making process, and thus free will is just a garbage concept that has no bearing or meaning in reality.

      Even if there was such a thing as free will, it would be completely unimportant in decision making.

      it is hard to imagine free will has nothing to do with why you don’t hold the tree morally responsible.

      It doesn’t, let’s imagine free will separate from knowledge, reasoning, experience, etc. No amount of knowledge, reasoning, experience would prevent the tree from falling according to the laws of physics, that’s why I don’t hold the tree accountable. The tree has no knowledge, no reasoning, no experience, no morals, so, even if it could freely make the choice not to do it, because it doesn’t have those things, it doesn’t matter at all.