> Alas, the only flavor of philosophy that’s popular with techies is what I’d call edgelord utilitarianism — a collection of materialist, pseudo-mathematical beliefs favored by the SF Bay Area rationalist community.
Which is sad, because philosophy of technology does exist and is a young discipline in philosophy.
Philosophy of technology has existed since Plato and Aristotle. Every other word in their corpus is technē, which is why we call technology 'technology'. In every succeeding epoch the theory of the technological has been developed. It isn't clear there are 'disciplines in philosophy': there are only a few thousand researchers to begin with, on the scale of art history. I asked perhaps doubtful AI but it said that in AI there is an 'elite tier' of AI researchers of 5000 from maybe 100,000 total; the corresponding figure for philosophy was 500 out of 5000. The AI world could finance its own army of philosophers and it could be bigger than real philosophy, and no one would notice the dent on funds
> But if we have no agency, nothing matters. There can be no morality: a criminal was always destined to commit a crime. It was never right for us to punish them, but that’s okay: we couldn’t have acted differently, so we shoulder no blame.
Right, and it seems likely to me that this is correct, but I don't see the issue. Whether we'd like things to matter has no impact on whether they really do, but the obvious conclusion along the same lines is to act as if you believe in free will (e.g. enacting punishments) even if you don't. Either there is free will, so you behaved correctly, or there isn't, so you didn't really decide anyway how to act anyway.
In smart psychopath Logic, because life is a repeated game and you will have moments of weakness and imperfections, so you would like the world to he in a moral equilibrium where even if you let your guard down for a moment you will not risk immediately be butchered by the other person. The game theory of collaboration and nice mess is pretty solid once you account for transaction costs, risk, repeated interactions etc.
For most people, given that they are part of a species who's superpower is collaboration at planet scale and who evolved accordingly, the hedonic pleasure of acting morally congruent and being embraced by a community, as well as hard wired tendency towards empathy does the rest of the trick. How you grow up and what trauma shaped your intellectual and emotional development will affect who you consider worthy of empathy and care ofc.
Right, this is why you resolve act as if there is. If there isn't, then "you" didn't really resolve to do anything anyway, or at least it was inevitable that you would make that choice (for example that you would follow this line of reasoning) so it didn't matter.
If there really were such a thing as free will, whatever that means, then by acting like there is, you were acting correctly.
It's sort of like how in math, when you're dealing with an if statement, a false premise gives your conclusion for free. You only need to consider the case that you have a choice in the first place when deciding how you should act. Therefore you should act as if free will exists, even if deep down you really don't believe it does.
Basically "I should choose to act as if I have free will" really expands to "if I can choose how to act, then I should choose to act as if I have free will," which is then straightforward basic logic.
For me, I just can't falsify my experience that things do matter, that I make choices. The people in my life that I encounter seem to have this same experience.
1-We do have machinery that performs a resolution of next action/thought/belief (based on external input, current state, etc.) and we possibly just sense that action as "choice"
2-It seems pretty unlikely that the resolution process could be cleanly deterministic and repeatable given quantum stuff, meaning some step in the resolution process hovering on the edge of two options could go either way depending on the brain's electromagnetic soup's current state.
3-Our emotions are critical for our survival, driving choices that help us short and long term, and it seems that one of those core drivers is a sense of agency. Even if we don't have free will in the magic sense of causing electrons (or whatever) to suddenly turn left to support or choice, it would still be critical for us to have a sense that our actions and efforts all matter, so those feelings are probably built into the system.
Note:
This assumes there is no special magic somewhere that defies our current understanding of the universe and it just hasn't been figured out yet.
The quantum stuff appears to me to very much be that the universe is deterministic if and only if it's deterministic. Like, if you imagine that we're all something like vibrational modes on an expanding drum head (which, as far as I know is basically what QFT says, but I've never actually studied it), then there's no issue as far as I know. The initial state of the universe set everything in motion, and the global geometry of the universe causes certain wave propagations or it doesn't. Could be that I just don't know enough, but I've always found the phrasing of "super-determinism" to be odd; obviously, if the universe is deterministic, you don't get to choose what experiments you run. That's just normal determinism.
> In classical physics, the universe is deterministic: every action is a necessary consequence of what happened before. In this view, our actions are predetermined too.
Sure, but the deterministic chaos [1] arising within classical physics says that our predetermined actions depend on upon effectively unknowable aspects of initial conditions.
Nothing probabilistic or required. Easiest example is anything dependent on turbulent fluids, which are found everywhere in the atmosphere and the oceans.
Predetermined actions in a chaotic system are indistinguishable from free will. Occam's Razor suggests free will, being simpler and just as predictive, is the better model.
Author tries and fails to rationally argue that rational thinking is incorrect by pointing out that some people trying to think rationally have failed.
> In this view, our actions are predetermined too.
> But if we have no agency, nothing matters.
This is, listen carefully, just bollocks. More precisely it's a non sequitur because "predetermined" doesn't mean "no agency". That's what it would mean, sure, if your actions were predetermined by an evil puppetmaster. But ask two questions:
1. What are your actions predetermined by? It's you. That's what.
2. What, if you find this too constraining, do you want? What do you mean by free will, if not your actions being determined by your own mind? Exactly, you don't know, so stop complaining about nothing.
Yes, the universe is deterministic, boo fucking hoo. This doesn't mean you're some sort of robot slave, because it's your mind that is deterministic, and your mind, deterministically, probabilistically, makes choices. These are the only kind of choices that can possibly exist, which is why, to resume my starting theme, when you try to come up with any alternative thing a choice could be, you must necessarily talk bollocks.
There are less reductive forms of materialism. For the view of a Nobel prize physics laureate see A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down by Robert B. Laughlin. From the philosophy world, read Manuel DeLanda or Alicia Juarrero.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 32.9 ms ] threadWhich is sad, because philosophy of technology does exist and is a young discipline in philosophy.
Right, and it seems likely to me that this is correct, but I don't see the issue. Whether we'd like things to matter has no impact on whether they really do, but the obvious conclusion along the same lines is to act as if you believe in free will (e.g. enacting punishments) even if you don't. Either there is free will, so you behaved correctly, or there isn't, so you didn't really decide anyway how to act anyway.
For most people, given that they are part of a species who's superpower is collaboration at planet scale and who evolved accordingly, the hedonic pleasure of acting morally congruent and being embraced by a community, as well as hard wired tendency towards empathy does the rest of the trick. How you grow up and what trauma shaped your intellectual and emotional development will affect who you consider worthy of empathy and care ofc.
If there really were such a thing as free will, whatever that means, then by acting like there is, you were acting correctly.
It's sort of like how in math, when you're dealing with an if statement, a false premise gives your conclusion for free. You only need to consider the case that you have a choice in the first place when deciding how you should act. Therefore you should act as if free will exists, even if deep down you really don't believe it does.
Basically "I should choose to act as if I have free will" really expands to "if I can choose how to act, then I should choose to act as if I have free will," which is then straightforward basic logic.
1-We do have machinery that performs a resolution of next action/thought/belief (based on external input, current state, etc.) and we possibly just sense that action as "choice"
2-It seems pretty unlikely that the resolution process could be cleanly deterministic and repeatable given quantum stuff, meaning some step in the resolution process hovering on the edge of two options could go either way depending on the brain's electromagnetic soup's current state.
3-Our emotions are critical for our survival, driving choices that help us short and long term, and it seems that one of those core drivers is a sense of agency. Even if we don't have free will in the magic sense of causing electrons (or whatever) to suddenly turn left to support or choice, it would still be critical for us to have a sense that our actions and efforts all matter, so those feelings are probably built into the system.
Note: This assumes there is no special magic somewhere that defies our current understanding of the universe and it just hasn't been figured out yet.
Sure, but the deterministic chaos [1] arising within classical physics says that our predetermined actions depend on upon effectively unknowable aspects of initial conditions.
Nothing probabilistic or required. Easiest example is anything dependent on turbulent fluids, which are found everywhere in the atmosphere and the oceans.
Predetermined actions in a chaotic system are indistinguishable from free will. Occam's Razor suggests free will, being simpler and just as predictive, is the better model.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
> But if we have no agency, nothing matters.
This is, listen carefully, just bollocks. More precisely it's a non sequitur because "predetermined" doesn't mean "no agency". That's what it would mean, sure, if your actions were predetermined by an evil puppetmaster. But ask two questions:
1. What are your actions predetermined by? It's you. That's what.
2. What, if you find this too constraining, do you want? What do you mean by free will, if not your actions being determined by your own mind? Exactly, you don't know, so stop complaining about nothing.
Yes, the universe is deterministic, boo fucking hoo. This doesn't mean you're some sort of robot slave, because it's your mind that is deterministic, and your mind, deterministically, probabilistically, makes choices. These are the only kind of choices that can possibly exist, which is why, to resume my starting theme, when you try to come up with any alternative thing a choice could be, you must necessarily talk bollocks.