[ExI] Free will was: Everett worlds

SR Ballard sen.otaku at gmail.com
Tue Aug 25 20:51:21 UTC 2020


“Predetermination” as you put it does not require an actor of any kind. 

Just initial conditions that mechanistically turn into later conditions and then so on and so forth. Nothing is random, just emerging from initial conditions.

SR Ballard

> On Aug 25, 2020, at 2:42 PM, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, Aug 25, 2020 at 11:11 AM Anton Sherwood via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 2020-8-17 08:54, SR Ballard via extropy-chat wrote:
>> > If free will is real and you think it is not, you can and will excuse
>> > all manner of immorality, sloth, and cruelty because they couldn’t be
>> > avoided. You probably put murderers in jail, but it’s kind of stupid
>> > because from your perspective they never decided to kill anyone.
>> > Killing someone was something they would be completely unable to
>> > prevent.
>> 
>> Seems to me, even without free will, your actions can be influenced by 
>> your prediction of consequences; and therefore it still promotes 
>> happiness to reinforce some behaviors and discourage others.
> 
> Indeed.  Even if it's all predetermined - even if, say, reality is strong superdetermination - what did that predetermination?  That is the "you" that is making your choices, in that case.  Perhaps you may perceive the now, but if you need to kick free will up the chain to resolve things, so be it.  There is still a thing that is you that is making decisions.  (And no, the thing that is making your choices is not necessarily omniscient; it may have no more perception of your current state of affairs than you have right now.)
> 
> Also, there do appear to be some truly random aspects to the universe, such as the precise timing of atomic decay.  There could be a free will behind those, nudging our brains just enough to make the decisions they make.
> 
> It's also possible to reward things (people) that achieve socially beneficial ends, and punish things (people) that achieve socially antagonistic ends, so that the former will be more able to do their thing and the latter will be less able to do so.  This gets to the warehousing of criminals, if criminals are most likely to repeat offend right after they have done crimes and less likely to if forced to cool off in jail for a time.  Also, ideally the criminals can be offered opportunities to learn new skills and otherwise change themselves into things (people) less likely to commit more crimes.
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