[ExI] [Extropolis] Thoughts on the manifesto of futurist science (1916).

[William Flynn Wallace]

I have read that there are people in science who think that thinking things
in terms of cause and effect is old hat, or should be.  We do have a strong
tendency to use cause and effect as as understanding of what is going on.
Maybe these people just want to know 'what' and 'how' and leave 'why' out
of the question.  Nondeterminists.  bill w

On Sat, Jun 10, 2023 at 5:55 PM Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, 10 Jun 2023 at 23:36, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Jun 10, 2023 at 6:29 PM Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> >> But why do you want to do it? There are only 2 possibilities, you
>>>> wanted to do it for a reason or you wanted to do it for no reason, in other
>>>> words it was random.  There's just no getting around it, you and I are
>>>> either a roulette wheel or a cuckoo clock. I can live with that.
>>>>
>>>
>>> *> Normally you do it for a reason. You pick the chocolate rather than
>>> vanilla ice cream because you like chocolate more. It’s your choice because
>>> you made it, using your brain. It’s a free choice because no-one held a gun
>>> to your head and forced you to choose it. You are responsible for the
>>> choice and therefore you have to pay for the ice cream.*
>>>
>>
>> It may not have been a gun but *something* made you choose chocolate
>> rather than vanilla; either that or you chose it for no reason and your
>> choice was random.  We're back to cuckoo clock or roulette wheel.
>>
>
> Usually the reason is that you prefer the one you choose. If you go with
> your preference it is called a “free” choice, if you go with the preference
> of the person holding a gun to your head it is called a “forced” choice.
> There is a real and important distinction here: people want to be able to
> make their own choices and they don’t like to be forced. That is the
> layperson’s understanding of the term “free will”, and most modern
> philosophers agree that that is all there is to it, and the debates about
> whether we can be free in a determined world are misguided.
>
>> --
> Stathis Papaioannou
>
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