The Free Willies

Sabine recently had a post claiming free will doesn't exist. Lumo responded with a couple of his own. I feel only slightly guilty that I didn't bother to read much of either.

I'm pretty sure I've heard it all before, and frankly, the whole subject gives me the willies. I've read a lot of this stuff in the past and it's all about determinism, quantum randomness, etc. All very Laplacian and, in my opinion, beside the point.

My point is that each of us comes equipped with sensors and a decision making machine that takes in data about the world and makes choices about what to do next. As I mentioned before, whether you believe that old decision maker is almost purely deterministic or somewhat affected by quantum randomness is beside the point, because in either case, one datum that affects those choices is belief in whether we can really make such choices. There is every reason to believe that fatalism, or its absence, plays an important role in the choices people actually make. This is one of those self-referential loops that bedevils even math and logic.

Mostly, I think, disbelief in free will is most useful as an excuse for bad behavior or moral or intellectual laziness. In any case, if you find yourself bringing it into the logic of any decision you are making, you are probably just confusing your brain.

Those brains we come equipped with are a kludge of parts originally designed for much smaller brained animals. We still have the same fight or flight, feed and fuck instincts that served our remote ancestors well. The biggest difference we have from them is the over development of the front of the brain, and its main job is to weigh the consequences of following those instincts against desired longer term outcomes. If we feel tempted to invoke "free will doesn't exist" in the course of any decision making, chances are its really just a way of telling you frontal lobes to buzz off.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

The most pointed critique of social security and liberalism in general is the libertarian critique. The problem with libertarians, for a liberal, is that we have too much in common. We both believe in individual rights, tolerance of individual differences, and dislike government prescription of religion. The basic difference, it seems to me, is the different answers we give to Cain's (with thanks to the Captain - my original version had the corpse asking the question!) famous question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That's not really my basic bitch against the libertarians though. My real complaint is the same as my complaint against most religion - its premise is a fraud. For those who can't stand to wait for the punchline, I believe that trying to implement libertarian principles leads to tyranny or social disintegration. Demonstrating that takes some historical (and pre-historical) context. For all but the last 15,000 or so of the 100,000 years the human spec
Read more

Uneasy Lies The Head

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ........... Shakespeare Henry IV, Part II. So it is with us and our slightly distant primate cousins , so it seems. A 9-year study of wild baboons in Kenya by Princeton University and the Institute of Primate Research may turn conventional assumptions of alphas males upside down. The study found that alpha males have high testosterone levels, which allows them to dominate other baboons, get access to more food, and attract better mates. This is expected. Surprisingly, though, the alpha males also have high levels of stress hormone glucocorticoid, which scientists measured from their feces samples. In fact, the stress of alpha baboons was on par with low-ranking baboons. The convention wisdom is that access to food and females provides life security and thus less stress for dominant males. Conversely, weak males who are constantly threatened by starvation and physical violence from stronger males are thought to be more stressed. The st
Read more

We Call it Soccer

The US played its best, and maybe only good game of World Cup, but lost thanks to brilliant goalkeeping by the Swedish keeper and the bizarre method soccer uses to settle ties when three US stars could not put the ball on frame from the 12 yard spot.  At the end it came down to a blocked shot that spun in by maybe a couple of centimeters. Well, that's football - too much like life.   Which brings me to a modest proposal.  Replace the thirty minute overtimes with as many 7-player 15 minute periods as needed to settle it.  Scoring should be much easier with fewer players.
Read more