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Cydex's avatar

Great article, both clear and honest. I was following you in everything, except perhaps the very end:


> Dodging these questions by explaining them away—saying that free will and consciousness are just an illusion—would be intellectually dishonest. We have these sensations, and we should be asking how exactly they correspond to physical reality.

I disagree here. You have set to explore the possibility that consciousness and free will are NOT illusions arising from deterministic processes, but exploring this possibility doesn’t immediately make it so. Conversely, it doesn’t make the opposing effort intellectually dishonest, right? Just a different starting point, rather.

It’s like, upon seeing a magic “trick”, say, a rabbit getting out of an empty hat, one audience member would say “this is an illusion, the rabbit was somehow in the hat before or put there while I got distracted” and another member would say “Sure, but let’s assume rabbits COULD appear inside empty hats, how would that work?” I feel like Sam Harris is the first person and you’re the other one, and I don’t think either is intellectually dishonest.

Or did I miss why Harris is wrong?

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Shady Maples's avatar

This was clear and engaging writing on a topic that can become really esoteric really fast. You have a knack for taking dense, multi-faceted, topics and presenting them in a way that is accessible but not patronizingly simplistic. I really enjoyed it.

Metaphysical questions like free will vs determinism are fun, and I suppose are important on a very fundamental level, but as a pragmatist I resolve the dilemma by asking myself: "will taking a position on this change what's required of me? No? OK, I'll carry on as if I have free will." If we accept that things are determined, well... what do we with that knowledge? Knowing that the future is determined gives no insight into the future itself, so we must act as if we have free will in either case. You could see this as dodging the question, but to me it's an answer.

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