Comment on do you think freewill truly exists?
crt0o@lemm.ee 3 weeks agoMy idea is that the agent is the particle itself, and the laws of physics are simply the statistics of what decisions it tends to make. I imagine that if a fundamental particle like an electron was phenomenally conscious and had some kind of agency, it wouldn’t have any intention or self-awareness, so it would decide practically randomly, based on its quantum state, which would be some kind of rudimentary experience it has.
pcalau12i@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I feel like this is no different practically speaking than just saying its behavior is random, but anthropomorphizing it for some reason.
crt0o@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
The reason is trying to work towards a model which could actually solve the hard problem, something which the physicalism prevalent in science has failed at completely. Consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality, and it needs to be taken seriously, any model which doesn’t include it is either inacurrate or incomplete. Yes, a single particle might act randomly, but that might not hold for a more complex entangled system, especially an orchestrated one inside a living being.
pcalau12i@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
There is no “hard problem.” It’s made up. Nagel’s paper that Chalmers bases all his premises on is just awful and assumes for no reason at all that physical reality is something that exists entirely independently of one’s point of view within it, never justifies this bizarre claim and builds all of his arguments on top of it which then Chalmers cites as if they’re proven.
crt0o@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
My line of thought is this: the most epistemically primary thing is subjective experience, because it can be known directly, thus it is undeniably real. Due to the principle of ontological parsimony, if everything can be explained in terms of experience, there is no reason to postulate something beyond it (the physical). So the way I would formulate the hard problem would be something more like “Why does our experience contain the appearance of a physical world at all, and how are they related?”.
I guess this might not resonate with you either, if you don’t believe in phenomenal consciousness as all. Personally I have a hard time understanding physicalist reductionism, how can you say that something like the experience of redness is the same thing as some pattern of neurons firing in the brain? These are clearly very different things, and even if one is entirely dependent on the other, it doesn’t mean it’s non-existent or illusory.