hotdaniel

@hotdaniel@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yes, We Have Free Will. No, We Absolutely Do Not⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  there is a difference in agency where a human system bases its decisions on a large spatial, time range of experiences (moments to life-long experiences and multi-generation planning, tiny tools all the way to architecture planning, a large number of connections by multiple means to other humans’ experiences) to make “decisions”. What do you call that?

  I would call this determinism as much as anything else. Whatever you discover by reflecting on memories, you make your decision based on those memories, ergo there was a reason that determined your choice.

  Because it exists and if it’s not called free will, that’s probably the closest thing that scientifically can be measured and associated with “free will”.

  I would just agree that we have a “will”. It’s the “free” qualifier that’s disputed.

  We may just be “transistors” responding to the environment, but we are complex enough to introduce chaos by connecting lots of unrelated things to the point of being as close to being unpredictable as any random system in the universe.

  Sorry, I can’t agree. We have ignorance about the future, but that doesn’t mean my decisions are undetermined. As far as I can tell, everything is either determined or not determined. If it’s determined, then I was not free to choose it. If it’s not determined, then it’s random, in which case I again could not have freely chosen it. You seem to be moving towards compatibilism, which accepts determinism but believes determinism can still be compatible with a notion of free will, e.g. our ignorance of the future is what we mean by free will.

  Personally, I think life is very interesting bring a wet robot! However, I understand why most reject the concept out of hand.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yes, We Have Free Will. No, We Absolutely Do Not⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s what it is to be a compatibilist. They are determinists who believe that there is still a meaningful use of the phrase free will, despite the apparent determinism of the universe. They would redefine free will to not mean I have the ability to supervene on the natural laws, but that when you make a decision absent certain forces compelling a particular choice, that’s what we mean by free will.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yes, We Have Free Will. No, We Absolutely Do Not⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  For people arguing they have free will, they typically mean they have the ability to do other than what they did do. That is, whenever they make a choice, they do so under the belief that they could have, in principle, made a different choice. As far as science is concerned, such a free will does not exist, because the behaviors you exhibit appear to be completely explainable in terms of the environment impressing upon you, and the effects that impression has on your neural activity. There is no “you” making free decisions in this picture. There’s just stuff bumping into other stuff, and how is that free?

  Regarding a general consensus of free will, that’s just not even an argument anyone should care about. Plenty of people are flatly told they have free will because, “they don’t have a choice, God made them with free will”. Others/most are simply uneducated or under-read on the subject. That’s fine, but it doesn’t mean their opinion should weigh on our conclusions. If you show most people an optical illusion and ask them if it appears to be moving, they’d say yes, even though science will tell you there’s nothing moving.

  I personally am a hard deterministic regarding free will. I think we have a will but nothing about it is free. It is subject to natural laws just as a rock rolling down a cliff. That’s fine. There’s a related philosophical position of compatibilism, which believes that we have a determined will, but that the truth of the determination does not undercut our ability to talk as if and use the phrase free will as if we really do have such a thing. In this sense, compatibilists would say we don’t have the ability to do other than what we are determined to do, but since we might not yet know what we are determined to do, then that ignorance captures what is meant by free will. So compatibilists are determinists, they just think free will as a concept is compatible with that determinism.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Youtube’s Anti-adblock and uBlock Origin⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I just disabled ghostery ad-block and that seems to work. Still have ublock going.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OP finds vulnerability where a forum sends you your password in plaintext over email and everyone misses the forest for the trees⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  This was just recently since BG3 came out. Since I first saw this drama I was pretty sure OP was misrepresenting the situation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists confirm that the first black hole ever imaged is actually spinning⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  From an outsider’s perspective, you would see an object approach and then freeze. It would red-shift dimmer until it disappeared. From an in-falling perspective, I don’t think you’d notice anything at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OP finds vulnerability where a forum sends you your password in plaintext over email and everyone misses the forest for the trees⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Uh, I seem to recall this happening when I made a Larian account. What happens is you give them your email, they make your account, and email you a temporary password. The temp password is shown in plaintext, as the email shows. Once I saw the email, I logged in to finalize my account and change my password to something secure. It’s not the most modern process, but I wasn’t really that concerned either.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists confirm that the first black hole ever imaged is actually spinning⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I see. Thank you. So, you can use light to infer the mass, and then the volume information to infer the spin? Easy enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists confirm that the first black hole ever imaged is actually spinning⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Well… does it? If all the stuff falls in and only the volume remains, who could say that it’s spinning? How could you detect it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists confirm that the first black hole ever imaged is actually spinning⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Does the black hole spin? Or does the stuff outside the black hole spin? 🤔

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft cuts ties with the Surface Duo after just 2 Android version updates⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Bro, can you simp for apple harder? They tried to screw people over, got called out, and you’re running damage control.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People who haven't gotten into habit of googling stuff in the last 20 years might not get into it at all anymore because of how search engines are gamed with SEO spam tactics nowadays⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I think something broke with Bing’s advanced search. It doesn’t seem to respond at all.