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Comment by sysbin | Hacker News Reader

Free will is an illusion but you can continue to postulate otherwise. You can feel like you’re responsible while not really being true in both situations.

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> Free will is an illusion but you can continue to postulate otherwise.

Then you won't be mad at me for down-voting your comment? It wasn't my choice!

I'm curious why you think I would care in the first place if that's your attitude.

This is the path of irresponsibility, leads to not caring, what denying it really accomplishes? You really will argue that you can’t even try acting otherwise? Reminds Ice T from rick and morty schwifty :)

Nope, a person with the childish attitude that the person exhibits is a clown in either mental capacities of understanding free will is an illusion or not. Understanding free will is an illusion increases analysing how you are as a person and in my opinion makes you become a pacifist.

> analysing how you are as a person and in my opinion makes you become a pacifist

This contradicts your argument. If there is no free will, you can't make yourself become anything.

That's not what I wrote. People who understand free will is an illusion become pacifists.

If free will is an illusion, then the influence of the algorithms is also illusory. Furthermore, Google had no choice but to create the algorithms as they have, therefore holding them (or anyone) accountable for any harm is meaningless.

Much better to act as if free will is not illusory, and do what we can to improve things.

I disagree and that's very much a strawman argument. I still want to improve things and even when knowing free will is an illusion.

> Free will is an illusion but you can continue to postulate otherwise

Aren't you implying free will by saying a person "can continue to postulate otherwise"?

postulate: suggest or assume the existence, fact, or truth of (something) as a basis of reasoning.

The conundrum is in the word “can”

I guess "will" would have been better.

To really live up to your philosophy you seriously need to completely abandon modal verbs in your language

Depends on what you mean by "free will." Natural liberty, moral liberty, ultimate sovereignty...

You're not free in any of those situations.

Curious where you're coming from -- Materialistic determinism? Hyper-Calvinism? Something else?

Hard determinism

Caused by?

Ok. How? And are we talking predestination or simply external locii of control lack of free will?

There is the narrating self and the experiencing self. The narrating self makes up stories from the information that the experiencing self feeds to it. The important thing being that the experiencing self cannot judge, it just... experiences. Takes in every bit of sensory information and let’s the narrating self make up the story it thinks matches the experience one goes through.

Now, imagine the sensory overload you get when stuck on YouTube, showing those reviews, unboxing videos, whatever to you - or more precisely, to your experiencing self. At some point your narrating self will make up the story and then you end up paying 15k for camera equipment... of course, it’s your choice, right?

EDIT: https://medium.theuxblog.com/the-peak-end-rule-ff7246115248

This is a good explanation of the situation OP went through.

Thanks for this explanation and for the link.

Once younlook at the ad-driven economy from this point of view, it becomes harder to be condescending.

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