257 karma · joined March 4, 2016
> If you choose to define an action as representing free will only if it is uncaused then first, you've made up a definition entirely at odds with the normal English usages
I was trying to be precise, and assumed you agree that something that's part of a causal chain cannot be reasonably be called "free" by any common sense definition. You can't change the past after all, can you? If not then you're a product of circumstance just like everything else in the universe.
Whatever mechanism there is that makes you act on some thoughts but not on others, that mechanism is itself subject to the same mystery as thoughts are. What I mean is, you would have to make the decision to make the decision to act, but not before having made the decision to make that decision, and so on. What we in fact experience is no such regression of decisions, but instead merely the sensation of the thought, possibly followed by the sensation of acting.
That you identify yourself as the voluntary thinker of your thoughts and actor of your actions is a beneficial psychological feature surely, it's the difference between someone suffering from schizophrenia and someone not, but that feeling is necessarily an illusion because of the reasons I have explained.
If you remain unconvinced, try meditating for like 5 minutes. That is, focus on nothing but your breath for as long as possible. You could not avoid having other thoughts pop into your head even if your life depended on it.
In that case the concept is detrimental to our justice system. Take away free will and it still makes sense to protect society from dangerous agents, the only thing that changes is the notion of justice being somehow predicated on retribution and punishment instead of rehabilitation and restoration.
> that anything that comes from the brain of a single individual is that individual's free will, by definition.
In that case free will is the effect of your past causal history molding the neuronal structure in your brain, your brain's current chemical composition combined with electrical signal processing. Describe where there is something "free" in that.
> If I hold a gun to your head and force you to do something, that isn't your free will, but if you choose to do something without my influence, that is your free will.
That does not make any sense. It's not like I can choose to ignore my self preservation instinct when I'm on top of a tall building, but suddenly can't ignore it when being threatened by you. You seem to claim that we are influenced by our environment only in some subset of circumstances. How can you tell when that switch is turned on or off?
> Whether you actually had the option to make another choice (whether any specific moment in time has multiple different future paths based on some magical internal rational agent) is irrelevant.
How are you defining free will if the ability to make choices is irrelevant? Also it seems to contradict your previous sentence that I have the ability to make a choice unless you are influencing me.
I imagine a mother posting that comment on her phone, with a couple young children looking at her sadly in the background. She feels good about the change she decided to make in her life, after checking facebook just one last time.
Yes I'm familiar with the quote and of course it was obvious that you were referencing it. What's funny is that you seem to believe the only reason I'd disagree with something you said is that I'm unaware that Planck said something similar. I'm unable to get a hold of Planck to discuss it with him, and thought I'd ask you about it since you're here promoting his ideas, but I realize that I should have made that clear to you.
Okay I will accept that premise for the sake of the argument even though I don't actually believe it's true.
Based on that you go on to conclude it's a good thing that scientists die, so that science can keep advancing.
You're essentially faced with a trolley problem, where pulling the lever one way will make everyone immortal at the cost of slowing down scientific progress, but pulling it the other way will euthanize everyone in the world, and euthanize the countless billions that might live in the future. Somehow your morals (or whatever you call it) tell you that euthanizing everyone is better than slowing down scientific progress. I disagree with you there.
Why not even try to solve the problem some other way than killing everyone? I don't know, why not, say, create an off-world colony outside the reach of those evil progress-impeding elders. Just throwing ideas out there.
Taking your logic to its limit, why not just kill every scientist after their first paper is published? But I don't think you actually want that, so lets hear your argument against my strawman.
Please describe what you consider a fair practice to seize a market in general terms.
As an experiment, go to some relevant thread and courteously imply you don't share the belief that Rust is the greatest invention since penicillin.
Then watch what happens to your karma.
Having to bear the cognitive burden of making the lifetime explicit in all of the code is a steep price to pay for the benefit of securing the small subset of the code that is actually complex enough to potentially cause a problem. I wouldn't mind having such a feature be optional though, so that you'd enable it for the most precarious parts, something like a safe{} block rather than unsafe{}.
> will this function mutate the value I give it. (&mut pointers)
We already have const. Yes I agree it's better to enable by default.
I find it interesting to watch combat sports, because it's like an experiment in human physique and psychology that reveals of what kind of self defense is actually effective and how humans function under extreme conditions. For me, that is valuable even if I never got in a fight for the rest of my life.