Comment on determinism etc
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Comments on Anuj's essay:
Evolution has not "bred out" numerous other illusions that persist to this day. All animals perceive rocks and trees as solid even though they are largely made up of empty space. Why not? The illusion is a useful approximation.
Consider: you are walking on the African Serengeti. You hear a rustle in the tall grass. Is it a sabertooh cat stalking you (do you detect agency)? Or is it just the wind (do you not detect agency)? Evolution has not "bred out" the cognitive illusion of detecting agency where there isn't any. Why not? Because false positives are relatively harmless (it wasn't a sabertooth, you got spooked for nothing, no big deal) while false negatives can be disastrous (it was a sabertooth, now you're dead). The manner in which this illusion is false is more useful than alternative manners in which this illusion could be false.
And so the list goes on. The notion of free will is just another item on this long list of cognitive constructs that provide some benefit over alternatives and whose detrimental aspects aren't severe enough to be selected against. But make no mistake, evolution is under no "obligation" to only breed for correct cognitive constructs. Only ones that are more useful than the alternatives. (I invite you to think about your intuitive notion of physics and compare it to real physics. That involves a whole suite of moderately useful but wrong ideas.)
Before delving into what quantum mechanics has to say about free will, it's important that you clearly define what you mean by free will. Every formulation I've seen has been flawed to the point of incoherence. Is free will the ability to engage in behaviors that can't be predicted? Predicted in practice, or in principle? What if probabilities can be predicted for behaviors, would that negate this type of free will? What about free will, defined as "not caused by physical mechanisms"? Then caused by what? A soul? Nothing about the sciences of physics, chemistry, anatomy and neurology even remotely suggest that is happening. And there are severe philosophical problems involved with "unphysical" forces interacting with physical systems. What would that even mean?
Evolution has not "bred out" numerous other illusions that persist to this day. All animals perceive rocks and trees as solid even though they are largely made up of empty space. Why not? The illusion is a useful approximation.
Consider: you are walking on the African Serengeti. You hear a rustle in the tall grass. Is it a sabertooh cat stalking you (do you detect agency)? Or is it just the wind (do you not detect agency)? Evolution has not "bred out" the cognitive illusion of detecting agency where there isn't any. Why not? Because false positives are relatively harmless (it wasn't a sabertooth, you got spooked for nothing, no big deal) while false negatives can be disastrous (it was a sabertooth, now you're dead). The manner in which this illusion is false is more useful than alternative manners in which this illusion could be false.
And so the list goes on. The notion of free will is just another item on this long list of cognitive constructs that provide some benefit over alternatives and whose detrimental aspects aren't severe enough to be selected against. But make no mistake, evolution is under no "obligation" to only breed for correct cognitive constructs. Only ones that are more useful than the alternatives. (I invite you to think about your intuitive notion of physics and compare it to real physics. That involves a whole suite of moderately useful but wrong ideas.)
Before delving into what quantum mechanics has to say about free will, it's important that you clearly define what you mean by free will. Every formulation I've seen has been flawed to the point of incoherence. Is free will the ability to engage in behaviors that can't be predicted? Predicted in practice, or in principle? What if probabilities can be predicted for behaviors, would that negate this type of free will? What about free will, defined as "not caused by physical mechanisms"? Then caused by what? A soul? Nothing about the sciences of physics, chemistry, anatomy and neurology even remotely suggest that is happening. And there are severe philosophical problems involved with "unphysical" forces interacting with physical systems. What would that even mean?
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