I think the notion of Free Will is slippery, because it probably doesn't exist. Reading up on some neuroscience stuff, what they talk about as free will has a crazy amounts of similarities to the idea of God. In that it's an explanation that can't exist based on the known laws of physics that allows us to arrive at a conclusion we want, but doesn't really logically follow.
A weird phenomenon with the human mind seems to be our ability to semantic our way into believing whatever it is we want to believe, and much less so on the if A then B type logic/honest introspection.
If, hypothetically, we are Artificial Intelligence brought about by evolution, perhaps there is some benefit to our believing we aren't just mindless robots, and are in fact conscious individuals with free will. Or the chosen people of a God. This would probably venture off into a psychological/sociological tangent about the benefits of thinking highly of oneself.
For me, it is odd how quickly it is dismissed with "who cares" though. People not only asserting that they would behave the same, but that I would as well. I wouldn't. The determinism would dictate the change, but it would in fact be a change from my current state. It seems to me that's what one would expect when you change the value of variables in an equation. You get a different answer.
A weird phenomenon with the human mind seems to be our ability to semantic our way into believing whatever it is we want to believe, and much less so on the if A then B type logic/honest introspection.
If, hypothetically, we are Artificial Intelligence brought about by evolution, perhaps there is some benefit to our believing we aren't just mindless robots, and are in fact conscious individuals with free will. Or the chosen people of a God. This would probably venture off into a psychological/sociological tangent about the benefits of thinking highly of oneself.
For me, it is odd how quickly it is dismissed with "who cares" though. People not only asserting that they would behave the same, but that I would as well. I wouldn't. The determinism would dictate the change, but it would in fact be a change from my current state. It seems to me that's what one would expect when you change the value of variables in an equation. You get a different answer.
