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- Homo Deus –– Yuval Harari
- [[free will]]: This is the best reason to learn history: not to predict the future, but to free yourself from the past and imagine alternative destinies. Ofcourse, this is not total freedom - we can't avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is obviously better than none.
- Homo Deus –– Yuval Harari
- In exchange for such devoted counseling services, we will just have to give up the idea that humans are individuals, and that each human has a [[free will]] determining what's good, what's beautiful and what is the meaning of life. Humans will no longer be autonomous entities directed by the stories their narrating self invents. Instead they will be integrated parts of a huge global network.
- Homo Deus –– Yuval Harari
- [[free will]]: decisions reached through a chain reaction of biochemical reactions, each determined by a previous event are certainly not free. Decisions resulting from random subatomic accidents aren't free either. They are just random accidents - and combine them with deterministic processes, we get probabilistic outcomes, but this too doesn't amount to freedom.
- Yet, people erroneously jump to the conclusion that if I want to press it, I choose to want to. This is of-course false, I don't choose my desires, I only feel them and act accordingly.
- However, once we accept that there is no soul, and that humans have no inner essence called the 'self', it no longer makes sense to ask 'How does the self choose its desires?' It's like asking a bachelor, 'How does your wife choose her clothes?'. In reality, there is only a stream of consciousness, and desires arise and pass within this stream but there is no permanent self who owns the desires, hence it is meaningless to ask whether I choose my desires deterministically, randomly or freely. #Buddhism
- Doubting [[free will]] is not just a philosophical exercise - it has practical implications. If organisms indeed lack free will, it implies we could manipulate and even control their desires using drugs, genetic engineering or direct brain stimulation.
- What could happen if we could rewrite our inner monologues, or even silence them completely on occasion?
- [[free will]]: decisions reached through a chain reaction of biochemical reactions, each determined by a previous event are certainly not free. Decisions resulting from random subatomic accidents aren't free either. They are just random accidents - and combine them with deterministic processes, we get probabilistic outcomes, but this too doesn't amount to freedom.
- Homo Deus –– Yuval Harari
- Doubting [[free will]] is not just a philosophical exercise - it has practical implications. If organisms indeed lack free will, it implies we could manipulate and even control their desires using drugs, genetic engineering or direct brain stimulation.
- What could happen if we could rewrite our inner monologues, or even silence them completely on occasion?
- Doubting [[free will]] is not just a philosophical exercise - it has practical implications. If organisms indeed lack free will, it implies we could manipulate and even control their desires using drugs, genetic engineering or direct brain stimulation.
- Made You Think –– Homo Deus
- People seem to have [[free will]], whether it exists or not.
- Do we perform conscious choices under free will or are we subject to environment and past experience?
- How do we structure our own environment or experiences to structure our own choices?
- One mental model is to realize that people are not rational, free will, calculating beings but are instead input-output combinations.
- By that model, nobody does anything right or wrong, either.
- "But the million-dollar question is not whether parrots and humans can act upon their inner desires – the question is whether they can choose their desires in the first place."
- Free will as an evolutionary result to improve survivability.
- People erroneously jump to the conclusion that if I want to press something, I choose to want to. This is of course false. I don’t choose my desires. I only feel them, and act accordingly
- First mover concept - even when asking why to a certain situation, you can never reach a first mover. You can explain it by past experiences or biology etc, but you can't ever reach a first mover (ie: "I chose to do this"), and by this argument we can't have free will.
- Regardless we have or not free will, we still are responsible for our lives.
- Dichotomy - it's easy to fall into a trap of pure nihilism, everything is "environment" and therefore nothing matters. Who is responsible?
- Punishment should be still used to protect society from bad not-free-will behavior, whether it's environment or not.
- Even though you are not responsible, you are still dangerous. Especially for a societal benefit.
- Do we perform conscious choices under free will or are we subject to environment and past experience?
- People seem to have [[free will]], whether it exists or not.
- Fatalism, Foreknowledge and Determinism
- Topic: [[free will]]
- The War of Art –– Steven Pressfield
- The truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. [[free will]]
- What Does It All Mean –– Thomas Nagel
- [[free will]]
- Nothing up to the point at which you choose determines irrevocably what your choice will be. It remains an open possibility.
- Some things that happen are determined in advance.
- the sum total of a person's experiences, desires, and knowledge, his hereditary constitution, the social circumstances and the nature of the choice facing him, together with other factors that we may not know about, all combine to make a particular action in the circumstances inevitable.
- The process of decision is just the working out of the determined result inside your mind.
- People disagree about this: if determinism is true, no one can reasonably be praised for anything, any more that the rain can be praised or blamed for falling.
- [[free will]]
- Highlights from Homo Deus
- For centuries, humanism has been convincing us that we are the ultimate source of meaning, and that our [[free will]] is therefore the highest authority of them all.
- Highlights from Homo Deus
- The last nail in freedom's coffin is provided by the theory of evolution. Just as evolution cannot be squared with eternal souls, neither can it swallow the idea of [[free will]]. For if humans are free, how could natural selection have shaped them?
- Thoughts on the connection between stoicism and religion
This leads into a tangent - to define whether Stoicism is ultimately a religion, you'd have to define what religion and "belief in the divine" really are. The more you think about it, the more you realize that Stoicism could be just another term for a belief in "God". According to the philosophy, there are some things that are "predetermined" or out of your control, and others that aren't - [[Free will]]. There are things in our control, that exist in this realm or the physical realm, and then there are things that are not in our control, those controlled by a larger divine being, or however one would like to refer to it.