Comment by tiltowait

4 days ago

While I doubt you’re unique in this, I think this is the first time I’ve seen someone say they hope there’s no such thing as free will.

Can you explain why you hope everything is deterministic?

In my way of thinking, determinism is a prerequisite for "free will". People usually speak of free will as a the idea of making their own choices. Suppose you hypothetically take a snapshot of my exact physical/mental state at the instant of decision and replay it multiple times. If I always make the same choice, that's determinism. If the outcome of the decision is sometimes different, I can't call that a "choice" or free will. It was something random that I had no control over.

Might just be a reflection of my enjoyment of life. I’ve been very lucky on most aspects. Perhaps if things were worse I’d wish for the knowledge that it could have gone differently.

But also it would be super trippy and interesting. Knowing just the mass of the universe you’d be able to peer into any time, past or present, and see exactly what happened. But then what happens around areas where people look into the local time? This happens in the show Devs. So not at all a new idea in scifi.

  • Not much concern for all the people less lucky than you?

    • Just explaining where my ideas on determinism might come from. It’s not as though I can change the laws of physics to be one way or the other.