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mwengler comments on Evolutionary psychology as "the truth-killer" - Less Wrong
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Sure they would have a cause. But in a free will world, their cause for blaming would be that it was me who had caused their being slapped. In a deterministic world, their cause for blaming me would be a long sequence of events whose outcome was determined long before my consciousness even existed. In the free will world, the meaning of their words and actions would actually reflect the reality of the situation. In the deterministic world, they would seem to me to be puppets acting out a drama about agents with free-will whos lines they had not written and could not alter.
What do you mean by "free will"? What do you think of Eliezer's solution to The Problem Of Free Will, which seems satisfactory to me: the past does not reach around the present to cause the future, it causes the future through the present. The decisions that you and I make are part of that chain of causation. The subjective sense of "free will" is just what it feels like to take an action without having knowledge of one's internal machinery.
If you think that free will is something else, what?
Having knowledge of this internal machinery won't take away "free will", and one isn't usually just surprised with decisions selected by an introspectively inaccessible process that then have to be enacted, there is an option of reflecting on the output of any given opaque decision procedure and choosing something else. The relevant uncertainty is about what you will decide, not about the procedure that will be used to make the decision. If you know what you'll decide, you have already decided; if you are still deciding, you don't yet know what you'll decide, and absent this knowledge, you are free to consider the possibilities.