= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Laoch comments on How to not be a fatalist? Need help from people who care about true beliefs. - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (85)
I'm trying to find out if fatalism is wrong and why or why not. So I'm committed to that. I'm not saying I'm behaving fatalistically, I'm asking what choice do I have.
Ah, I see.
For my own part, I would agree that we are powerless to do anything other than what we are actually going to do.
So there are at least some versions of fatalism I think are true, and embrace.
But we are also ignorant of what that is going to be, and the process of considering alternatives and deciding what to do is part of the mechanism whereby we end up doing what we do.
As for what choices you have... we all experience lots of choices. Those experiences exist in our minds, just as the experiences of pleasure and pain and fear and love and etc. exist in our minds... there is nothing out there in the world outside our minds that is intrinsically lovable or frightening or painful or pleasurable or "choicey".
But that doesn't mean we don't have pleasure, pain, fear, love, or choice. We have all of those things. To say that my pleasure "isn't real" because it exists solely in my mind is to misunderstand the nature of pleasure; to say that my choices "aren't real" because they exist solely in my mind is to misunderstand the nature of choice.
To me "we are powerless to do anything other than what we are actually going to do" is either meaningless or tautological, so I am not sure how one can disagree with it.
Well, I'm not exactly sure how either, but I suspect that if we asked a hundred randomly chosen people to agree or disagree with that statement, we'd find more disagreement than agreement. And perhaps I'm misunderstanding what Laoch means by "fatalism", but it was the first description here so I went with it.
I like the SEP phrasing better, even though it's only slightly different:
"we are powerless to do anything other than what we actually do"
Feels more sensible because the tenses are not jumbled.
I can't think of a meaning one sentence has that the other one doesn't, so I'm happy to use your preferred sentence.