I don't think that's EY's solution - I don't think his discussion of Free Will has anything to do with moral responsibility being a matter of convention.
From what I recall, the argument is something more like this: When people talk of "Free will", it's not clear what exactly they are referring to. If you try to pin down a more precise meaning that matches people's intuitions, you get something like "the subjective sensation of evaluating different available courses of action one might take" - and that is compatible with determinism (you can run decision algorithms in a perfectly deterministic binary world e.g. a simulated tile-based game world).
Does that make sense?
Does that make sense?
Yes, though this...
If you try to pin down a more precise meaning that matches people's intuitions, you get something like "the subjective sensation of evaluating different available courses of action one might take"
...seems obviously false to me, not least because it's a category error. This sounds like a description of the sensation of having free will, not free will. I don't think anything can be identical to the sensation of itself, but even if so, that's not what's going on with free will.
And that's not what peopl...
ErinFlight said:
Thinking about it, I realized that this might be a common concern. There are probably plenty of people who've looked at various more-or-less technical or jargony Less Wrong posts, tried understanding them, and then given up (without posting a comment explaining their confusion).
So I figured that it might be good to have a thread where you can ask for explanations for any Less Wrong post that you didn't understand and would like to, but don't want to directly comment on for any reason (e.g. because you're feeling embarassed, because the post is too old to attract much traffic, etc.). In the spirit of various Stupid Questions threads, you're explicitly encouraged to ask even for the kinds of explanations that you feel you "should" get even yourself, or where you feel like you could get it if you just put in the effort (but then never did).
You can ask to have some specific confusing term or analogy explained, or to get the main content of a post briefly summarized in plain English and without jargon, or anything else. (Of course, there are some posts that simply cannot be explained in non-technical terms, such as the ones in the Quantum Mechanics sequence.) And of course, you're encouraged to provide explanations to others!