Pick a favorite ice cream flavour. Now tell me it (it's chocolate, great) and let's make a "theory of ice cream preferences". It reads "Hen favours chocolate above others". I go to a third person (let's call him Dave) and tell a story about how I got a divine mission to make a fact in the paper to come true. I wave my magic wand and afterwards Dave checks that indeed the mission was accomplished. All a natural law is a description how things happen, the law itself is not the cause of it's truth. If you try to ask "Did hen or the law of ice cream picking reduce the options to chocolate?" the answer is going to be yes, but mostly figurative for the side of law and not "literally". All natural law is descriptive and not imperative.
It is not so that people first ponder what they want to do and then pass it by the censor of "universe" in whether they are allowed to do it or not. People simply just do things. I have also seen that some hold that everything that is determined can not be the result of a free choice. This seems silly when you try to pick a ice cream flavour as making so that "Hen prefers chocolate" would rob you of your agency as now it has become "determined". It would also mean that any such choice would be impossible to make if it were to remain truly "free". Things will happen a certain way, not 0 ways or 2 ways but 1 way and that is separate from our ability to describe it and whatever happens is the way that happens and a statement describing that would be a true natural law.
1) free will is incompatible with determinism / the natural world is relevantly deterministic // we therefore do not have free will. you are wrong in the first and 3rd section. Corrected it would read like "People spout all kinds of beliefs about their ability to make choices / the natural world is relevantly deterministic / Not everything people spout can be true / What people spout is not an adequate picture of world"
or alternative version "1) free will requires determinism / natural world is relevantly determistic / we can excerise free will 2) Here is a theory why people form funny and incorrect beliefs while dealing with their ability to make choices 3) Don't let error sources cloud your understanding and use you brain to clear any fogginess up"
This is very interesting.
All a natural law is a description how things happen, the law itself is not the cause of it's truth.
So, are you saying that the natural world (ourselves included) don't 'obey' any sort of law, but that natural law is just a more or less consistent generalization about what does happen?
So, let me ask you a question: would you say there's any such thing as a physical impossibility that is not also a logical impossibility?
...Corrected it would read like "People spout all kinds of beliefs about their ability to make choices / t
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!