Perplexed comments on Righting a Wrong Question - Less Wrong

68 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 March 2008 01:00PM

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Comment author: Perplexed 29 July 2010 11:26:44PM *  1 point [-]

"Why do I think I have free will?"

One answer might go like this: "But I don't think that. If I use W to denote the proposition that I have free will, I can think of no experiments whose results might provide evidence for or against W. I don't assign a high subjective probability to (W|<everything else I know>). For any other proposition Y, I don't see any difference between the probability of (Y|W) compared to (Y|~W)".

"Nevertheless I choose to assume W because I often find it easier to estimate P(Y|W) than to directly estimate P(Y), especially when I can influence P(Y) by an act of 'will'."

A belief doesn't have to be useful to be valid; an assumption doesn't have to be true to be useful.