AndyWood comments on Possibility and Could-ness - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 June 2008 04:38AM

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Comment author: AndyWood 14 June 2008 04:55:48PM 0 points [-]

James Baxter: I think that was in poor taste.

Doly: My suggestion would be to keep reading and thinking about this. There is no contradiction, but one has to realize that everything is inside the dominion of physics, even conversations and admonitions. That is, reading some advice, weighing it, and choosing to incorporate it (or not) into one's arsenal are all implemented by physical processes, therefore none are meta. None violate determinism.

Robin Z: I have not yet seen an account of classical compatibilism (including the one you linked) that was not rife with (what I consider) naive language. I don't mean that impolitely, I mean that the language used is not up to the task. The first concept that I dispense with is "free," and yet the accounts I have read seem very interested in preserving and reconciling the "free" part of "free will." So, while I highly doubt that CC is equivalent to my view in the first place, I'm still curious about what view you adopted to replace it.

Hopefully: Are you trying to say that personal agency is illusory? If I say, "The human that produced these words contains the brain which executed the process which led to action (A)," that is a description of personal agency. That does not preclude the concept "person" itself being a massively detailed complex, rather than an atomic entity. I, and I expect others here, do not feel a pressing need to contort our conversational idioms thusly, to accurately reflect our beliefs about physics and cognition. That would get tiresome.