Hopefully_Anonymous comments on Possibility and Could-ness - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: Hopefully_Anonymous 14 June 2008 09:04:50PM 2 points [-]

What properties must a human visual system that works like a a movie camera have? Properties that apparently don't exist in the actual human visual system. Similarly the popular model of human choice tied to moral responsibility (a person considers options, has the ability to choose the "more moral" or the "less moral" option, and chooses the "more moral" option) may not exist in actual working human brains. In that sense it's reasonable to say "if it's detetministic, if you're designed to do it, if it's made of parts and caused by the dynamics of those parts, if it's physically impossible for you to have finally arrived at any other decision after all your agonizing" it's not a choice. It's an observable phenonenon in nature, like the direction a fire burns, the investments made by a corporation, or the orbital path of Mars. But singling out that phenomenon and calling it "choice" may be like calling something a "perpetual motion machine" or an "omnipotent god". The word usage may obfuscate the phenomenon by playing on our common cognitive biases. I think it can be tempting for those who wish to construct status hierarchies off of individual moral "choice" histories, or who fear, perhaps without rational basis, that if they stop thinking about their personal behavior in terms of making the right "choices" they'll accomplish less, or do things they'll regret. Or perhaps it's just an anaesthetic model of reality for some.

Still, I think the best neuroscience research already demonstrates how wide swaths of our intuitive understanding of "choice" are as inaccurate as our intuitive understanding of vision and other experiential phenomenon.