Comment on Eliezer's Sequences and Mainstream Academia

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 10:02:00 GMT

To have an opinion about free will, you must first observe the existence of the issue.

Most people do this with introspection: The world outside you seem to conform to \ while inside you, it seems that indeed you control every movement and thought.

Lord Kelvin has voiced the above statement quite poetically.

Now, the keyword here is 'seem'. Your argument hitches on an anecdote from your own, non-optimal cognitive machinery.

What EY did was point at this 'seem' and explain it. He did not point at free will and explained it, he explained why the cognitive machinery hands you the anecdote. And then from there you can crank the handle of modus ponnens and conclude that 'free will' goes in the same category as 'redness of red'.

Also on a technical note you forego that you live 80 milliseconds in the past (sensory lag to synch toe-tips to retinas) and you have more subconscious processes than conscious ones, processes you can only rarely consciously affect. This gives nondeterminism a low prior.

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