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Alicorn comments on A Rationalist's Account of Objectification? - Less Wrong Discussion

43 Post author: lukeprog 19 March 2011 11:10PM

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Comment author: Alicorn 20 March 2011 03:37:06AM 5 points [-]

Regarding free will, the metaphysics of choice are not actually what is at issue when the list mentions "autonomy", "self-determination", "agency", and "activity". (I can't tell if you knew this, and were making a joke, or not.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 March 2011 03:54:41AM 1 point [-]

Regarding free will, the metaphysics of choice are not actually what is at issue when the list mentions "autonomy", "self-determination", "agency", and "activity".

However, there doesn't appear to be a clear 'Schelling line' between the metaphysics of choice and what you do mean by those terms. Thus people and movements that start out arguing against free-will tend to end up arguing against "autonomy", "self-determination", and "agency" in the sense you mean.

Comment author: AdeleneDawner 20 March 2011 10:02:02PM *  4 points [-]

Is it at all useful to think of the issue in terms of "treating people as if they had free will/autonomy/etc, as a reasonable way of dealing with the fact that we can't model each other to a consistently acceptable degree of accuracy"?

Comment author: Strange7 18 April 2011 06:07:41PM 4 points [-]

If we go with the assumption that humans are strictly deterministic machines, "autonomy" could be thought of as the degree to which it's easier to predict a human's future actions by looking at their internal state, rather than by looking at the orders they receive.