Asklemmy

48125 readers

658 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Do you believe in free will? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

119 comments fedilink hide all child comments

There is an argument that free will doesn't exist because there is an unbroken chain of causality we are riding on that dates back to the beginning of time. Meaning that every time you fart, scratch your nose, blink, or make lifechanging decisions there is a pre existing reason. These reasons might be anything from the sensory enviornment you were in the past minute, the hormone levels in your bloodstream at the time, hormones you were exposed to as a baby, or how you were parented growing up. No thought you have is really original and is more like a domino affect of neurons firing off in reaction to what you have experienced. What are your thoughts on this?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I agree. But then I am a pragmatist, which tends to make people extremely mad

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Is there a tl;dr for that?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Sure:

It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.

– C. S. Peirce

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I don't see why that would make anyone angry, but I also can't understand what the hell it actually means. "The third grade of clearness of apprehension"? "Might conceivably"?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Well, understandable. It's one line out of a book, out of context. What he means is that no metaphysical nonsense actually matters, if it doesn't have real-world consequences. I.e. someone can claim Russell's Teapot actually exists, and rest of us can just ignore them because it's untestable and inconsequential.

This has made very many philosophers very angry, but I don't expect anyone who's not interested in philosophy to care.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago

Ah I gotcha. That's an actual tl;dr. Makes sense to me and I agree.