Wednesday 18 December 2019

Free Will


Saw this advert on a solicit's window in Chipping Sodbury High St.


What if I choose not to have it reviewed? That would surely show I already had free will and didn't need it tested - or would it?

Actually no - the concept of free will is reinforced by experience but cannot be falsified by it. When we choose X without evident constraint, we feel we are free because we could have chosen Y. That we can imagine to choose Y proves nothing; it only begs the question.

The solicitor's advert should be removed as misleading, as it's not possible to review you free will....


2 comments:

Archdruid Eileen said...

And yet if we don't have free will all legal punishment is capricious (except it can't be because we don't know better) and rehabilitation is just machine learning. Actually, I've changed my mind and decided not to write this after all.

Steve Borthwick said...

It's all an exercise in assimilating the training data that your "wet-net" is exposed to.. Although if we can select our training data then we can alter the outcome of our non-free choices, hum...