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by dwaltrip 2809 days ago
> That's exactly correct. Every action you took voluntarily was your choice.

> You are always doing whatever you want to do. You may tell yourself many stories in your head, and we can dispute free will, but as long as we assume it for the purpose of this discussion, what you do is your choice.

I understand what you are getting at, and I agree with the basic fundamental idea within a certain context. However, we have to be careful with how we extrapolate and attempt to re-interpret words and phrases such as "choice", "want", "feel like doing [x]", "deciding" , and so on.

The part quoted above basically makes those words meaningless. Regardless of what one thinks about free will, those words have great utility and fulfill roles in the human experience for which there isn't really any replacement.

You yourself demonstrate this quite plainly in your last sentence, when you say we should "decide" what we really "want" to be doing with our life.

1 comments

That's a fair point. I think we inevitably end up in a discussion about free will if we try to pin those words down. That part of the last sentence could have been written as "thinking what values are important to you".

But yes it's just rephrasing. I explained myself in a bit more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17524210