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> As far as why people care about free will, I dunno, almost everyone I meet insists free will exists, and when I ask why, they insist that they have a choice, and then I say “but you could only have made one choice,” and at this point most of them become absolutely incandescent with disagreement. Because the notion that they don't instinctively feels wrong. It feels like they are choosing, and so it is emotionally difficult to even question how that choice would have worked in a way that gives them agency. And if they actually think about it, people tend to quickly get a strong impulsive understanding that this would destroy a lot of their world views, such as e.g. as you point out, assigning blame, and we're deeply emotionally invested in believing we can blame people and assign responsibility for all kinds of things. A lot of people also whether they say so or not are deeply invested in variants of the just world hypothesis, and that just falls apart if people had no alternate possibilities, and so reasonably no blame. So many attitudes are tied to the assumption that we can discuss fairness and blame and responsibility on the basis of our view of how a person chooses to act. Take away responsibility for those choices, and we need to re-evaluate everything. I don't think free will is a reasonable belief, by the way. I keep asking people who believe in it to define it in ways that does not just boil down to a veneer or obfuscation of determinism, and in ~30 years of asking countless people that question I've only ever gotten exasperated attempts at avoiding a definition, or attempts at evading the question by claiming dualism, which then leads to exasperation when I ask the same question again, because it remains just as relevant. Otherwise exceedingly smart people can be reduced to going in circles with logical flaw after logical flaw over this. |