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by Layke1123
1958 days ago
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You can disagree. You can assert that believing people can't make choices in a true sense of free will causes other to suffer. You can also be dismissed for said assertion without providing any evidence. For instance, if your assertion is true, why do I, as someone who does not believe I make my own choices, do no harm to others? Shouldn't I be on a killing spree according to your logic? Shouldn't I be repressing and hurting people left and right? All I have to do is prove it's possible to not believe you make your own choices and not do harm. That single data point is enough to prove your claims wrong. |
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I didn't assert anything about "believing people can't make choices in a true sense of free will". Nor did I assert anything about individual cases.
Since you are apparently unable to properly understand statements that use terms like "choice", I will rephrase my assertion using your ultra-physicalist language:
There are causal processes that happen inside human brains. Those causal processes have effects outside of the particular human brains in which they take place. Those effects can include effects on what happens to the particular human in whose brain the causal processes are taking place, and effects on other humans besides that particular human.
The question is whether the causal processes that happen inside a particular human's brain have a much greater impact, on net, on what happens to that particular human, than causal processes that happen in other human brains; or, by contrast, whether causal processes that happen in other human brains have a much greater impact, on net, on what happens to that particular human.
My assertion is that a society in which the former is the case will have less human suffering, and more good things, than a society in which the latter is the case.
Note that the effects the causal processes inside human brains have outside those brains, whether on that particular human or on other humans, happen regardless of the beliefs held by the particular human in whose brain the causal processes are happening, unless you count the beliefs themselves as part of the causal processes. Which is fine with me personally, but in fact, in your ultra-physicalist language, the word "belief" is just as out of place as the word "choice"; in your ultra-physicalist language, people don't have beliefs any more than they make choices. But the causal processes happening in their brains have the effects they have regardless of what language you use to describe them. Using obfuscatory ultra-physicalist language to describe them, instead of the common, intuitive language of beliefs and choices that everyone understands, just makes it harder to think clearly about what is going on. It's like doing arithmetic using Roman numerals; yes, it's possible, but it's just making things much harder than they need to be for no good reason.