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by mensetmanusman 1535 days ago
The humans aren’t special bit really comes down to whether you believe in free will (which by any meaningful definition is quite special).
1 comments

Free will is another one of those things that people love to trot out because it's so ill-defined. To cut through all the crap though, it's very simple: "free will" === "unpredictable behavior". This inherently means that it's observer-dependent.

This has the benefit that it empirically fits how people think about it. Nobody thinks a rock has free will. Some people think animals have free will. Lots of people think humans have free will. This is everybody trying to smush a vague concept into the very simple, intuitive definition above.

Which is all to say that free will is about as relevant to any conversation as say astrology is: not one bit.

As much as a cloud of atoms doth protest that free will is irrelevant, reality has a way of not caring :)
Funny, I'd say reality has a way of existing despite all of the comforting woo people like to make up about it.