[sunshowers]

I have much less patience for C++ than I would in a world with free will.

Since there's no free will, outcomes are determined by luck, and what matters is how lucky we can make people through pit-of-success environments. Rust makes people luckier than C++ does.

I also have much less patience for blame than I do in a world with free will. I believe, for example, that blameless postmortems lead to much better outcomes than trying to pretend people had free will to make mistakes, and therefore blaming them for those mistakes.

You can get to these positions through means other than rejection of free will, but the most robust grounds for them are fundamentally deterministic.

[tsimionescu]

If there is no free will, then all arguments about what should be done are irrelevant, since every outcome is either predetermined or random, so you have no influence on whether the project at work will choose Rust or C++. This choice was either made 13 billion years ago at the Big Bang, or it is an entirely random process.

[zzo38computer]

> If there is no free will, then all arguments about what should be done are irrelevant, since every outcome is either predetermined or random, so you have no influence on whether the project at work will choose Rust or C++.

This is not correct. Whether or not you have free will, stuff influences and is influenced by other stuff, so these arguments are not meaningless or worthless.

> This choice was either made 13 billion years ago at the Big Bang, or it is an entirely random process.

I had thought of this before, and what I had decided is that both of these are also independent of having free will. For example, if the initial state includes unknown and uncomputable transcendental numbers which can somehow "encode" free will and then the working of physics is deterministic, then it is still possible (although not necessarily mandatory) to have free will, even though it is deterministic.

[Retric]

Lack of free will doesn’t prevent logical arguments from seeming to work.

[GoblinSlayer]

Depends on whether you consider facts or theory. Facts don't prevent logical arguments from seeming to work, but lack of free will is theory. When theory doesn't match facts, theory is wrong.

[Retric]

We have built systems that don’t have free will and respond to logical arguments, so no theory is required here.

[mensetmanusman]

Random processes can’t use logic.

[Retric]

Fuzzy logic deals with truth values between 0 and 1. You can for example map water temperatures in such systems without having arbitrarily important cutoff points.

Such system often deal with uncertainty quite well including random noise on their inputs. The output ends up a function of both logic and randomness, but can still be useful.

[mensetmanusman]

Agreed, I don’t believe a system like that can access the platonic realm of mathematical truths. It’s clear that an electron doesn’t carry the laws of physics with it as it travels.

[Retric]

Why not? The human brain is hardly a perfect system of logic but can emulate such.

[sunshowers]

This is a strawman argument extended by those who rely on supernatural explanations. In reality, people's utterances and actions are part of the environment that determines future actions, just like everything else.

[tsimionescu]

Sure, but that still doesn't matter: the fact that I wrote my previous comment is what caused you to write your response, but it's not like I had a choice to write that comment or some other: the fact that I wrote that comment, as well as everything that led to me writing it (conversations with teachers, my parents letting me watch English cartoons so I learned English, etc), were predetermined the moment the Big Bang happened, or they're just a quantum fluctuation.

What I'm saying is that there's no logical point to the concept "should" unless you have some concept of free will: everything that happens must happen, or is entirely random.