| I think the basis for your counter argument here is flawed. The statement 'The payouts are the same regardless of what you do' is in the context of a person's state of mind; someone can either 'behave as if there is or behave as if there isn't' free will. We are for our purposes only concerned about the situation where there is no free will. The main issue is what not having free will entails. The parent didn't specify 'libertarian' or some other form of free will, and it's hard to specify what it means without resorting to handwaving. The implied meaning I read was that if a person has no free will, there is no opportunity for them to change what they do. In truth, they are not free to change what they do, or even free to change what they will. Any appearance of such is an illusion. If we accept that this is what not having a free will means, then it should be clear that, given we have no free will (our assumption from before), whether a person thinks that they have a free will or thinks that they do not have a free will makes no difference, as someone with no free will has no opportunity to change what they do. Regardless of all that, I think kernel of the idea is a good one. Even if we are deterministic machines with no free will of any kind, we still experience out lives and should enjoy them. Thinking about if we have any oversight of our brain, able to determine the direction we want it to take is a foolish one, driven by the disconnect between what we experience and what we know about the mechanics of our minds. We are our brain, and everything else around it, and what it does is exactly what we are doing. We have the capacity to shape what we think and do as much as any other learning machine, but we are not an outside entity looking in. My favourite quote about these ideas is this, and I have no idea where it comes from: "If nothing matters, then the statement 'nothing matters' doesn't matter, so you might as well forget about it and enjoy yourself." |