That sounds to me like it’s mixing physical and volitional language and coming off weaker than it needs to be as a result. You could, for example, try defending some punitive measure by painting it as a consequence of a set of interpersonal rules (propagating, of course, by deterministic means) which end up producing a world containing less subjective misery than the counterfactual world in which they’d never arisen. Choice, or the lack thereof, needn’t enter into it.
Not that I rule out talking about choices within a deterministic worldview. It’s just that “choice” under that framework means something different than the vague libertarian free will voodoo that the naive view uses.
Sure, but then you effectively accept a world in which we are puppets acting out a play in which the STORY is that we have agency and responsibility and are therfore blamed and loved for our actions, while the author of the story is a mechanistic rube goldberg machine.
To the extent any of us are actually pursuing the truth and pursuing a way to live with other humans that respects the truth, we would want to abandon the drama and come back to stating what we actually believed rather than acting out things that looked like belief in order to achieve a goal.
you effectively accept a world in which we are puppets acting out a play in which the STORY is that we have agency and responsibility and are therfore blamed and loved for our actions
Be careful with words, their implicit connotations don’t necessarily form an argument. The word “story” suggests arbitrariness, imprecision, lack of fundamental import, all in contrast with the strengths of physical description. Yet there is no opposition between these framings, both and many more describe the same situation without mutual contradiction. A circle can be described both as “a bounded curve”, and as a set of pairs of real numbers (x,y) such that (x-a)^2+(y-b)^2=r^2.
The description in terms of physical law, for all its precision, is not shaped in a way usable for performing decision theoretic analysis of a situation. When you have a story that models a situation in terms of players, beliefs and intentions, you can produce useful conclusions and decisions. If you don’t know what to do with an extremely detailed physical description, you produce no conclusions or decisions. This is worse, so you should at least construct a story, and then see if you can do better by taking advantage of the additional data. Realizing that you don’t know how the stories work, or don’t know how to solve the problem on a more fundamental level, does not justify refusal to use the tool that works (and doesn’t commit you to only ever using this one tool).
That sounds to me like it’s mixing physical and volitional language and coming off weaker than it needs to be as a result. You could, for example, try defending some punitive measure by painting it as a consequence of a set of interpersonal rules (propagating, of course, by deterministic means) which end up producing a world containing less subjective misery than the counterfactual world in which they’d never arisen. Choice, or the lack thereof, needn’t enter into it.
Not that I rule out talking about choices within a deterministic worldview. It’s just that “choice” under that framework means something different than the vague libertarian free will voodoo that the naive view uses.
Sure, but then you effectively accept a world in which we are puppets acting out a play in which the STORY is that we have agency and responsibility and are therfore blamed and loved for our actions, while the author of the story is a mechanistic rube goldberg machine.
To the extent any of us are actually pursuing the truth and pursuing a way to live with other humans that respects the truth, we would want to abandon the drama and come back to stating what we actually believed rather than acting out things that looked like belief in order to achieve a goal.
Be careful with words, their implicit connotations don’t necessarily form an argument. The word “story” suggests arbitrariness, imprecision, lack of fundamental import, all in contrast with the strengths of physical description. Yet there is no opposition between these framings, both and many more describe the same situation without mutual contradiction. A circle can be described both as “a bounded curve”, and as a set of pairs of real numbers (x,y) such that (x-a)^2+(y-b)^2=r^2.
The description in terms of physical law, for all its precision, is not shaped in a way usable for performing decision theoretic analysis of a situation. When you have a story that models a situation in terms of players, beliefs and intentions, you can produce useful conclusions and decisions. If you don’t know what to do with an extremely detailed physical description, you produce no conclusions or decisions. This is worse, so you should at least construct a story, and then see if you can do better by taking advantage of the additional data. Realizing that you don’t know how the stories work, or don’t know how to solve the problem on a more fundamental level, does not justify refusal to use the tool that works (and doesn’t commit you to only ever using this one tool).