Someone else could read the book and know exactly what you do next year. My intuition doesn’t think this sounds like free will. Or imagine a universe where all your decisions were completely random. That doesn’t sound like free will either, right?
So, you suddenly realise you live in either of those universes and go “oh, well, I have no free will”.
Does that imply anything for you? Do you start behaving any differently? Is there any practical conclusion that you would reach in both of those universes that you wouldn’t in one where you had free will (which shouldn’t exist since you ruled out both determinism and non-determinism, but we’ll allow it since the lack of a counterfactual would also make free will meaningless)? Emphasis on ‘both’ - there are interesting consequences to determinism and non-determinism, but you need free will to be the discriminating factor for the concept to be worth existing.
(As a side note, my “intuitive answers” aren’t the same as yours, but I won’t bring them up since I’m arguing that everyone’s “intuitive answers” are just non-answers to a non-question.)
Well, it would certainly shake up my morality a bit, which would then change my actions. My ideas of punishment and reward would become more utilitarian as I held people less “responsible” for doing good or bad, for example.
However, if you’re asking “what would be different if you’d been living in that universe all along and never found out,” I must admit I can’t think of anything. Wait, nevermind. “The bell inequalities wouldn’t be violated.” Or “fermions wouldn’t be identical particles.” “Arithmetic would be inconsistent.” But it’s possible to imagine “just so” theories that would fit observations without having much free will. I wouldn’t say a Boltzmann brain has free will in the second before it boils away into the plasma.
Still, I think Occam’s razor helps rule that stuff out. I’ll have to think about it more.
So, you suddenly realise you live in either of those universes and go “oh, well, I have no free will”.
Does that imply anything for you? Do you start behaving any differently? Is there any practical conclusion that you would reach in both of those universes that you wouldn’t in one where you had free will (which shouldn’t exist since you ruled out both determinism and non-determinism, but we’ll allow it since the lack of a counterfactual would also make free will meaningless)? Emphasis on ‘both’ - there are interesting consequences to determinism and non-determinism, but you need free will to be the discriminating factor for the concept to be worth existing.
(As a side note, my “intuitive answers” aren’t the same as yours, but I won’t bring them up since I’m arguing that everyone’s “intuitive answers” are just non-answers to a non-question.)
Well, it would certainly shake up my morality a bit, which would then change my actions. My ideas of punishment and reward would become more utilitarian as I held people less “responsible” for doing good or bad, for example.
However, if you’re asking “what would be different if you’d been living in that universe all along and never found out,” I must admit I can’t think of anything. Wait, nevermind. “The bell inequalities wouldn’t be violated.” Or “fermions wouldn’t be identical particles.” “Arithmetic would be inconsistent.” But it’s possible to imagine “just so” theories that would fit observations without having much free will. I wouldn’t say a Boltzmann brain has free will in the second before it boils away into the plasma.
Still, I think Occam’s razor helps rule that stuff out. I’ll have to think about it more.