It’s not a useless construct. Entities that think they have free will and think that other entities have free will are better able to cooperate in society where punishment and reward are neccesary mechanisms.
...insofar as such entities make punishment and reward contingent on the belief in free will. If they instead punish what they don’t want and reward what they do, independent of their belief in free will (e.g., punish people for entering in a forbidden location even if they were forced there by forces outside their control, like storm winds, or their own brains, or whatever), that works OK too.
Surely not having free will and knowing that other entities dont have free will can lead to more cooperation in society. Knowing that others are programmed to cooperate and that they have no free will to decide otherwise can lead to maximum cooperation while actually having free will on the other hand would bring uncertainty and noise.
A credible belief in free will is an approximation that Is more achievable by evolutions so far than perfect self and other knowledge. Similarly: emotions are noisier and less certain than people just saying exactly what they want but we still have them and animals also seem to.
A whole bunch of scientists seem to have concluded that free will is nonsense. This hypothesis suggests that they are likely to lose out. Perhaps soon we’ll have populations big enough to test this “cooperation” hypothesis with.
Sorry i meant the qualia of free will wasn’t a useless construct, not that I thought free will was real. I think it serves similar credible signaling purposes as guilt but I don’t think “guilt” is determined in any cosmic way.
When I said these scientists might “lose out” I didn’t mean that their views would be found to be inaccurate.
Your hypothesis suggests that these scientists wouldn’t be able to cooperate as well. If there’s enough of them, then we may be able to see whether that is true.
It’s not a useless construct. Entities that think they have free will and think that other entities have free will are better able to cooperate in society where punishment and reward are neccesary mechanisms.
...insofar as such entities make punishment and reward contingent on the belief in free will. If they instead punish what they don’t want and reward what they do, independent of their belief in free will (e.g., punish people for entering in a forbidden location even if they were forced there by forces outside their control, like storm winds, or their own brains, or whatever), that works OK too.
It doesn’t need to be contingent deductively or whatever as long it changes the way people fee about things for purposes of prosocial enforcement
Surely not having free will and knowing that other entities dont have free will can lead to more cooperation in society. Knowing that others are programmed to cooperate and that they have no free will to decide otherwise can lead to maximum cooperation while actually having free will on the other hand would bring uncertainty and noise.
A credible belief in free will is an approximation that Is more achievable by evolutions so far than perfect self and other knowledge. Similarly: emotions are noisier and less certain than people just saying exactly what they want but we still have them and animals also seem to.
A whole bunch of scientists seem to have concluded that free will is nonsense. This hypothesis suggests that they are likely to lose out. Perhaps soon we’ll have populations big enough to test this “cooperation” hypothesis with.
Sorry i meant the qualia of free will wasn’t a useless construct, not that I thought free will was real. I think it serves similar credible signaling purposes as guilt but I don’t think “guilt” is determined in any cosmic way.
When I said these scientists might “lose out” I didn’t mean that their views would be found to be inaccurate.
Your hypothesis suggests that these scientists wouldn’t be able to cooperate as well. If there’s enough of them, then we may be able to see whether that is true.