Haunted by the ghosts of materialism

plastic-enjoyer

> Alas, the only flavor of philosophy that’s popular with techies is what I’d call edgelord utilitarianism — a collection of materialist, pseudo-mathematical beliefs favored by the SF Bay Area rationalist community. Which is sad, because philosophy of technology does exist and is a young discipline in philosophy.

ndriscoll

> But if we have no agency, nothing matters. There can be no morality: a criminal was always destined to commit a crime. It was never right for us to punish them, but that’s okay: we couldn’t have acted differently, so we shoulder no blame. Right, and determinism seems likely to me to be correct, but I don't see the issue. Whether we'd like things to matter has no impact on whether they really do, but the obvious conclusion along the same lines that "saves" us is that you should act as if you believe in free will (e.g. enacting punishments) even if you don't. Either there is free will, so you behaved correctly, or there isn't, so you didn't really decide how to act anyway.

RhysU

> In classical physics, the universe is deterministic: every action is a necessary consequence of what happened before. In this view, our actions are predetermined too. Sure, but the deterministic chaos [1] arising within classical physics says that any predetermined actions depend on upon effectively unknowable aspects of initial conditions. Nothing probabilistic required. Easiest example is anything dependent on turbulent fluids, which are found everywhere in the atmosphere and the oceans. Another place with turbulence is the human heart [2]. There's deterministic chaos lurking behind the oxygenation of every cell in your body. Predetermined actions from a chaotic system are indistinguishable from free will. Occam's Razor suggests free will, being simpler and just as predictive, is the better model for human behavior. Just because it's fun: Why is the universe like this? The anthropic principle [3]! Without fluid turbulence the other available diffusion mechanisms are too slow to evolve creatures like us. Literally, either turbulence is a classical physics PITA or you don't exist [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory [2] https://cvphysiology.com/hemodynamics/h007 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle [4] Things one observes when procrastinating on a turbulence-related dissertation.

lern_too_spel

Author tries and fails to rationally argue that rational thinking is incorrect by pointing out that some people trying to think rationally have failed.

card_zero

> In this view, our actions are predetermined too. > But if we have no agency, nothing matters. This is, listen carefully, just bollocks. More precisely it's a non sequitur because "predetermined" doesn't mean "no agency". That's what it would mean, sure, if your actions were predetermined by an evil puppetmaster. But ask two questions: 1. What are your actions predetermined by? It's you. That's what. 2. What, if you find this too constraining, do you want? What do you mean by free will, if not your actions being determined by your own mind? Exactly, you don't know, so stop complaining about nothing. Yes, the universe is deterministic, boo fucking hoo. This doesn't mean you're some sort of robot slave, because it's your mind that is deterministic, and your mind, deterministically, probabilistically, makes choices. These are the only kind of choices that can possibly exist, which is why, to resume my starting theme, when you try to come up with any alternative thing a choice could be, you must necessarily talk bollocks.

asplake

There are less reductive forms of materialism. For the view of a Nobel prize physics laureate see A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down by Robert B. Laughlin. From the philosophy world, read Manuel DeLanda or Alicia Juarrero.