Gwynne Michele
@thecurioushermit
My evening is smoking joints and working on a paper on the neuroethics of free will. Which is just one of the many areas where Western philosophy gets locked into black and white thinking about determinism vs free will.
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Wev 🐰🎩
@wevans247.eth
Ant chance you’d be willing to share your paper? I’m def interested to read it. The concept of free will has been top of mind all year for me (due to multiple stressors hitting at once and my seemingly successful navigation of them) and frankly I’m leaning hard towards the “free will is an illusion“ camp but on the lookout for counter arguments.
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Gwynne Michele
@thecurioushermit
My counter argument is that Western philosophy tries to oversimplify reality into maxims that don't end up holding up over time. Like the whole free will vs determinism debate is never going to find an answer because it's not either/or, it's both. The Universe has some deterministic qualities and some probabilistic qualities, and humans have metacognition - we can think about our thinking and change our thinking - that lets us lean more into the probabilistic to overcome the deterministic aspects of reality, and THAT is what free will is.
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Wev 🐰🎩
@wevans247.eth
I'm wary of false dichotomies (one of my pet peeves), so I appreciate this perspective. Def something I'll have to mull over. I often think of this old quote (I think it's Tony Robbins actually) that goes something like "people change when the pain of changing becomes greater than the pain of not changing." Sounds a lot like a thermostat. If this, then that. So... yes we can change our conditions (pain of not changing leads to learning new skills or seeking out new persepectives, for example) but it still all feels very clockwork, very mechanical, to me.
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Gwynne Michele
@thecurioushermit
This is what I wrote about it on Facebook last night while I was working on my paper:
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Gwynne Michele
@thecurioushermit
While pain is often a driver of change, it's not the *only* driver of it. Sure, a lot of people only make changes when things are so bad they can no longer tolerate it, but a lot of that comes from societies being more deterministic than probabilistic and conditioning people to just accept the way things are, with individuals still able to *decide* to cultivate the sort of awareness that allows us to better take advantage of probabilities and improve things before pain becomes the motivator. I think "free will" exists on a spectrum, and I also have an intuition that the way Western philosophy frames the concept is precisely *why* we think it's a problem to be solved.
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