You are reading a single comment by @andyp and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
-
It’s the memes thread, flippancy is expected.
I made no comment on the maturity of the discussion, it just reminded me of how much this kind of thing used to matter to me and how I’d spend hours and hours discussing it with friends and fellow students.
andyp-
Well sure, I totally expect flippancy here. But it's de rigeur any time somebody is close to driving the point home, even in an ostensibly serious context.
This concept has been doing my head in for decades. Sometimes it goes away for a bit, but it always comes back, probably because I don't see the conversation moving forwards very much at all...
Kimmo
Is this meant to imply that pondering this stuff is a mark of immaturity?
As I see it, there's a lack of intelligent discussion of these subjects. Sure, folks have been banging on about this crap for thousands of years, but modern physics, neuroscience and information theory has only been around for a relative blip, and I see very little sign that we are doing much to integrate the obvious implications.
I listened to a Neil deGrasse Tyson podcast about free will a couple of months back, and found it somewhat superficial; seems to me we should be further along with this.
People like deGrasse Tyson and Sabine Hossenfelder are starting to make the point that a claim that free will exists is, contrary to intuition, akin to claiming that God, or Russell's Teapot exists, and that the onus of proof is on those who claim the existence of something you can cut away with Occam's Razor.
But serious discussion should have moved past this point decades ago, if not for (even some of the smartest) people's stubborn refusal to integrate near certainties they find uncomfortable. We should be talking about the ethical implications of this all but inescapable realisation, and how to drag our primitive instinctual notions of morality towards something more evidence-based which would doubtless lead to better outcomes.
But nooo, let's all just mask our insecurity with pointless flippancy every time some unhip nerd brings it up.