Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
We are constantly making and updating our choices in response to new information. Just because the brain decided upon one course of action at one point in time does not preclude it from changing course in the future. That's just a new choice. All available information is taken into consideration at all points in time.
If our brain can make these choices, then how can we say it is determined to make a specific choice?
By determined, I mean it follows a logical set of rules, not that it is set on a specific action. The idea would be that it was determined to make all those choices because everything else is also following the rules of the universe. Just as it was determined that they play in traffic, so was it determined for me to tell them to stop, just as it was determined for them to listen. They didn't choose to change their mind, they were always going to change their mind.
That’s what raises my question of when we say someone “should” do something. If what you describe is true, there are not any better or worse choices or actions, there are just actions that are consequences of a previous action.
I’m not sure if you’re familiar of Jelle’s Marble Races, but the general conceit is that marbles are sent down a track or through obstacles while a sports commentator analyzes the race as if observing human competitors. The humor arises from the cognitive dissonance of talking about strategy, risky decisions, athleticism, etc. while the audience is fully aware that these are inanimate objects being acted upon by mechanical forces.
Likewise, talking about what decisions should or shouldn’t do with a worldview that these actions are simply things that happen due to more complex interactions of cause and effect that we can’t immediately see causes a similar sense of cognitive dissonance for me. It seems that human minds and language have evolved to experience a world where our actions do have meaning and that we don’t really experience them in a way that feels deterministic to us.
You brought up the brain a vat thought experiment in another reply, and the answer is similar: even if we are brains in a vat, that’s not how we experience the world. And we don’t really experience the world as a deterministic one, either.