That is, they think all of their decisions were preordained, and then use this to claim that they can’t be held responsible for anything they do.

  • Moobythegoldensock
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    1 year ago

    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.