notes
we have agency or free will, but like Kant noted this agency comes from our mind that is constrained to make sense of the outside world from sensory inputs. no more no less. The agency we have is for our survival in this world. for example, it is evolved for us to learn language easily. it’s hard for us to understand birds’ tunes or whales’ calls. for human being, we have access to two realms, one is our consciousness or the thought realm and the other our actions to change our surroundings or the action realm. the essence of life is a transformer to turn some inputs such as food, words, sensory data into something totally different like a tree from a seed.
D: I like how the author gets straight to the matter of why free will persists: it’s how we blame people for their problems and praise the powerful.
D: I agree, I guess. It’s a bullshit move to simplify the complexity of things so, and for political reasons.
D: But that said, something I’ve learned along the way is that my life usually goes in a better overall direction when I take some responsibility for the messes I find myself in, the choices I’ve made . Is it all my fault? Hell no. I didn’t trigger the Big Bang, or create the Universe in seven days, or whatever the hell happened. But did I really need to open that second bottle of wine last night? Was I just acting in accord with deterministic trajectories long long long ago set in motion, or was I being an indulgent idiot with poor impulse control who now has a mild headache and overall queasy feeling … ?
D: I do think it terrifies a lot of people that it actually matters what we choose to do. That we can’t just chalk everything up to fate, the will of God (or whatever), or that it’s all just random physics, evolutionary processes etc.
C: I can (and should) look at the reasons for my behavior, but having taken them into account I still need to live my life as if I have agency and my choices matter.
C: Blame and shame are bad solutions for some problems, but I think they have a place in a healthy society. It’s probably an empirical question which problems shame is useful for and which are just made worse. But I don’t think having a stance on “free will” helps you very much with that question, and I doubt it’s a very useful way of convincing other people trade shame for more productive solutions. We’d be better off focusing on convincing evidence of what actually works.
B: Sensible people who want free will don’t want their actions to emerge spookily from nowhere in a contradiction of the laws of physics. They just want certain of their mental processes to determine some of their actions, so that if they hadn’t had those thoughts those actions would not have occurred.
we all know that humam makes mistakes all the time. for us to make less mistakes, one approach is to add frictions to prevent mistakes from happening. for example, banning smoke indoors. for example, making road narrower slows down the traffic/driving. below is another example to design a badge so that the attachment of it to the product won’t go wrong.
A: A specific worker was assigned to attach the badge onto the product. It was symmetrical, and was attached with two (same-size) screws. One per minute, 400 per day, 2,000 per week. At a 0.1% error rate, we would find about 2 badges installed upside down per week.
A: The solution wasn’t to fire them and hire a more conscientious worker, someone who used their “free will” to be more precise in their work. The solution was to redesign the badge so it took one larger diameter screw and one smaller diameter screw, but keeping the screw head the same size. This made the badge impossible to install incorrectly.
A: No one comes to work wanting to do a bad job. Everyone is doing the best they can given their circumstances outside of work. Sometimes, that doesn’t meet your standard. In a psychopathic kind of way, I treat all my reports as cabbages, and it would be a poor farmer indeed who blames their cabbages for not growing well.