Spotify: How We Will Consume Music in the Future

In response to
this thread
on Reddit:

—

Free will is a necessary delusion. The big bang happened, and then we do
things. If true randomness does exist it might rule out absolute
determinism, but it still wouldn’t give us any more control over our
decisions than if true determinism did exist. Nature + nurture + stimuli =
outcome.

However, this view, while true, cannot form the basis of a society. The
punishment of criminals and adoration of heroes requires the concept of
personal responsibly. Therefore, we must conduct ourselves, and society, as
if free will does exist–even though we know it doesn’t.

The way our true knowledge of free will comes into play is in our social
policies, i.e. since we know that nature + nurture + stimuli results in an
outcome, then we need to create social policy that prevents this combination
from resulting in humans suffering, and effect change that modifies these
variables to bring about happiness instead. As such, a secular humanist
worldview is, in my opinion, best suited for this approach.

On a side note, here’s an interesting question to ask yourself about free
will (if you believe in it):

If the answer is nowhere, then the conclusion is that despite what
perception we have, all outcomes came from physical inputs. The fact that we
are one of those inputs doesn’t mean we have any control over them. The act
of “making a decision” does not inject anything into the system other than
another physical variable, which could only have come with the proper
pre-existing, physical conditions.

In other words, outcomes move through us, and we participate by
foolishly thinking we made something called a “decision” at some point or
another in the process. But in reality, every single input that resulted in
our current state, came from a point outside of us, and the decision process
now appears to be little more than a pre-action glimpse of what was going to
happen anyway.1

There is only one escape from this deterministic model, and that is if our
decision process injects a variable from outside of physics, i.e. if free
will comes from the supernatural. Barring that, we have no true free will.
But let’s keep pretending, because we go on if we didn’t. ::

Links

1 [
Brain Scanner Predicts Your Future Moves | newscientist.com
]