Being human is hard, this pair of psychologists say. Could accepting we don’t have free will make it easier?

H

Hume

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The Menzies see the surrender of free will not as a way to reject moral responsibility, but rather to reduce the pain we carry. “Once you accept the fact that you are made up of atomic particles that must act in a determined way, that there are distributed causes that are playing out across time, then it is far easier to be gentler to the self and to others,” Ross says.

www.theguardian.com

Being human is hard, this pair of psychologists say. Could accepting we don’t have free will make it easier?

For Ross and Rachel Menzies, making peace with our smallness can help us navigate the challenges of human existence
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
Don't know how this would reduce pain. A world where love, loyalty, compassion are not freely given by the willful act of a person with free agency but are just subatomic particles deterministically colliding with each other seems like a bleak world.
 
Cypress said:
Don't know how this would reduce pain. A world where love, loyalty, compassion are not freely given by the willful act of a person with free agency but are just subatomic particles deterministically colliding with each other seems like a bleak world.
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I found their view to be incoherent. They always counter it to absolute freedom where everything I think about and will becomes reality.
 
Hume said:
I found their view to be incoherent. They always counter it to absolute freedom where everything I think about and will becomes reality.
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I think some of these guys just think it's "edgy" to write papers saying there is no free agency or freedom of choice.
 
Cypress said:
Don't know how this would reduce pain. A world where love, loyalty, compassion are not freely given by the willful act of a person with free agency but are just subatomic particles deterministically colliding with each other seems like a bleak world.
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Hugo is trying to argue for taking away free agency. He is making the same argument as Satan.
 
Cypress said:
Don't know how this would reduce pain. A world where love, loyalty, compassion are not freely given by the willful act of a person with free agency but are just subatomic particles deterministically colliding with each other seems like a bleak world.
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You have a pretty hard job of addressing the science on this point since it seems that actual brain scans indicate maybe free will is a myth.

But then I suspect science doesn't much get in your way anyway.
 
murph63 said:
You have a pretty hard job of addressing the science on this point since it seems that actual brain scans indicate maybe free will is a myth.
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Science does not even have a concept of free will. It is a philosophical concept.
 
murph63 said:
You have a pretty hard job of addressing the science on this point since it seems that actual brain scans indicate maybe free will is a myth.

But then I suspect science doesn't much get in your way anyway.
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One definition of free will:

"Simple Conditional Analysis: An agent S has the ability to do otherwise if and only if, were S to choose to do otherwise, then S would do otherwise."
 
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