0:24 You all know that I don’t believe in free will, which is why I don’t talk about what we “should” do. I’m just here to observe what we do. And this doesn’t look good for the future of our species. ...She rejects free will because of a belief in superdeterminism. That is a fallacy that I have criticize previously.6:13 This is why I am of two minds about the current developments. On the one hand, I see a return to sanity, a recognition on a country level about what we can realistically expect and achieve. And this will probably mean that more climate policies will be rolled back in the coming years. It’s not great, but we will cope.
On the other hand, it demonstrates that we have a much bigger underlying problem, our inability to make collectively intelligent decisions. That will come back to haunt us and that’s why I’m worried about the future of our species.
Here, I am just wondering how she thinks that anyone will make intelligent decisions, if there is no free will. Free will is the ability to make decisions. No free will, and we are trapped in the consequences of some ancient initial value problem.
Most philosophers have become compatibilists, meaning that you can have the illusion of free will, even though all your decisions are determined. Whether that is true or not, if our decisions are determined, there is no use complaining about lousy decisions. No one can make any decisions. We are doomed to live out a preprogrammed life.
Once she says that she has no free will, why would anyone listen to her opinions? They are not her opinions. They are just sentences that have been programmed to come out of her mouth. She is not applying her personal knowledge and judgment. She cannot expect us to draw our own conclusions. It is all like a big artificial simulation. She is like a movie character who says she is worried about the future. It means nothing. It is just a line in the script.
Update: Here is evolutionist Jerry Coyne on a rant against free will, attacking Michael Shermer for saying:
Determinists like Harris and Sapolsky have physics envy. The history of science is littered with the failed pipe dreams of ever-alluring reductionist schemes to explain the inner workings of the mindCoyne is a hard-core determinist. He does say that we can learn from experience, but it is involuntary evolution at work.
All the free will debating aside, I really don't understand Dr. Hossenfelder sometimes, especially since she herself has said she no longer trusts many scientists, after said scientists got caught cherry picking data, p-hacking, conducting experiments that can not be reproduced, and writing bogus papers designed to get published and cited... but with no real predictions.
ReplyDeleteIf every ridiculous claim about climate armageddon was to be taken seriously, we would already be dead dozens of times over already. Back in the seventies said experts were claiming we were heading into an ice age, and were advising we do all we could to warm the climate up by geo-engineering.Today, the current experts are advocating we geo-engineer to cool the planet down... all to the tune of billions and billions of dollars. To put it mildly, the experts ability to predict the climate doing anything significant is dubious at best.