I'm confused as to why he decided a supernatural intelligence would be required for free will and cause and effect. Is hid point just basically to say an omniscient god-like entity existing would mean free will doesn't?
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He uses it to explain why free will doesn't truly exist. The demon being a point of view from which we can see a snap shot of the universe and understand it. If one were to do that and understand the properties of everything, then they could accurately determine how everything would happen. Thus the existence of true free will will never actually exist because the interaction of all items in the universe will be determinable based on their properties.
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Eh. I find the whole free will doesn't exist thing silly, but then again, I'm not even close to being philosophically inclined. That sort of thinking just doesn't work with how I'm wired.
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Do you know how to reason deductively? Try to follow. You know the properties of all things. Therefore you know how they will interact. Nothing is truly random. The idea is similar to a presentist theory. The only true time that exists is the present and the past and future only exist in our imagination. The present is caused by what happened in the past and the future will be the result of the present.
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I understand the reasoning behind it, I just can't really wrap my head around the idea itself. Sure, my typing this comment out right now could be part of some sort of interaction in the atoms of the universe that could never have been changed, as well as my thoughts that I could have not replied if I wanted to, but I just see philosophizing about free will as a self defeating and pessimistic action, seeing as it's impossible to prove either way. If we truly have no free will, philosophizing about it is irrelevant and pointless, even though it's an action we have no ability to change. If I was forced to accept with absolutely incontestable evidence that free will doesn't exist, then it would seem to make my life that much more depressing and aimless, which I guess would be my "destiny" anyway. Like I said, I'm not too into philosophizing, especially about existential sorts of things like this, but hey, maybe that's by design.
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I don't find it self defeating or making excuses at all. Quite to opposite. I live to the best of my abilities because that's who I am. I don't necessarily subscribe to the idea 100% but suppose I did. Do you not suppose that maybe we were meant to philosophize about it? Do you see turtles doing that? No, just humans do. Turtles don't progress in maslow's hierarchy of needs nearly as much as humans do. Would there not be a purpose for that or at least utility for it?
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That's the thing though. The way I view it means that there is no purpose or meaning to anything whatsoever. Is there purpose to a computer running through repeating code? There isn't, except for the resulting purpose the code has to whomever created it. The computer system and code themselves in isolation from the purpose given to it by the creator are meaningless. The computer runs through the code over and over, but all its doing is going through the motions that the workings of the code dictate. The code itself has no purpose in this isolated universe and neither does the computer except for to run the code to no effect. The way I view the non-existance of free will, we are the code, and the universe is the computer, except in this case, there is no end result of the code being fully ran through. It would essentially be an infinite code that no matter what pieces you remove from it, the computer will keep chugging along through it except in a slightly and inconsequentially altered way. If we as the code were meant to philosophize about free will, meaning there was a piece of code that declared that action, that piece of code could be plucked out of the universe and nothing would change except that such an action would no longer exist. Any supposed "meaning" it had is in actuality meaningless as nothing integral changes with its absence. True purpose, as in the human idea of it, cannot exist without something of free will existing to give it purpose. The human idea of purpose or meaning existing without the presence of free will is paradoxical seeing as any emotional meaning/purpose a person thinks himself/herself or another object to have is ultimately meaningless in the human idea of the word seeing as that "meaning" was predestined to be placed on whatever it was placed on anyway, and as such it is no longer special or meaningful. It's like a forced apology. Obviously, purpose in the general sense can exist regardless of free will, but that kind of purpose isn't any more meaningful than the purpose behind inanimate objects like carbon dioxide and trees both happening to exist. As I see it, in order to believe that a universe devoid of free will can have purpose in the non-literal sense, you would have to also subscribe to the idea of a higher being with free will that gave us purpose, which I don't, so maybe that's why I can't grasp the concept of no free will. If you actually read all that, I just tried my best to put into words how I feel about the whole no free will thing. Maybe it was all incoherent rambling, I don't know lol.