Teeqoz said:
SvennoJ said:
I wonder where this sense of duality comes from? You are the sum of your synapses doing the work. You did do the work and the appropriate response to that is thankfulness. (reinforcing your good behavior)
There is no pre-programming (well there is a lot actually but not on a case by case basis) and while your behavior may be predictable up to a point, there is also the problem of not being able to fully understand/measure a system from within that system. To us, the future is unknowable.
Perhaps free will is simply a by product of the evolution of our brain. The main purpose of the brain is pattern recognition, identifying cause and effect, predicting outcomes while determining causes. Turn that onto itself and the brain comes up with free will and perhaps consciousness as an explanation of its inner workings. God made the earth, free will makes me choose. Could it be as simple as that.
Perhaps not believing in free will has been weeded out by evolution. If as you say not believing in free will leads to why laugh, why love, why do anything. Not a good recipe for procreation. Same as brains that believe there is no point to life are going to procreate as fast or even at all. We're all a product of millions of years of natural selection, which has very much shaped the way we think.
Back to the duality. Why is it not you doing the good deeds if free will is a myth. Why should you not be rewarded. It's still you weighing up the actions and deciding to do the good thing, whether it's chemicals and electrical signals in a neural network making the decision, or something else.
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Studies have shown that not believing in free will can have a negative impact on your work proficiency and a lot of other things in your life. It can make you less dedicated to everything basically. So evolutionarily, it totally makes sense that we believe in free will, even if it is an illusion. It is as they say, ignorance is bliss.
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But if we don't believe in free will aren't the chemicals deciding not to believr in this illusions since free will doesn't exist?
