Choose your own review/for strong free willists

19 May 2024 - 20 May 2024
Open in Logseq
    • You are a believer in free will, based on the fundamental experience of being.

      • Congratulations on sticking up for yourself, or your Self, your freedom and your subjectivity, in a world in which all those seem to be largely illusory. You are a true existential hero. The science nerds might sneer at you, but you are probably a better person than they are. You certainly have a strong sense of morality, a stubborn refusal to disbelieve in the reality of right and wrong. If science and reason say that you don't exist, that your experience of freedom is unreal, well, fuck science and reason.
      • And putting aside whatever attachment you have to your Self, it seems like hard determinism has some deep deep problems and embracing it would be a big mistake, no matter how much it might seem to be true. It is entirely corrosive to all traditional notions of mind and morality, as well as freedom and subjective expereince. It seems to be on a deep level anti-value, anti-purpose, and anti-meaning. And that means it is fundamentally anti-life, a toxic idea, something we literally can't live with, no matter how true it is.
      • It not only subverts morality, but thinking itself, which is necessarily based on a kind of freedom. A coerced thought is not really a thought.
      • Thus you are a romantic out of necessity; your passionate belief in yourself, your feelings, and that of others outweighs the science. You are, in fact, battling the forces of nihilisma and materialism and will continue to do so until your last breath.