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what the government doesn't want you to know is that free will is real, some people have more of it than others, and cultivating it is a fundamentally dangerous practice

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Alex MacCaw

@maccaw

· Sep 20, 2021

The universe is deterministic. There is no free will. Have empathy for everyone.

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

@QiaochuYuan

i suppose after you claim there’s no free will and then issue a command like “have empathy for everyone” the idea is that some people will deterministically comply and others won’t? determinism is so weird

4:06 AM · Sep 21, 2021Twitter for iPad

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

@QiaochuYuan

Sep 21, 2021

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@QiaochuYuan

one fun idea i came across recently is that a big reason why free will has historically been such a big deal is that if it doesn’t exist then the concept of sin becomes incoherent idk how true this is but food for thought

QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

@QiaochuYuan

Sep 21, 2021

what the government *really* doesn’t want you to know is that the people with the most free will are the jews

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

@QiaochuYuan

· Jul 28, 2020

yesterday i learned that there's a whole millennia-long debate about astrology in judaism and one of the positions is "astrology is true for everyone except jews because god gives jews more free will" and this is my new headcanon now en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_vi

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

@QiaochuYuan

Sep 21, 2021

anyway as an alternative to getting philosophically confused about free will vs. determinism i suggest you experiment with switching between moving your fingers “on purpose” and letting them move “however they want to” to get phenomenologically confused instead

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I think of cellular automata. Deterministic but unpredictable, some may as well be random. The only way to know what they'll do is run them, and with a person that's them actually making the decision.