• Square Singer@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    There are so many cases like that. For example, define intelligence. If you try to, you’ll run in loops of equally undefined abstract concepts.

    And that’s basically what philosophy is about.

    • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      Even though intelligence isn’t precisely defined, people still have enough of an idea about it to have some consensus about how it should be measured. An animal that keeps running into a wire fence trying to get through is showing less intelligence than an animal that notices an opening a few feet away and walks through that instead. Free will is much less defined than even that.

      • Square Singer@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Well, intelligence is defined as what the intelligence test measures.

        But lets try a different one: sentience. Or consciousness.

        • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          Well, intelligence is defined as what the intelligence test measures.

          Right, so where’s the Free Will test?

          sentience. Or consciousness.

          IMO these are a bit worse defined than intelligence, but still more so than free will. I don’t think it would mean anything to say I don’t believe in free will, but when I say I don’t believe in consciousness, the delusion I deny is one people actually have. The state of your brain is only that, a state, but people are possessed by an overpowering intuition of having experience that is independent from the physical reality and data structure.

          Free will on the other hand isn’t even a delusion, it isn’t anything more than rhetoric.

          • Square Singer@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            Same as conciousnes. That concept only consists to differentiate between groups of living beings to justify eating some of them. (Disclaimer, I too eat meat, but using conciousnes/sentience as a justification is just a rethoric, or more plainly a lie).