Showing posts with label psychopathy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychopathy. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 5, 2019

A theory of free will and psychopathy

Free will

Define: an effectively deterministic system, or an apparent robot, is a system whose behavior can be predicted easily from its initial state and immediate surroundings.

Define: an effectively teleological system, or an apparent agent, is a system whose behavior cannot be predicted as above, but whose future state can be predicted somewhat.

Basically, an apparent robot is somebody that you can read like a book, and an apparent agent is somebody that you can't, but you can still guess what "goals" (likely future states) they have.

A successful creature needs to figure out what other creatures are going to do. But it's too hard to model them as apparent robots, just because how complicated creatures are. It's easier to model them as apparent agents.

Apparent agents are apparently free: they aren't apparently deterministic.

Apparent agents are willful: they do actions.

Thus, apparent agents apparently have free will. To say someone "has free will" means that someone is a creature that does things in a way you can't predict.

Let's Read: Neuropath (Bakker, 2009)

Neuropath  (Bakker 2009) is a dramatic demonstration of the eliminative materialism worldview of the author R. Scott Bakker. It's very b...