• Is this meant to imply that pondering this stuff is a mark of immaturity?

    As I see it, there's a lack of intelligent discussion of these subjects. Sure, folks have been banging on about this crap for thousands of years, but modern physics, neuroscience and information theory has only been around for a relative blip, and I see very little sign that we are doing much to integrate the obvious implications.

    I listened to a Neil deGrasse Tyson podcast about free will a couple of months back, and found it somewhat superficial; seems to me we should be further along with this.

    People like deGrasse Tyson and Sabine Hossenfelder are starting to make the point that a claim that free will exists is, contrary to intuition, akin to claiming that God, or Russell's Teapot exists, and that the onus of proof is on those who claim the existence of something you can cut away with Occam's Razor.

    But serious discussion should have moved past this point decades ago, if not for (even some of the smartest) people's stubborn refusal to integrate near certainties they find uncomfortable. We should be talking about the ethical implications of this all but inescapable realisation, and how to drag our primitive instinctual notions of morality towards something more evidence-based which would doubtless lead to better outcomes.

    But nooo, let's all just mask our insecurity with pointless flippancy every time some unhip nerd brings it up.

  • I listened to a Neil deGrasse Tyson podcast...and found it somewhat superficial

    NdGT? Superficial? Perish the thought!

  • His offsider is pretty lame, except for the black humour about racism; that has a lot of bite.

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