Truth HQ by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T R U T H H Q

they are trying to turn us into zombies rather than try to turn zombie computers into humans. At some point the two processes will coincide and they’ll tell us they’ve cracked it! But all that would have happened is that we would have reduced humanity to the level of dumb, blind, stupid machinery.

Alongside these trends is an increasing interest in what’s known as determinism. Determinism is the idea that there is no such thing as free choice or ‘agency’ in the world. Free choice is an illusion. Everything that we do is determined by past causes. This could be our genetic

inheritance and the conditions of our upbringing. But these things – in turn – relate back to a purely physical determinism. So it’s matter, and the flows of information moving around physical arrangements, that determine everything that happens. This is despite Einstein, and the idea that causes and effects may not follow in the same order for different observers. And this is despite quantum theory, showing us that so much of what we see in the world is a matter of probabilities and not fixed relations between things. Despite all this, determinism seems to attract increasing credibility as a theory about free will – or rather, the lack of it. Why do people seem to like this idea of determinism? I think it’s because it plays into the mindset that consciousness can be reduced to process – and that this process can find a suitable substrate in a purely mechanical arrangement of matter just as well as in biology. I think instead that we should look somewhere else when searching for that elusive something that makes conscious beings conscious. We

should start with the thing that is most apparent to us – we have agency – we have choice.

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