And so… Encryption should be a fundamental basic human right.

You are referring to a completely different concept. Determinism has absolutely nothing at all to do with the economic policies that are used to oppress people; those things would still happen in a world with free will so long as someone in power wills it. Workers' rights have to be addressed on a physical/social/political level.

Gotta say, our thoughts are complex but absolutely not random, nowhere near totally. We wouldn't have social structure or science if we didn't actually know and do things with intention. Not to say that the world isn't deterministic; it is, for the most part, as far as science knows (we haven't proven that something can act without causality, which the philosophy idea of free will requires to some degree)

Phenomenologically, you could have acted otherwise. In other words, as far as you're concerned, you could have. It's not inconceivable or impossible for that to have happened (as in there is definitely a possible world in which you did act differently, virtually infinitely many in fact), which is why it appears as a "choice" to you. As long as there is some possible world in which you acted differently, then you experience the event as contingent. And since the experience of it is all that matters to you (the only person who could perceive their own agency), you have agency.

More technically though, agency is not an event to be observed objectively. You can't point to something and say, "that's agency". Agency is a phenomenological property, something that can only be experienced. Nobody else can determine whether you have agency or not, only you can. For example, if you tell me to do something, and point a gun at my head, and then I do it, you'll probably assume I don't have agency in that situation. But if I felt like I wanted to do it, then I do have agency, despite the fact that I ultimately had to do it (or die I suppose, but you can change the gun to a magic wand that literally forces me, to strengthen the example). This is all still the case, regardless of whether everything happening was determined in some grander sense. Just think of every higher order system of determination as another magic wand.

Going back to your initial question though, I think the simple answer is that our layman's notion of what constitutes a choice is just wrong. We don't enact reality when we make choices; that's not what a choice is. But it doesn't mean choices don't exist. We know they do because we experience them. We act them out.

For working scientists and engineers, philosophical mistakes often lead to logical and mathematical mistakes, which affect outcomes.

We have agency but it isn’t free from causality. What is a choice if you couldn’t have made a different one?

In such instances, it's best to ignore them. You can't really prove the importance of philosophy to someone who doesn't care. I might go a step further and say that their primary agenda is to ridicule you and make you feel bad. That's usually their primary focus.

As if autonomy amongst the workforce is a priority for anyone in power.

Basically, philosophy as an area of study encompasses a number of important problems. For example, what we can know or how we know stuff, or how we should behave and judge the behaviour of others. Such things are foundational to all kinds of human endeavour and even our regular lives.

There's different ways we might go about dealing with such problems. We can try to ignore them, and maybe just rely on received wisdom or prevailing cultural attitudes. Or we might idly speculate and come up with answers that seem pleasant or particularly in accord with our intuitions. Or we might pray, meditate, take a lot of hallucinogenics, etc. and see if any answers reveal themselves to us. These might all work out fine for us if we're just looking to get on with life and not trouble ourselves with such matters, but they probably aren't satisfactory if we want to know what's actually true. So the alternative is philosophy as a discipline: attempting to work out these problems in a rigorous and critical way.

Usually when people are dismissive of philosophy it's because they either don't understand that rigor can be applied to these kinds of problems, or just think that philosophy isn't about doing that (e.g., that it's the "idle speculation" approach).

Yup, Harris is just a scientist who doesn't understand the point; he has a layman's (naive) conception of free will. He can't grock the philosophy of science and mind involved in the current debate. He thinks anything outside of imposing god-like powers of control over the world is not free will. He doesn't understand that his conception of free will is a layman's conception, and that philosophers have long ditched that.

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The main point from compatibilists is that the determinist conception of free will is simply inaccurate. Free will isn't about imposing control of any sort. That simply has nothing to do with agency. Agency is constituted by the experience of not being at odds with reality. Only the agent's experience matters. The causal interaction of atomic particles isn't part of the phenomenology. If you experience yourself as having agency, then you do, by definition, since that's all agency is.

What about just being you.

> As Sam Harris put it, compatibilism is just arguing that free will exists as long as the puppet ignores its strings.

Lol. There's a reason why other philosophers take Dennet seriously and Harris ... not. His incapability to understand basics such as the actual claims of compatibilism is a major part of it.

Nice summary but Dennett is still using the same unconvincing argument with a different spin.

As Sam Harris put it, compatibilism is just arguing that free will exists as long as the puppet ignores its strings.

Non of our thoughts are free from external causations that we dont control, even our attempts to control our thoughts are just an illusion of will that our brain created from other external stimuli, its just a function of evolution to give us agency and survive better, but agency is not free.

Your free will is binded to the consequences of acting on free will.

Yinyang

Selecting for cooperativeness sounds like a slippery slope to Orwellianism tbh

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Myself actually, I do have the training.

This is kinda a standard university topic. One I haven't been asked in decades. Put simply, there are many possible answers but a couple of the more prominent ones are:

1. Philosophy teaches you how to think, how to see the important questions in any problem solving exercise. Once you begin to think like a philosopher, many every day problems will become easier to solve. You may even find yourself helping others with problems they have languished over for a long time and privately wonder why they didn't come to the same conclusion long before. And this teaching you how to think is an excellent foundation for politics, medicine, law, any kind of research position and a great many other professions.

2. Philosophy is the foundation of all knowledge, in all topics. Science is nothing more than applied philosophy. Quite often philosophy is thought of as the asking of questions but not answering them. And for some, this is all they ever want philosophy to be. But it can be more if you want it to. Ex: You have two competing ideas that can be thought of as two roads diverging in a wood. You arrive at the fork in the road and stand there wondering which direction to go. Without being able to see the end of either road, it is difficult to say which is the correct path. So you can a) conduct observations and see what factors may lead you to choose one versus the other, b) gather information from those who may be traveling down the same road and see which is has been observed to be the more likely correct path, or c) you can simply choose to walk a path and by walking it find an answer for right or wrong. All three of these are the foundation of all scientific study in all fields.

Oh okay, I was trying to use eugenics in the same way as the author is proposing the term should be used, and you are not. That's why this conversation doesn't make any sense. I didn't realized you were just hard disagreeing about the terminology.

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This is more of a meta philosophy question so I hope it's ok but: How do you handle the age old "philosophy isn't important" kind of remarks? The people who think all of philosophy is just "are we dreaming right now?" And "if a tree falls in the forest...." kind of questions. I've heard very intelligent people make comments like this and I usually present them with the same annoying math remarks like, "when am I going to use this?". Mathematitians usually answer that with the fact that we use math everyday in any number of applications. Philosophy is the same way. Everytime we try to determine if something is right, or good we use it. When we try to examine something unknown with objectivity we use it. When we use logic of any kind we use it to some degree. It just never seems to stick, though. At best I get a sort of, "yeah, ok hippy. That's very deep." kind of response. It's like many people think science and philosophy are at odds with one another when that couldn't be more untrue. They work in conjunction with eachother in the pursuit of knowledge. I just can't seem to get that across very easily.

Opposing incest for the "inherent power imbalance" is just silly. All sexual interactions have a power imbalance and removing it as much as possible wouldn't probably change your mind. Or would you say that 2 gay adult twins engaging in consensual sex(power imbalance negated) is an OK form of incest?