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scrollbreak t1_jd6bvlq wrote

Reply to comment by KBSMilk in In-depth interview with Gregg Caruso, free-will skeptic by fatsosis

Just seems to pass the buck on the inconsistency - how can puppets be hurt? And who/what at the strings has decided they ought not to be?

I really don't think the whole puppet idea and also using 'I' are at all consistent with each other. It's like pretending to be puppeteer AND puppet, whichever is most convenient at any given moment.

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ThePantsParty t1_jd6cp3s wrote

> Just seems to pass the buck on the inconsistency - how can puppets be hurt?

I don't really see how the question is coherently connected with the topic. Even just granting a fully deterministic world, why do you think that somehow contains an implication that an individual could not be hurt? You could say they were determined to be hurt, but how would it make sense to say they cannot be hurt? Causation and "ability to feel" are not remotely the same question.

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Newbie4Hire t1_jd6ruv4 wrote

Because it's all irrelevant, because you have zero control over any of it. So who cares if they are hurt or not hurt. How can you even argue whether people should be punished or not? They either will be or they won't be. There is no choice here, everything is just happening, and it will happen however it was going to happen. At least that would be the case if there was no free will.

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ThePantsParty t1_jd94yig wrote

I think the question of "importance" is one thing, and there's certainly differing opinions there, but the person I was replying to seemed to be making a much more particular claim that under determinism people cannot be hurt, which seems far stranger.

Your point is understandable enough that if they're hurt they were determined to be and so it could not be otherwise so maybe worrying about it is a waste of time, but while that's all very relevant to the free will debate, I'm still just hung up on claiming that "hurt" isn't possible outside of any of that.

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