by Daniel Miessler
Actually, luck is only really relevant in a world where human beings are able to either experience it in a free will world or discuss it. In a determined universe as some understand it, good luck and bad luck are entirely interchangeable because how human beings do either experience it or assess it is but a necessary component of the only possible reality in the only possible world.Taking action
Harris can’t take credit for the luck of his birth, his having had a normal moral education—that’s just luck—but those born thus lucky are informed that they have a duty or obligation to preserve their competence, and grow it, and educate themselves, and Harris has responded admirably to those incentives.
He keeps making the same error.
And, given free will, my own question to those like Harris and Dennett would how, in a determined universe, they themselves imagine a discussion of luck would unfold...should unfold?
Same with morality and education. They either are what they can only ever be if the human brain is interchangeable with all other matter or "somehow" the human brain is...different.
They're programmed in other words. By human beings. Who may or may not themselves be programmed by nature. The tricky part then revolves around the extent to which in educating themselves they become more and more like us.Let’s try it with Robots:
Robots can’t take credit for the luck of their birth and their normal moral education—that’s just luck—but those born thus lucky are informed that they have a duty or obligation to preserve their competence, and grow it, and educate themselves, and the robots has responded admirably to those incentives.
Taking input and formulating a complex response is not freedom. Plants do it. Animals do it. Computers do it. That is not the standard, and if it were then most living things would qualify; it’d just be a question of degree.
And that's the point: the extent to which matter wholly in sync with its own immutable laws can go. All the way to us?
Only brain matter has evolved to the point where it is able to question the nature of brain matter itself. And to ponder how in a No God world it may well have "somehow" acquired autonomy.