Spinoza saw that if a falling stone could reason, it would think, “I want to fall at the rate of thirty-two feet per second per second.
Philip K. Dick. (via but does it float, a blog that for some stupid reason does not see fit to cite the authors of its quotes. Edit: apparently, PKD is one of the tags at the bottom of the post. That’s no proper cite. Thx, Alejandro.)
This is, I think, the most concise and poetic description of the argument against free will I’ve seen. According to Spinoza, humans believe they cause their actions because they are conscious of their own preferences and choices, but not of the causes that created these preferences and choices. A falling stone did not freely choose to fall, but if it were conscious it would surely be unaware of the causes of its fall and feel as if it chose it; similarly, humans are unaware of the causes of their choices and feel as if they chose them, but neither stone nor human makes any free choices at all.
I tend to side with the compatibilists, who agree with Spinoza that the free will he denies doesn’t exist, but who counter that this is not the free will that matters; in the important sense, which is not the sense that Spinoza uses “free will”, we are free.
Amid the onslaught of visual stuff that while pretty feels like it lacks substance, this quote turned up and made me think. I suppose I should applaud but does it float for that, even though they didn’t write the line themselves, nor properly credit its author.
