Free Will, Privacy and Other Poorly Defined Argument Tent Poles

Spadina Avenue logic puzzle: two BBQ and two pizza shops ...
what belongs in the place that's for lease? 

Whenever I hear someone going on about free will or privacy, I wonder what it is exactly that they are talking about.

Free will, I suppose, is this cherished notion that tells us we must be masters of our own fate. The opposite of free will is predetermination -- the allegedly soul-crushing state where we have no agency in our lives.

Ted Chiang -- a brilliant sci-fi writer who has been around for years but whom I've just discovered -- wrote a compact tale about a gadget that knows before you do that you are going to press its button. A light will flash exactly one second before you press. You can't push the button in less, or more, than one second. You can't pretend that you're going to press the button and then change your mind. The gadget knows whether you are going to press the button or not. In Chiang's story, the effect of this gadget on the world is it saps people of their will to live. They start to falter, fade and eventually die, because the gadget proves to them there's no such thing as free will. 

Chiang as a writer has considerable gifts, but it's not absolutely clear to me what his point is. I am personally surprised that anyone believes that free will is anything other than one of those fancy notions -- like justice -- that people put up as lace curtains between us and the utter arbitrariness of life.

It strikes me that a better opposite to free will would be chaos. So the gadget in the story would sometimes flash, sometimes not, and sometimes do a third thing you were not expecting at all, no matter what you did.

Speaking of curtains: privacy, that old-fashioned notion that your personal space is something you protect and control. 

People who fret about their privacy these days also post on WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, have a YouTube channel for their lists of favourite songs and movies, and find their worth as a human being in the online reactions they get to these things. 

They worry that the data they ceaselessly, compulsively generate for social media companies could be used against them somehow ... like in targeted marketing campaigns. 

There's likely something to be wary of as humans upload their personalities to the cloud, but it doesn't seem like privacy is it.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

This is Lester. He's waiting for Sylvia to throw a stick.
This shot has nothing to do with today's post.