wherein i try to talk about a show and sort of go off rails

[sigmaleph]

The Good Place is a show that is clearly *about* philosophy in a way very little television is (or at least, television I've been exposed to). Which makes it all the more frustrating when the show is just... terrible. at analysing philosophical questions.

The comparison that comes to mind is that it's to philosophy what science fiction is to actual science, except, well... that's kind of awfully arrogant of me isn't it. I am not a scientist but I was a science student for a while. I typically have reason to be confident when I call out some bit of technobabble as making no sense whatsoever, and I have the backing of the scientific establishment behind me.

But like, me calling out Chidi for not being a consequentialist or whatever that nonsense was about free will vs determinism for not even mentioning compatibilism? Lots of real actual philosophers think consequentialism and compatibilism are wrong. I am not even an amateur philosophy student, just some girl who spends too much time on the internet, who the heck cares what I think

and yet compatibilism is the obviously correct answer to the philosophical question of determinism vs free will. like being 100% honest I'm not entertaining much reasonable doubt about this. I have the sense that I *should be* less confident that I've got this question right when clearly lots of very smart people spent longer than I've been alive thinking about this and came to different conclusions, but I'm not.

that sure sounds like it makes me arrogant, which is interesting because I tend to be a very epistemically anxious person (also an anxious person in general). why am i not on this, of all things?

anyway yeah don't watch The Good Place for philosophical instruction, and don't watch sci-fi to learn science.

Comments

[sigmaleph]

this was going to be me talking about a show, not epistemic arrogance. ah well.

[fibonacci_reminder]

This is pure speculation, but I'd guess that you're confidence on this is because, at least to a degree, you have spent a lot of personal time thinking about and teasing out the potential problems with the idea and creating personal nuance to answer those problems, and because the nature of free will vs. determinism means that it's a very, like, definitions-contingent thing, so if you're comfortable and explicit about your internal definitions there usually isn't that much to learn about the situation from external observation or experimentation (unless those very definitions point towards some testable parameterizaton of 'free-will'), and thus you can overall come to what feels like a 'solid' conclusion purely by thinking about it and tweaking your belief until it no longer feels like it needs tweaking.

[theaudientvoid]

and yet compatibilism is the obviously correct answer to the philosophical question of determinism vs free will. like being 100% honest I'm not entertaining much reasonable doubt about this.

If by compatibilism, you mean "redefining 'free will' to be functionally meaningless" then yes, you are correct.

[fibonacci_reminder]

This feels like an overly harsh and reductive way of phrasing things to me.

[theaudientvoid]

Allow me to rephrase, then. "Redefining 'free will' in a way that it is both (a) trivial true, and (b) entirely uninteresting."

[sigmaleph]

I don't think compatibilist free will is uninteresting. I think it satisfactorily answers the surface-level contradiction of 'it feels to me like I am making my own choices, yet observation suggests people's choices are either determined by the outside world or at best a coinflip'.

[sigmaleph]

I mean. If someone told me "if the kind of free will I have is the kind you mean then that's meaningless to me" then I'd believe them. Disagree about where to draw meaning from, but I'd believe them.

[oligopsony]

Chidi not mentioning compatibilism seems much worse than his not being a compatibilist. As you point out, plenty of philosophers are incompatibilists (i.e., wrong.) But none of them would fail to be aware of it as an option, if only to knock it down.

But then Chidi hsd always been a frustrating character, because the basic idea of the character is neat and compelling, the actor delivers it well, but he's just served such inconsistent characterization from the script. He's an academic philosopher but shows almost zero interest in the bizarre metaphysical situation he finds himself in, except for one reboot that gets depressed. His defining character traits are being extremely smart and pathologically scrupulous, but he misses whole strains of ethical considerations that should be obvious.

This is implicit in your post, I think, but I think TGP might be the rare fiction where becoming more like a rationalist fic would be better by its own criteria.

[sigmaleph]

Worth mentioning that Chidi wasn't a part of the free will debate, it was just Michael and Eleanor.

I don't actually know if TGP would be improved by becoming more rat-fic-like, any more than a random sci-fi show would improve by becoming harder scifi. It would frustrate *me* less, but to some extent it'd be worse qua comedy

[unknought]

There's a model of philosophical disagreement which has become compelling to me recently, which I don't fully endorse:

We don't come to philosophical positions by pure logic alone, but by thinking about our intuitions about the world and trying to fit them into a coherent picture of the thing we're trying to understand. No matter how we do this some of the conclusions we reach are going to be counterintuitive; we're going to need to bite some bullets to get anywhere. But which intuitions we start with and which counterintuitive claims we're willing to accept is something that varies a fair amount from person to person. Philosophical analysis can help us expand on a particular viewpoint and give a detailed and precise picture of the world based on that intuition, but it can't really resolve differences between people coming from different starting points. So you can get to a point where you can be pretty confident that no further philosophical argument could convince you to change your mind while still knowing a lot less about the topic than some philosopher with a different view.

But why should you trust your own intuitions? I think the only answer I can give here is that it's not really possible to do otherwise. No matter what approach or meta-approach you take to the problem, you're ultimately starting from a place of "What makes sense to me?" and you can't get away from that. In Bayesian terms: Two rational Bayesian predictors with very different priors can reach different conclusions from the same evidence, but it doesn't ever become rational for either predictor to change their priors in response to the disagreement.

Like I said I don't completely endorse this model, but for me it's given an explanation for how I can be justifiably confident in a philosophical position even while acknowledging that there is no consensus among people who understand the issue much better than I do.

[packbat]

*glances at the other comments*

I really enjoyed the college class I audited on the free will question, but I think this is one of those philosophy topics that highlights how much of the disagreements are intractable differences of intuition.

(...huh - "Free will" article on Wikipedia looks like a pretty solid overview, at least in the intro part.)

For what it's worth, I mostly agree with you? Sometimes in conversation with people whose conception of free will is profoundly different from my own, I will slide into a semi-compatibilist "we still have moral responsibility" position, but that's more "I'm often willing to speak someone else's language" than anything else. On my own, I compatibilism.

Popping back up to the attempted point about philosophy in fiction: I agree with you. A lot of people who tell stories are not students of philosophy, even on the level of "spends too much time on the Internet", and they tend towards obvious questions and obvious-to-them answers.

[packbat]

As far as feeling comfortable being certain about a controversial question, I think it's also worth considering what the impact of that philosophical position has. Your answers to questions like "does responsibility come from having made a choice?", "are you making a choice if you could not do otherwise?", and "is the universe deterministic?" - the questions I was taught about free will, modulo years of not thinking about it - have much less impact on other people than the question "do trans people actually exist?". (The Philosophy Tube video "Transphobia: An Analysis" does a good job of breaking that down.)

[sigmaleph]

hm, it's an interesting example. because of course "are trans people members of the gender they say they are, rather than the one they were assigned at birth?" is another question of which I am very sure of my answer (yes) yet it is fairly controversial one.

but a significant part of the disagreement there is not philosophical disagreement, and to the extent it is and you get into the question of 'what does it mean for someone to be one gender or another' i am substantially less confident of my answer.

(but it's not the philosophical questions behind that have the major ethical implications! it's the first question, the one I'm very certain of)

[packbat]

I think it's a little easier in the trans case to feel that confidence in your answer? I mean, far as I can tell, the evidence for denial of trans existence consists of "This makes me uncomfortable", "I never heard of this before", "I don't understand this", and excuses.

And yeah, the what-even-is-a-gender question is still up in the air, as far as I'm aware. We know there are people who tell us that they changed their gender - they were one gender before, they are another now - and we know there are people whose gender came years or decades before knowing that gender was real and having language for it, because they tell their stories too. We know there are trans people who hate some of the markers of their assigned gender - being "Sir"ed or "Ma'am"ed in public, visible facial hair or boobs, a low or a high voice, and so on - and trans people who rejoice in some of the markers of their present gender, but the former is definitely not universal and the latter might not be either. We know that trans children answer questions about themselves in ways that match cis children of the same gender. We know that cis children have to develop a gender identity themselves - none of us are born with a gender, as far as we can tell, we have to find out about gender and figure out who that means we are.