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Wednesday, December 02, 2015

Love potion N°4


Love potions get a bad rap in freewill theism. Apparently, they don't read fairly tale love stories to their children. 

Now, all things being equal, I'd rather have the beautiful princess fall madly in love with me because I'm such a wonderful guy. If, however, it's a choice between having her or losing her, I'll settle for the love potion. Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good

On a more serious note, consider Robert Nozick's The Experience Machine:

Suppose there was an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life experiences? Of course, while in the tank you won't know that you're there; you'll think that it's all actually happening. Would you plug in? 

i) This is like the love potion in the sense that if you plug in, it disarms your critical faculties. A pleasant, self-induced delusion. 

ii) I daresay many readers would find his thought-experiment very appealing. Insofar as that is generally true, it counters the frequent appeal that psychological determinism is intuitively wrong.

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