Because I'm the member of the NYC FutureSalon meetup group, and because these types tend to be quite verbose when it comes to their opinions of matters philosophical and transhumanistic, I was in an email chain of about 20 dense emails debating the merits of a proposed topic for the next meetup.
Essentially the topic proposed was "do we have free wills or predetermined wills?"
With the following discussion focused around the following reply:
"Frankly I don't see what this has to do with a Futurist group. This is a topic that has been discussed for centuries and belongs (if anywhere) in a philosophy discussion group, not a group devoted to extrapolating about the future.
When it is not a guise for religious views at its very best it is a singlemindedly annoying subject. Count me out!!!"
I won't go into the the details of the other 18 much lengthier emails, but I'll share my favorite response, submitted by the original topic proposer:
"The reason the determined will vs. free will question is very relevant to NYC Futures Salon is that the future we create in large part reflects the premises we base it on. A future world that continues to accept free will as a reality will be profoundly different than a future world that evolves to a more accurate understanding of human will. For example, a believer in free will might say "it doesn't make sense to expand our resources in teaching our children to be law-abiding, good people - in the end they will still act according to their free will as adults." When one understands that our devoting more resources to teaching our children to be more law-abiding, good people will result in more law-abiding, good adults, it is far more likely that we will devote those resources, and help our children become better adults."
Sounds very much on the side of the idea that "determinism isn't about the future - it's about the past." This is something I captured once upon a time in a tweet that is no longer showing up in the search results, that I'll have to expand on sometime in the future; I think the Oracle said something about it in the Matrix as well, if you're in to that kind of thing. The basic idea is that because our decisions are driven by our experiences, our future is determined by our past.
