Build a million variations of Data, each with a different complexity of positronic brain. Order them in complexity.
Now draw a line between the positronic brain that is capable of free will and is not capable of free will.
if someone actually drew a line for you, would it be a satisfying response? i understand that you are making a rhetorical point, not expecting a response, but the problem is, someone could probably give you a response. it wouldn't satisfy you but it would satisfy them and then you'd just both be arguing whether chocolate or vanilla is better.
i still don't understand why the existence of entropy necessarily leads to a belief in the existence free will. it feels very "god is the gaps" to me.
even if the laws of physics directly precluded comprehensive direct causal behavior (regardless of our ability to predict behavior), even if the laws of the universe actually said in capital letters that NOT EVERYTHING HAS A DIRECT PHYSICAL CAUSE, i still don't see how free will suddenly results from this law. i feel like we are missing a shitload of axioms and theorems and a whole bunch of other stuff between entropy => a => b => c => free will.
If you can't distinguish between when something has free will and it does not, how is free will a property that can be applied to the natural world?
Things that cannot be tested for in the natural world belong to the realm of the supernatural. And no one can agree on anything pertaining to the supernatural because it cannot be tested by definition.
Why does free will need to be "a property that can be applied to the natural world"? If we accept that free will is a social construction, not a physical property of objects, and if we accept that something can be socially constructed and real (if maybe not real like a physical object is real), then we get out of these weird "how many grains of sand does it take to make a pile?" type of questions.
We have a social construct called "rationality" that we already use in all the spaces where "free will" could be applied in society.
Is rationality a property that can be tested for and applied to the natural world?
No its an incredibly arbitrary social construct and has been applied to disenfranchise and enslave minorities that whites felt did not meet their standard of "rationality".
To be honest, I've lost the thread of this conversation. What are we talking about now? I thought I was arguing that free will doesn't have to be a property in or applicable to the natural world in order to be real or important, and in three short posts we've moved to the racist history of the concept of rationality, which is a credible enough claim, but doesn't seem to have anything to do with whether free will is real or matters.
If you want to use free will as an imprecise social construct like rationality, something decided by judges and courts that society appoints, then you'll have to deal the consequences of that.
If you want free will to be a property that a lifeform can or cannot have that is decided in a way that everyone regardless of society can agree on, then it has to be something testable in the natural world.
And if I just want to be able to say "you knew what you were doing" as though that is a meaningful and relevant consideration with respect to behaviour and responsibility?
I can think of a lot of phrases that say that more precisely and with less baggage than "free will", starting with "responsible," "rational," "mindful," and "conscious."
Wait, weren't you just talking about the baggage associated with the concept of rationality? But now "rational" can be part of the set of terms that does the conceptual work "free will" would otherwise do? I don't understand how that works.
If you use "he acted with free will" in a post online when you simply mean "he acted responsibly" or "he acted mindfully," you're just asking for someone to respond to you with "free will doesn't exist!" when you didn't mean to talk about free will in whatever sense doesn't exist in that respondent's mind.
Then you're off on a tangent about whether free will exists or not when you and the person you're arguing with have not established what either party means by free will.
Only if that person has no grasp on the context. If they don’t then it’s entirely possible they also ask what a cost free final testament has to do with anything.
I mostly have a problem with divorcing the term of "free will" from its long theological history regarding a supernatural ability to act without regard to natural causes.
If somehow the context allows you to use the term without that implication, then feel free I guess.
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I mostly have a problem with divorcing the term of "free will" from its long theological history regarding a supernatural ability to act without regard to natural causes.
If somehow the context allows you to use the term without that implication, then feel free I guess.
Pending a point of technological development where a database of sufficient granularity and breadth exists such that a hypothetical behavior-predicting algorithm can predict your behavior in significantly better than real-time (meaning it doesn't take 35 years of computation to determine what a 35 year old will choose from a breakfast menu) I don't think there's anything necessarily theological about an assumption of free will.
Historically, yes, the term is very much tied up in theology. But in terms of discussing morality and ethics I think we're best of just assuming people are 'free willed' in the sense that their behavior is not perfectly predictable by other humans.
If we reach a point where you can, with perfect accuracy, predict that Person A will choose X from among X, Y, and Z then ethics and morality and justice become very confusing all of a sudden.
I mostly have a problem with divorcing the term of "free will" from its long theological history regarding a supernatural ability to act without regard to natural causes.
If somehow the context allows you to use the term without that implication, then feel free I guess.
Pending a point of technological development where a database of sufficient granularity and breadth exists such that a hypothetical behavior-predicting algorithm can predict your behavior in significantly better than real-time (meaning it doesn't take 35 years of computation to determine what a 35 year old will choose from a breakfast menu) I don't think there's anything necessarily theological about an assumption of free will.
Historically, yes, the term is very much tied up in theology. But in terms of discussing morality and ethics I think we're best of just assuming people are 'free willed' in the sense that their behavior is not perfectly predictable by other humans.
If we reach a point where you can, with perfect accuracy, predict that Person A will choose X from among X, Y, and Z then ethics and morality and justice become very confusing all of a sudden.
I hold the position that free will is an unnecessary concept for moral responsibility.
I cannot say whether I have free will or not. I can say that if I murder someone and get caught, I'll be held morally responsible by society regardless.
It doesn't matter if my action of murder was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I mostly have a problem with divorcing the term of "free will" from its long theological history regarding a supernatural ability to act without regard to natural causes.
If somehow the context allows you to use the term without that implication, then feel free I guess.
Pending a point of technological development where a database of sufficient granularity and breadth exists such that a hypothetical behavior-predicting algorithm can predict your behavior in significantly better than real-time (meaning it doesn't take 35 years of computation to determine what a 35 year old will choose from a breakfast menu) I don't think there's anything necessarily theological about an assumption of free will.
Historically, yes, the term is very much tied up in theology. But in terms of discussing morality and ethics I think we're best of just assuming people are 'free willed' in the sense that their behavior is not perfectly predictable by other humans.
If we reach a point where you can, with perfect accuracy, predict that Person A will choose X from among X, Y, and Z then ethics and morality and justice become very confusing all of a sudden.
I hold the position that free will is an unnecessary concept for moral responsibility.
I cannot say whether I have free will or not. I can say that if I murder someone and get caught, I'll be held morally responsible by society regardless.
It doesn't matter if my action of murder was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions.
I agree with you. I think it gets confusing, though, because of secondary questions.
If a computer exists which can accurately predict who will commit murder tomorrow, is it ethical to arrest them ahead of time? And what sort of punishment is ethical in the case of a person who definitely would have but did not actually commit a crime?
If crime is predictable, does that capability morally behoove a society to take active measures to remediate the causes of crime?
Presumably if anti-social acts can be perfectly predicted that means those actions are caused by a combination of physiological states and personal experiences. Should a moral society take measures to prevent the types of lifetime experiences which lead to crime? If the technology exists, is it ethical to mandate drugs or chemical-regulatory implants which will prevent would-be actors from reaching the metabolic states which would lead to anti-social behavior?
Yes.
Maybe not to the extent where an automated bus swerves to hit the person yelling into their phone, to prevent the person yelling into their phone from boarding the bus and getting murdered by every other passenger.
The phone should just mute itself.
But yes.
I mean if me and my rival would board the same transport, encounter each other and fight to the death, is it an imposition on me for my rival to be redirected around me, so that we don't fight?
If you can predict far enough forward, then avoiding these scenarios does not seem to be a problem, nor even an imposition.
I mean, this is basically all OH&S regulations ever mandated.
The distance ahead of prediction certainly matters.
Taking action to prevent any child being raised in a way which enduces them to become a murderer seems a lot less ethically vague than if you can arrest people an hour before they commit murder.
Though if you're capable of absolute certainty then I'm 100% okay with the latter as well.
I mostly have a problem with divorcing the term of "free will" from its long theological history regarding a supernatural ability to act without regard to natural causes.
If somehow the context allows you to use the term without that implication, then feel free I guess.
Pending a point of technological development where a database of sufficient granularity and breadth exists such that a hypothetical behavior-predicting algorithm can predict your behavior in significantly better than real-time (meaning it doesn't take 35 years of computation to determine what a 35 year old will choose from a breakfast menu) I don't think there's anything necessarily theological about an assumption of free will.
Historically, yes, the term is very much tied up in theology. But in terms of discussing morality and ethics I think we're best of just assuming people are 'free willed' in the sense that their behavior is not perfectly predictable by other humans.
If we reach a point where you can, with perfect accuracy, predict that Person A will choose X from among X, Y, and Z then ethics and morality and justice become very confusing all of a sudden.
I hold the position that free will is an unnecessary concept for moral responsibility.
I cannot say whether I have free will or not. I can say that if I murder someone and get caught, I'll be held morally responsible by society regardless.
It doesn't matter if my action of murder was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions.
This construction of the argument smuggles the conclusion in one of its premises. Murder isn't just killing, it's killing that's been determined to have been deliberate and wrongful. Put another way, it does matter if your action was made with a free will or not; without free will, someone just died and you were involved.
I mostly have a problem with divorcing the term of "free will" from its long theological history regarding a supernatural ability to act without regard to natural causes.
If somehow the context allows you to use the term without that implication, then feel free I guess.
Pending a point of technological development where a database of sufficient granularity and breadth exists such that a hypothetical behavior-predicting algorithm can predict your behavior in significantly better than real-time (meaning it doesn't take 35 years of computation to determine what a 35 year old will choose from a breakfast menu) I don't think there's anything necessarily theological about an assumption of free will.
Historically, yes, the term is very much tied up in theology. But in terms of discussing morality and ethics I think we're best of just assuming people are 'free willed' in the sense that their behavior is not perfectly predictable by other humans.
If we reach a point where you can, with perfect accuracy, predict that Person A will choose X from among X, Y, and Z then ethics and morality and justice become very confusing all of a sudden.
I hold the position that free will is an unnecessary concept for moral responsibility.
I cannot say whether I have free will or not. I can say that if I murder someone and get caught, I'll be held morally responsible by society regardless.
It doesn't matter if my action of murder was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions.
This construction of the argument smuggles the conclusion in one of its premises. Murder isn't just killing, it's killing that's been determined to have been deliberate and wrongful. Put another way, it does matter if your action was made with a free will or not; without free will, someone just died and you were involved.
That's a nitpick and irrelevant to his point. You can replace "murder" with any socially undesirable and/or immoral act.
"It doesn't matter if my undesirable act was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions."
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I mostly have a problem with divorcing the term of "free will" from its long theological history regarding a supernatural ability to act without regard to natural causes.
If somehow the context allows you to use the term without that implication, then feel free I guess.
Pending a point of technological development where a database of sufficient granularity and breadth exists such that a hypothetical behavior-predicting algorithm can predict your behavior in significantly better than real-time (meaning it doesn't take 35 years of computation to determine what a 35 year old will choose from a breakfast menu) I don't think there's anything necessarily theological about an assumption of free will.
Historically, yes, the term is very much tied up in theology. But in terms of discussing morality and ethics I think we're best of just assuming people are 'free willed' in the sense that their behavior is not perfectly predictable by other humans.
If we reach a point where you can, with perfect accuracy, predict that Person A will choose X from among X, Y, and Z then ethics and morality and justice become very confusing all of a sudden.
I hold the position that free will is an unnecessary concept for moral responsibility.
I cannot say whether I have free will or not. I can say that if I murder someone and get caught, I'll be held morally responsible by society regardless.
It doesn't matter if my action of murder was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions.
This construction of the argument smuggles the conclusion in one of its premises. Murder isn't just killing, it's killing that's been determined to have been deliberate and wrongful. Put another way, it does matter if your action was made with a free will or not; without free will, someone just died and you were involved.
That's a nitpick and irrelevant to his point. You can replace "murder" with any socially undesirable and/or immoral act.
"It doesn't matter if my undesirable act was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions."
But when you put it that way it seems obviously wrong to me. Of course it matters if your undesirable act was made with free will. If you were just the unfortunate 80 kg mass that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, then it is in the best interest of society to not focus on you and to focus instead on making sure there isn't that hazard involving an 80 kg mass.
I mostly have a problem with divorcing the term of "free will" from its long theological history regarding a supernatural ability to act without regard to natural causes.
If somehow the context allows you to use the term without that implication, then feel free I guess.
Pending a point of technological development where a database of sufficient granularity and breadth exists such that a hypothetical behavior-predicting algorithm can predict your behavior in significantly better than real-time (meaning it doesn't take 35 years of computation to determine what a 35 year old will choose from a breakfast menu) I don't think there's anything necessarily theological about an assumption of free will.
Historically, yes, the term is very much tied up in theology. But in terms of discussing morality and ethics I think we're best of just assuming people are 'free willed' in the sense that their behavior is not perfectly predictable by other humans.
If we reach a point where you can, with perfect accuracy, predict that Person A will choose X from among X, Y, and Z then ethics and morality and justice become very confusing all of a sudden.
I hold the position that free will is an unnecessary concept for moral responsibility.
I cannot say whether I have free will or not. I can say that if I murder someone and get caught, I'll be held morally responsible by society regardless.
It doesn't matter if my action of murder was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions.
This construction of the argument smuggles the conclusion in one of its premises. Murder isn't just killing, it's killing that's been determined to have been deliberate and wrongful. Put another way, it does matter if your action was made with a free will or not; without free will, someone just died and you were involved.
That's a nitpick and irrelevant to his point. You can replace "murder" with any socially undesirable and/or immoral act.
"It doesn't matter if my undesirable act was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions."
But when you put it that way it seems obviously wrong to me. Of course it matters if your undesirable act was made with free will. If you were just the unfortunate 80 kg mass that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, then it is in the best interest of society to not focus on you and to focus instead on making sure there isn't that hazard involving an 80 kg mass.
That's pretty severely reductionist.
Preventing any hazards involving humans is impossible while also maintaining a functioning society.
Man, why is this of all debates the thing to decide to get kind of shitty about?
I'd really like it if folks in this thread could treat it as the pleasant, collegial, retro-D&D diversion that it is, a welcome break from the news cycle and the ongoing end of civilization. It is not a fucking battlefield and it is not worth fixing the bayonets and charging the enemy over.
Fuck i'm not even gonna lie i think i just had a straight up fuckin existential crisis in the thread y'all. I'm sorry. I hadn't really ever gone down the hard determinism conclusion train to like its very end points too much before, definitely not in a serious context. Like they explained the concepts to me when I was a kid. It just hadn't been a thing that is important enough to think about in depth cause I got all these bills to pay. Apparently getting on that train takes me in particular to "the only option is to not play the game" territory. I probably shouldn't have come here.
I mostly have a problem with divorcing the term of "free will" from its long theological history regarding a supernatural ability to act without regard to natural causes.
If somehow the context allows you to use the term without that implication, then feel free I guess.
Pending a point of technological development where a database of sufficient granularity and breadth exists such that a hypothetical behavior-predicting algorithm can predict your behavior in significantly better than real-time (meaning it doesn't take 35 years of computation to determine what a 35 year old will choose from a breakfast menu) I don't think there's anything necessarily theological about an assumption of free will.
Historically, yes, the term is very much tied up in theology. But in terms of discussing morality and ethics I think we're best of just assuming people are 'free willed' in the sense that their behavior is not perfectly predictable by other humans.
If we reach a point where you can, with perfect accuracy, predict that Person A will choose X from among X, Y, and Z then ethics and morality and justice become very confusing all of a sudden.
I hold the position that free will is an unnecessary concept for moral responsibility.
I cannot say whether I have free will or not. I can say that if I murder someone and get caught, I'll be held morally responsible by society regardless.
It doesn't matter if my action of murder was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions.
This construction of the argument smuggles the conclusion in one of its premises. Murder isn't just killing, it's killing that's been determined to have been deliberate and wrongful. Put another way, it does matter if your action was made with a free will or not; without free will, someone just died and you were involved.
That's a nitpick and irrelevant to his point. You can replace "murder" with any socially undesirable and/or immoral act.
"It doesn't matter if my undesirable act was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions."
But when you put it that way it seems obviously wrong to me. Of course it matters if your undesirable act was made with free will. If you were just the unfortunate 80 kg mass that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, then it is in the best interest of society to not focus on you and to focus instead on making sure there isn't that hazard involving an 80 kg mass.
That's pretty severely reductionist.
Preventing any hazards involving humans is impossible while also maintaining a functioning society.
Whoa now, all I said is that if someone's role in a process is just that of a dead weight, then they're not responsible for what happened, the problem is with that hazard, not that person.
I mostly have a problem with divorcing the term of "free will" from its long theological history regarding a supernatural ability to act without regard to natural causes.
If somehow the context allows you to use the term without that implication, then feel free I guess.
Pending a point of technological development where a database of sufficient granularity and breadth exists such that a hypothetical behavior-predicting algorithm can predict your behavior in significantly better than real-time (meaning it doesn't take 35 years of computation to determine what a 35 year old will choose from a breakfast menu) I don't think there's anything necessarily theological about an assumption of free will.
Historically, yes, the term is very much tied up in theology. But in terms of discussing morality and ethics I think we're best of just assuming people are 'free willed' in the sense that their behavior is not perfectly predictable by other humans.
If we reach a point where you can, with perfect accuracy, predict that Person A will choose X from among X, Y, and Z then ethics and morality and justice become very confusing all of a sudden.
I hold the position that free will is an unnecessary concept for moral responsibility.
I cannot say whether I have free will or not. I can say that if I murder someone and get caught, I'll be held morally responsible by society regardless.
It doesn't matter if my action of murder was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions.
This construction of the argument smuggles the conclusion in one of its premises. Murder isn't just killing, it's killing that's been determined to have been deliberate and wrongful. Put another way, it does matter if your action was made with a free will or not; without free will, someone just died and you were involved.
That's a nitpick and irrelevant to his point. You can replace "murder" with any socially undesirable and/or immoral act.
"It doesn't matter if my undesirable act was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions."
But when you put it that way it seems obviously wrong to me. Of course it matters if your undesirable act was made with free will. If you were just the unfortunate 80 kg mass that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, then it is in the best interest of society to not focus on you and to focus instead on making sure there isn't that hazard involving an 80 kg mass.
That's pretty severely reductionist.
Preventing any hazards involving humans is impossible while also maintaining a functioning society.
Whoa now, all I said is that if someone's role in a process is just that of a dead weight, then they're not responsible for what happened, the problem is with that hazard, not that person.
"just that of a dead weight" is the reductionist part.
The fact that your actions are predetermined by your physiology and your personal history is pretty far afield from "I'm a piano and someone dropped me out of a window and I hit that guy because gravity".
I mostly have a problem with divorcing the term of "free will" from its long theological history regarding a supernatural ability to act without regard to natural causes.
If somehow the context allows you to use the term without that implication, then feel free I guess.
Pending a point of technological development where a database of sufficient granularity and breadth exists such that a hypothetical behavior-predicting algorithm can predict your behavior in significantly better than real-time (meaning it doesn't take 35 years of computation to determine what a 35 year old will choose from a breakfast menu) I don't think there's anything necessarily theological about an assumption of free will.
Historically, yes, the term is very much tied up in theology. But in terms of discussing morality and ethics I think we're best of just assuming people are 'free willed' in the sense that their behavior is not perfectly predictable by other humans.
If we reach a point where you can, with perfect accuracy, predict that Person A will choose X from among X, Y, and Z then ethics and morality and justice become very confusing all of a sudden.
I hold the position that free will is an unnecessary concept for moral responsibility.
I cannot say whether I have free will or not. I can say that if I murder someone and get caught, I'll be held morally responsible by society regardless.
It doesn't matter if my action of murder was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions.
This construction of the argument smuggles the conclusion in one of its premises. Murder isn't just killing, it's killing that's been determined to have been deliberate and wrongful. Put another way, it does matter if your action was made with a free will or not; without free will, someone just died and you were involved.
That's a nitpick and irrelevant to his point. You can replace "murder" with any socially undesirable and/or immoral act.
"It doesn't matter if my undesirable act was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions."
But when you put it that way it seems obviously wrong to me. Of course it matters if your undesirable act was made with free will. If you were just the unfortunate 80 kg mass that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, then it is in the best interest of society to not focus on you and to focus instead on making sure there isn't that hazard involving an 80 kg mass.
That's pretty severely reductionist.
Preventing any hazards involving humans is impossible while also maintaining a functioning society.
Whoa now, all I said is that if someone's role in a process is just that of a dead weight, then they're not responsible for what happened, the problem is with that hazard, not that person.
"just that of a dead weight" is the reductionist part.
The fact that your actions are predetermined by your physiology and your personal history is pretty far afield from "I'm a piano and someone dropped me out of a window and I hit that guy because gravity".
Oh, for sure, I meant it as an extreme example to illustrate the range of roles a person could play in a chain of events, anything from dead weight (and here's the part I didn't say, so my bad that my meaning wasn't clear) to the architect of the chain of events. And where someone's involvement in a chain of events falls on that spectrum determines how responsible they are.
Man, why is this of all debates the thing to decide to get kind of shitty about?
I'd really like it if folks in this thread could treat it as the pleasant, collegial, retro-D&D diversion that it is, a welcome break from the news cycle and the ongoing end of civilization. It is not a fucking battlefield and it is not worth fixing the bayonets and charging the enemy over.
Fuck i'm not even gonna lie i think i just had a straight up fuckin existential crisis in the thread y'all. I'm sorry. I hadn't really ever gone down the hard determinism conclusion train to like its very end points too much before, definitely not in a serious context. Like they explained the concepts to me when I was a kid. It just hadn't been a thing that is important enough to think about in depth cause I got all these bills to pay. Apparently getting on that train takes me in particular to "the only option is to not play the game" territory. I probably shouldn't have come here.
I question how much QM is really relevant on the organism decision scale.
For example: Nuclear decay is highly unpredictable on a per atom basis but get a big lump together and it's so predictable it's the best clock we have. So s very random system
Not true, an atomic clock does not measure nuclear decay, it measures the wavelength/period of electromagnetic radiation which excites a certain transition inside an atom. No nuclear decay involved, and the transitions selected are chosen because their quantum broadening is very narrow.
Nuclear decays even from a large lump of material are still completely random even if the particle flux begins to become consistent. It will always remain impossible to predict the exact direction of particle exits, the maximum and minimum flux at small areas, and the exact elements which will decay.
QM creates relevant randomness all the time. You just don't realize that it it is doing its job.
I mostly have a problem with divorcing the term of "free will" from its long theological history regarding a supernatural ability to act without regard to natural causes.
If somehow the context allows you to use the term without that implication, then feel free I guess.
Pending a point of technological development where a database of sufficient granularity and breadth exists such that a hypothetical behavior-predicting algorithm can predict your behavior in significantly better than real-time (meaning it doesn't take 35 years of computation to determine what a 35 year old will choose from a breakfast menu) I don't think there's anything necessarily theological about an assumption of free will.
Historically, yes, the term is very much tied up in theology. But in terms of discussing morality and ethics I think we're best of just assuming people are 'free willed' in the sense that their behavior is not perfectly predictable by other humans.
If we reach a point where you can, with perfect accuracy, predict that Person A will choose X from among X, Y, and Z then ethics and morality and justice become very confusing all of a sudden.
I hold the position that free will is an unnecessary concept for moral responsibility.
I cannot say whether I have free will or not. I can say that if I murder someone and get caught, I'll be held morally responsible by society regardless.
It doesn't matter if my action of murder was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions.
I agree with you. I think it gets confusing, though, because of secondary questions.
If a computer exists which can accurately predict who will commit murder tomorrow, is it ethical to arrest them ahead of time? And what sort of punishment is ethical in the case of a person who definitely would have but did not actually commit a crime?
If crime is predictable, does that capability morally behoove a society to take active measures to remediate the causes of crime?
Presumably if anti-social acts can be perfectly predicted that means those actions are caused by a combination of physiological states and personal experiences. Should a moral society take measures to prevent the types of lifetime experiences which lead to crime? If the technology exists, is it ethical to mandate drugs or chemical-regulatory implants which will prevent would-be actors from reaching the metabolic states which would lead to anti-social behavior?
One of the beautiful things about predicting things is that you often then have the tools to figure out how to change the outcome.
Instead of pre-punishing someone, you actually figure out WHY they were about to do something and help them to not be that way using the least-invasive means possible, as resources allow, so that you don't have to actually punish them.
If I know that a drunk friend is going to maybe kill someone if they get in their car, I take their keys until they sober up instead of calling the cops on them.
I mostly have a problem with divorcing the term of "free will" from its long theological history regarding a supernatural ability to act without regard to natural causes.
If somehow the context allows you to use the term without that implication, then feel free I guess.
Pending a point of technological development where a database of sufficient granularity and breadth exists such that a hypothetical behavior-predicting algorithm can predict your behavior in significantly better than real-time (meaning it doesn't take 35 years of computation to determine what a 35 year old will choose from a breakfast menu) I don't think there's anything necessarily theological about an assumption of free will.
Historically, yes, the term is very much tied up in theology. But in terms of discussing morality and ethics I think we're best of just assuming people are 'free willed' in the sense that their behavior is not perfectly predictable by other humans.
If we reach a point where you can, with perfect accuracy, predict that Person A will choose X from among X, Y, and Z then ethics and morality and justice become very confusing all of a sudden.
I hold the position that free will is an unnecessary concept for moral responsibility.
I cannot say whether I have free will or not. I can say that if I murder someone and get caught, I'll be held morally responsible by society regardless.
It doesn't matter if my action of murder was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions.
I agree with you. I think it gets confusing, though, because of secondary questions.
If a computer exists which can accurately predict who will commit murder tomorrow, is it ethical to arrest them ahead of time? And what sort of punishment is ethical in the case of a person who definitely would have but did not actually commit a crime?
If crime is predictable, does that capability morally behoove a society to take active measures to remediate the causes of crime?
Presumably if anti-social acts can be perfectly predicted that means those actions are caused by a combination of physiological states and personal experiences. Should a moral society take measures to prevent the types of lifetime experiences which lead to crime? If the technology exists, is it ethical to mandate drugs or chemical-regulatory implants which will prevent would-be actors from reaching the metabolic states which would lead to anti-social behavior?
One of the beautiful things about predicting things is that you often then have the tools to figure out how to change the outcome.
Instead of pre-punishing someone, you actually figure out WHY they were about to do something and help them to not be that way using the least-invasive means possible, as resources allow, so that you don't have to actually punish them.
If I know that a drunk friend is going to maybe kill someone if they get in their car, I take their keys until they sober up instead of calling the cops on them.
Right. Which, at a societal level, becomes "is it ethical for the government to say to an individual, 'you can not drink alcohol because you will eventually kill someone drunk driving'?"
I think it probably does but I belive there to be a large number of people out there who disagree.
I mostly have a problem with divorcing the term of "free will" from its long theological history regarding a supernatural ability to act without regard to natural causes.
If somehow the context allows you to use the term without that implication, then feel free I guess.
Pending a point of technological development where a database of sufficient granularity and breadth exists such that a hypothetical behavior-predicting algorithm can predict your behavior in significantly better than real-time (meaning it doesn't take 35 years of computation to determine what a 35 year old will choose from a breakfast menu) I don't think there's anything necessarily theological about an assumption of free will.
Historically, yes, the term is very much tied up in theology. But in terms of discussing morality and ethics I think we're best of just assuming people are 'free willed' in the sense that their behavior is not perfectly predictable by other humans.
If we reach a point where you can, with perfect accuracy, predict that Person A will choose X from among X, Y, and Z then ethics and morality and justice become very confusing all of a sudden.
I hold the position that free will is an unnecessary concept for moral responsibility.
I cannot say whether I have free will or not. I can say that if I murder someone and get caught, I'll be held morally responsible by society regardless.
It doesn't matter if my action of murder was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions.
I agree with you. I think it gets confusing, though, because of secondary questions.
If a computer exists which can accurately predict who will commit murder tomorrow, is it ethical to arrest them ahead of time? And what sort of punishment is ethical in the case of a person who definitely would have but did not actually commit a crime?
If crime is predictable, does that capability morally behoove a society to take active measures to remediate the causes of crime?
Presumably if anti-social acts can be perfectly predicted that means those actions are caused by a combination of physiological states and personal experiences. Should a moral society take measures to prevent the types of lifetime experiences which lead to crime? If the technology exists, is it ethical to mandate drugs or chemical-regulatory implants which will prevent would-be actors from reaching the metabolic states which would lead to anti-social behavior?
One of the beautiful things about predicting things is that you often then have the tools to figure out how to change the outcome.
Instead of pre-punishing someone, you actually figure out WHY they were about to do something and help them to not be that way using the least-invasive means possible, as resources allow, so that you don't have to actually punish them.
If I know that a drunk friend is going to maybe kill someone if they get in their car, I take their keys until they sober up instead of calling the cops on them.
Right. Which, at a societal level, becomes "is it ethical for the government to say to an individual, 'you can not drink alcohol because you will eventually kill someone drunk driving'?"
I think it probably does but I belive there to be a large number of people out there who disagree.
We already do that. A lot. We're just clumsy about it from lack of precog machines. You can lose your license or get banned from entering Canada if you get DUIs. Breathalyzers etc are used to predict risk.
If we could narrow harm down to more specific moments we could get a better balance of safety vs. freedom. Imagine it you could tell whether or not taking a given dose of a drug would screw up your life or not!
Man, why is this of all debates the thing to decide to get kind of shitty about?
I'd really like it if folks in this thread could treat it as the pleasant, collegial, retro-D&D diversion that it is, a welcome break from the news cycle and the ongoing end of civilization. It is not a fucking battlefield and it is not worth fixing the bayonets and charging the enemy over.
Fuck i'm not even gonna lie i think i just had a straight up fuckin existential crisis in the thread y'all. I'm sorry. I hadn't really ever gone down the hard determinism conclusion train to like its very end points too much before, definitely not in a serious context. Like they explained the concepts to me when I was a kid. It just hadn't been a thing that is important enough to think about in depth cause I got all these bills to pay. Apparently getting on that train takes me in particular to "the only option is to not play the game" territory. I probably shouldn't have come here.
Man, why is this of all debates the thing to decide to get kind of shitty about?
I'd really like it if folks in this thread could treat it as the pleasant, collegial, retro-D&D diversion that it is, a welcome break from the news cycle and the ongoing end of civilization. It is not a fucking battlefield and it is not worth fixing the bayonets and charging the enemy over.
Fuck i'm not even gonna lie i think i just had a straight up fuckin existential crisis in the thread y'all. I'm sorry. I hadn't really ever gone down the hard determinism conclusion train to like its very end points too much before, definitely not in a serious context. Like they explained the concepts to me when I was a kid. It just hadn't been a thing that is important enough to think about in depth cause I got all these bills to pay. Apparently getting on that train takes me in particular to "the only option is to not play the game" territory. I probably shouldn't have come here.
I apologize for getting shitty there
I am real sorry that happened y'all.
We are told, from an early age, by our parents, by our teachers, by our churches (especially by our churches), by the media in general, that we are special. That we, humans, have a special place in the universe, that our special nature elevates us above rocks, plants and even other animals.
Having these notions challenged can be a difficult thing to get swallow, and quite a lot of people will, if directly confronted with it, just put their (metaphorical) fingers in their ears and go "LALALALA, i can't hear you".
No matter where you end up on the question in the end, it is a sign of maturity to be able to realize that your initial reaction was not the best possible one. And it's hurdle quite a lot of people seem unable to jump over.
People talk about determinism versus free will as if it hadn't already been decided ages ago.
If you wanna see the deterministic world view in full swing look no further than advertising and the billions of dollars every year that gets poured into making you think you need a new iPhone.
Wake up, sheeple! It's all a system of control!
And my mother says I am more special than a rock.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Man, why is this of all debates the thing to decide to get kind of shitty about?
I'd really like it if folks in this thread could treat it as the pleasant, collegial, retro-D&D diversion that it is, a welcome break from the news cycle and the ongoing end of civilization. It is not a fucking battlefield and it is not worth fixing the bayonets and charging the enemy over.
Fuck i'm not even gonna lie i think i just had a straight up fuckin existential crisis in the thread y'all. I'm sorry. I hadn't really ever gone down the hard determinism conclusion train to like its very end points too much before, definitely not in a serious context. Like they explained the concepts to me when I was a kid. It just hadn't been a thing that is important enough to think about in depth cause I got all these bills to pay. Apparently getting on that train takes me in particular to "the only option is to not play the game" territory. I probably shouldn't have come here.
I apologize for getting shitty there
I am real sorry that happened y'all.
If you haven’t then I suggest reading the the Nagel paper I linked. It is specifically a reaction against existential crises caused by reductionist assessments of the universe. It essentially shows that the response to such things is “so what, those ideas weren’t doing anything for us anyway, we lose nothing when we realise that things are deterministic, finite, without divine purpose etc.”
Man, why is this of all debates the thing to decide to get kind of shitty about?
I'd really like it if folks in this thread could treat it as the pleasant, collegial, retro-D&D diversion that it is, a welcome break from the news cycle and the ongoing end of civilization. It is not a fucking battlefield and it is not worth fixing the bayonets and charging the enemy over.
Fuck i'm not even gonna lie i think i just had a straight up fuckin existential crisis in the thread y'all. I'm sorry. I hadn't really ever gone down the hard determinism conclusion train to like its very end points too much before, definitely not in a serious context. Like they explained the concepts to me when I was a kid. It just hadn't been a thing that is important enough to think about in depth cause I got all these bills to pay. Apparently getting on that train takes me in particular to "the only option is to not play the game" territory. I probably shouldn't have come here.
I apologize for getting shitty there
I am real sorry that happened y'all.
If you haven’t then I suggest reading the the Nagel paper I linked. It is specifically a reaction against existential crises caused by reductionist assessments of the universe. It essentially shows that the response to such things is “so what, those ideas weren’t doing anything for us anyway, we lose nothing when we realise that things are deterministic, finite, without divine purpose etc.”
...
The paper is based off a false equivalence as far as I could tell.
It starts off with, the chain of consequences is finite so there's no value in any of them.
And then moves on to, anything outside our experience only extends that chain and so is meaningless for the same reason.
Which rather disregards that if the chain is infinite in the second case, then the individual links of the entire chain can have meaning, or even the act of preservation of the chain itself.
That said, the right hand side of my brain is now curled up and crying in the corner.
So perhaps building axiomatically founded logical constructs doesn't imbue meaning per se, but it would seem to be better than nothing.
Like i'm rolling it over and i'm just not seeing how this being the core truth ends at anything but "murder's fine" it's equivalent to breaking a bottle.
Like it just seems like y'all are trying to say that humans both aren't special but are.
Humans can treat each other as being special without actually being special.
Humans feel an emotional connection to each other that is biologically wired to make us feel that certain people are special to us, and that our own self is special. A mother believes her child to be special above and beyond any other child, but that child remains a human child.
Removing the notion of free will invalidates a lot of philosophical waxing about what makes humans special over other creatures, but it does not invalidate our emotional need to feel our uniqueness and individuality.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Humans can treat each other as being special without actually being special.
Humans feel an emotional connection to each other that is biologically wired to make us feel that certain people are special to us, and that our own self is special. A mother believes her child to be special above and beyond any other child, but that child remains a human child.
Removing the notion of free will invalidates a lot of philosophical waxing about what makes humans special over other creatures, but it does not invalidate our emotional need to feel our uniqueness and individuality.
Why?
Like how does it not invalidate them? Especially if say you don't generally feel those similar connections, and often find the extent to which folks say they exist seems at best... performatively exaggerated.
Humans can treat each other as being special without actually being special.
Humans feel an emotional connection to each other that is biologically wired to make us feel that certain people are special to us, and that our own self is special. A mother believes her child to be special above and beyond any other child, but that child remains a human child.
Removing the notion of free will invalidates a lot of philosophical waxing about what makes humans special over other creatures, but it does not invalidate our emotional need to feel our uniqueness and individuality.
Why?
Because it is who we are.
Because it is how we evolved.
Because it works.
Humans can treat each other as being special without actually being special.
Humans feel an emotional connection to each other that is biologically wired to make us feel that certain people are special to us, and that our own self is special. A mother believes her child to be special above and beyond any other child, but that child remains a human child.
Removing the notion of free will invalidates a lot of philosophical waxing about what makes humans special over other creatures, but it does not invalidate our emotional need to feel our uniqueness and individuality.
Why?
Like how does it not invalidate them? Especially if say you don't generally feel those similar connections, and often find the extent to which folks say they exist seems at best... performatively exaggerated.
Because feelings in general must be considered as they are an essential part of human nature.
Anyone who tries to dismiss another human being's emotional experience as being invalid without trying to accommodate or understand that feeling is engaging in a form of erasure (transgender erasure comes to mind for me, though I'm not sure if "erasure" is the right word to use here).
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Humans can treat each other as being special without actually being special.
Humans feel an emotional connection to each other that is biologically wired to make us feel that certain people are special to us, and that our own self is special. A mother believes her child to be special above and beyond any other child, but that child remains a human child.
Removing the notion of free will invalidates a lot of philosophical waxing about what makes humans special over other creatures, but it does not invalidate our emotional need to feel our uniqueness and individuality.
Why?
Like how does it not invalidate them? Especially if say you don't generally feel those similar connections, and often find the extent to which folks say they exist seems at best... performatively exaggerated.
Because feelings in general must be considered as they are an essential part of human nature.
Anyone who tries to dismiss another human being's emotional experience as being invalid without trying to accommodate or understand that feeling is engaging in a form of erasure (transgender erasure comes to mind for me, though I'm not sure if "erasure" is the right word to use here).
I mean yeah that's what i'm saying it isn't even exclusionary erasure it's universal erasure dismissing all feeling as inanimate. Literally just hyper complex dominoes.
That's like the seeming end point this ideology runs to.
Humans can treat each other as being special without actually being special.
Humans feel an emotional connection to each other that is biologically wired to make us feel that certain people are special to us, and that our own self is special. A mother believes her child to be special above and beyond any other child, but that child remains a human child.
Removing the notion of free will invalidates a lot of philosophical waxing about what makes humans special over other creatures, but it does not invalidate our emotional need to feel our uniqueness and individuality.
Why?
Like how does it not invalidate them? Especially if say you don't generally feel those similar connections, and often find the extent to which folks say they exist seems at best... performatively exaggerated.
Because feelings in general must be considered as they are an essential part of human nature.
Anyone who tries to dismiss another human being's emotional experience as being invalid without trying to accommodate or understand that feeling is engaging in a form of erasure (transgender erasure comes to mind for me, though I'm not sure if "erasure" is the right word to use here).
I mean yeah that's what i'm saying it isn't even exclusionary erasure it's universal erasure dismissing all feeling as inanimate. Literally just hyper complex dominoes.
That's like the seeming end point this ideology runs to.
Why are feelings and actions determined by free will somehow more valid than feelings and actions determined by individual biology to you?
I think my feelings and actions have meaning to me as an emotional, experiential being regardless of whether I have free will or not. Free will is not required for me to be a being unique from others.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Sleep, you are the one insisting that feelings don't matter in a causal universe. I've previously tried to engage with you on it and you've ignored me.
Something that resonated with me with regards to this was Discworld's Night Watch.
There exists no universe where Vimes as he is would ever hurt his wife. So who Vimes is now matters, as his uniqueness defines the field of possibilities over which the multiverse can enumerate the possibilities of his existence.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Humans can treat each other as being special without actually being special.
Humans feel an emotional connection to each other that is biologically wired to make us feel that certain people are special to us, and that our own self is special. A mother believes her child to be special above and beyond any other child, but that child remains a human child.
Removing the notion of free will invalidates a lot of philosophical waxing about what makes humans special over other creatures, but it does not invalidate our emotional need to feel our uniqueness and individuality.
Why?
Like how does it not invalidate them? Especially if say you don't generally feel those similar connections, and often find the extent to which folks say they exist seems at best... performatively exaggerated.
Because feelings in general must be considered as they are an essential part of human nature.
Anyone who tries to dismiss another human being's emotional experience as being invalid without trying to accommodate or understand that feeling is engaging in a form of erasure (transgender erasure comes to mind for me, though I'm not sure if "erasure" is the right word to use here).
I mean yeah that's what i'm saying it isn't even exclusionary erasure it's universal erasure dismissing all feeling as inanimate. Literally just hyper complex dominoes.
That's like the seeming end point this ideology runs to.
The thing with accepting a strictly material universe is that everything you truly experience is still there, it just needs a few edits to the definition, like when we moved from alchemy to chemistry.
"Animate" remains a valid description, it's just not endowed with some beyond-material properties.
Your feelings and sense of morality are still real, but they operate differently than you thought they did.
Your choices are still choices, but instead of being self-contained they're the result of all of history and literally all that you are and all that you have experienced up to that moment. When you choose to love someone, all of space-time is with you!
Determinism, materialism, etc. mostly just unite us with the larger universe and each other, and give us new tools to change the world.
Sleep, you are the one insisting that feelings don't matter in a causal universe. I've previously tried to engage with you on it and you've ignored me.
No it's that the example you give, a mother's love for its child, is just a bunch of super complex dominoes with nothing special about it.
That's literally just the end point determinism runs to.
If i accept determinism as indisputable truth the only end point it runs to is that no life matters and yes universal erasure is fine. Like I said this train goes straight to "the only option is to not play the game" territory. I'm really not seeing how it ends in anything but that. Other than like, "lol cause humans are dumb and are forced to feel stuff".
I guess I'm going to stick with a god is in the gaps there's something here we don't actually grasp and can't actually predict or determine. It might not be a giant gap, but there's definitely something there that can't yet be replicated or totally understood. Like to my understanding we barely even grasp why humans frickin sleep, and you're trying to tell me you've got the truth of how absolutely everything in the universe works cause you've got some newtonian physics?
I think I'm gonna deny the truth you're peddling here just like I did when Catholicism tried to sell me a bullshit truth they could never actually prove out. I'll file this right under weird ways folks try to fill in the gaps in human cognition and universal understanding like psychics and jesus, and go back to like enjoying shit and believing in an inherent sanctity of life. Which is a thing I can do because I'm a creature of will, and without hard undeniable proof otherwise i'm gonna go right on thinking determinism is like every other philosophical truth I've had someone try to pitch me... useless. At least fuckin Catholicism came with a few nuggets to steal like "treat everyone the way you want to be treated". Determinism seemingly just has, "Everything is little more than inanimate objects, Why care about anything? Might as well be dead... there's basically no difference between your living corpse and your dead corpse except you don't have to be cognizant of being an inanimate object victim to the unstoppable torturous forces of the universe anymore".
If it is a philosophical truth that can never be acted upon, then what's the fuckin point of it?
like seriously every time you guys try to justify morality or meaning the first step is to ignore this philisophical truth accept the fabricated meaning pressed upon me and just keep laughing along.
Posts
Only if that person has no grasp on the context. If they don’t then it’s entirely possible they also ask what a cost free final testament has to do with anything.
If somehow the context allows you to use the term without that implication, then feel free I guess.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Pending a point of technological development where a database of sufficient granularity and breadth exists such that a hypothetical behavior-predicting algorithm can predict your behavior in significantly better than real-time (meaning it doesn't take 35 years of computation to determine what a 35 year old will choose from a breakfast menu) I don't think there's anything necessarily theological about an assumption of free will.
Historically, yes, the term is very much tied up in theology. But in terms of discussing morality and ethics I think we're best of just assuming people are 'free willed' in the sense that their behavior is not perfectly predictable by other humans.
If we reach a point where you can, with perfect accuracy, predict that Person A will choose X from among X, Y, and Z then ethics and morality and justice become very confusing all of a sudden.
I hold the position that free will is an unnecessary concept for moral responsibility.
I cannot say whether I have free will or not. I can say that if I murder someone and get caught, I'll be held morally responsible by society regardless.
It doesn't matter if my action of murder was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I agree with you. I think it gets confusing, though, because of secondary questions.
If a computer exists which can accurately predict who will commit murder tomorrow, is it ethical to arrest them ahead of time? And what sort of punishment is ethical in the case of a person who definitely would have but did not actually commit a crime?
If crime is predictable, does that capability morally behoove a society to take active measures to remediate the causes of crime?
Presumably if anti-social acts can be perfectly predicted that means those actions are caused by a combination of physiological states and personal experiences. Should a moral society take measures to prevent the types of lifetime experiences which lead to crime? If the technology exists, is it ethical to mandate drugs or chemical-regulatory implants which will prevent would-be actors from reaching the metabolic states which would lead to anti-social behavior?
Maybe not to the extent where an automated bus swerves to hit the person yelling into their phone, to prevent the person yelling into their phone from boarding the bus and getting murdered by every other passenger.
The phone should just mute itself.
But yes.
I mean if me and my rival would board the same transport, encounter each other and fight to the death, is it an imposition on me for my rival to be redirected around me, so that we don't fight?
If you can predict far enough forward, then avoiding these scenarios does not seem to be a problem, nor even an imposition.
I mean, this is basically all OH&S regulations ever mandated.
Taking action to prevent any child being raised in a way which enduces them to become a murderer seems a lot less ethically vague than if you can arrest people an hour before they commit murder.
Though if you're capable of absolute certainty then I'm 100% okay with the latter as well.
This construction of the argument smuggles the conclusion in one of its premises. Murder isn't just killing, it's killing that's been determined to have been deliberate and wrongful. Put another way, it does matter if your action was made with a free will or not; without free will, someone just died and you were involved.
That's a nitpick and irrelevant to his point. You can replace "murder" with any socially undesirable and/or immoral act.
"It doesn't matter if my undesirable act was made with a free will or not, it is in the best interest of society to hold me responsible for my actions."
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
But when you put it that way it seems obviously wrong to me. Of course it matters if your undesirable act was made with free will. If you were just the unfortunate 80 kg mass that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, then it is in the best interest of society to not focus on you and to focus instead on making sure there isn't that hazard involving an 80 kg mass.
That's pretty severely reductionist.
Preventing any hazards involving humans is impossible while also maintaining a functioning society.
Fuck i'm not even gonna lie i think i just had a straight up fuckin existential crisis in the thread y'all. I'm sorry. I hadn't really ever gone down the hard determinism conclusion train to like its very end points too much before, definitely not in a serious context. Like they explained the concepts to me when I was a kid. It just hadn't been a thing that is important enough to think about in depth cause I got all these bills to pay. Apparently getting on that train takes me in particular to "the only option is to not play the game" territory. I probably shouldn't have come here.
I apologize for getting shitty there
I am real sorry that happened y'all.
Whoa now, all I said is that if someone's role in a process is just that of a dead weight, then they're not responsible for what happened, the problem is with that hazard, not that person.
"just that of a dead weight" is the reductionist part.
The fact that your actions are predetermined by your physiology and your personal history is pretty far afield from "I'm a piano and someone dropped me out of a window and I hit that guy because gravity".
Oh, for sure, I meant it as an extreme example to illustrate the range of roles a person could play in a chain of events, anything from dead weight (and here's the part I didn't say, so my bad that my meaning wasn't clear) to the architect of the chain of events. And where someone's involvement in a chain of events falls on that spectrum determines how responsible they are.
We're all friends here, no worries.
Not true, an atomic clock does not measure nuclear decay, it measures the wavelength/period of electromagnetic radiation which excites a certain transition inside an atom. No nuclear decay involved, and the transitions selected are chosen because their quantum broadening is very narrow.
Nuclear decays even from a large lump of material are still completely random even if the particle flux begins to become consistent. It will always remain impossible to predict the exact direction of particle exits, the maximum and minimum flux at small areas, and the exact elements which will decay.
QM creates relevant randomness all the time. You just don't realize that it it is doing its job.
One of the beautiful things about predicting things is that you often then have the tools to figure out how to change the outcome.
Instead of pre-punishing someone, you actually figure out WHY they were about to do something and help them to not be that way using the least-invasive means possible, as resources allow, so that you don't have to actually punish them.
If I know that a drunk friend is going to maybe kill someone if they get in their car, I take their keys until they sober up instead of calling the cops on them.
Right. Which, at a societal level, becomes "is it ethical for the government to say to an individual, 'you can not drink alcohol because you will eventually kill someone drunk driving'?"
I think it probably does but I belive there to be a large number of people out there who disagree.
We already do that. A lot. We're just clumsy about it from lack of precog machines. You can lose your license or get banned from entering Canada if you get DUIs. Breathalyzers etc are used to predict risk.
If we could narrow harm down to more specific moments we could get a better balance of safety vs. freedom. Imagine it you could tell whether or not taking a given dose of a drug would screw up your life or not!
Sorry for getting so terse with you, Sleep
Having these notions challenged can be a difficult thing to get swallow, and quite a lot of people will, if directly confronted with it, just put their (metaphorical) fingers in their ears and go "LALALALA, i can't hear you".
No matter where you end up on the question in the end, it is a sign of maturity to be able to realize that your initial reaction was not the best possible one. And it's hurdle quite a lot of people seem unable to jump over.
If you wanna see the deterministic world view in full swing look no further than advertising and the billions of dollars every year that gets poured into making you think you need a new iPhone.
Wake up, sheeple! It's all a system of control!
And my mother says I am more special than a rock.
If you haven’t then I suggest reading the the Nagel paper I linked. It is specifically a reaction against existential crises caused by reductionist assessments of the universe. It essentially shows that the response to such things is “so what, those ideas weren’t doing anything for us anyway, we lose nothing when we realise that things are deterministic, finite, without divine purpose etc.”
...
The paper is based off a false equivalence as far as I could tell.
It starts off with, the chain of consequences is finite so there's no value in any of them.
And then moves on to, anything outside our experience only extends that chain and so is meaningless for the same reason.
Which rather disregards that if the chain is infinite in the second case, then the individual links of the entire chain can have meaning, or even the act of preservation of the chain itself.
I think perhaps that was a reaction to section I's dissection of the arguments about the absurdity of life.
I think my reaction to the entire thing is: I still have my Math, my Math still has me, and Math cannot be absurd.
So perhaps building axiomatically founded logical constructs doesn't imbue meaning per se, but it would seem to be better than nothing.
Like it just seems like y'all are trying to say that humans both aren't special but are.
Humans feel an emotional connection to each other that is biologically wired to make us feel that certain people are special to us, and that our own self is special. A mother believes her child to be special above and beyond any other child, but that child remains a human child.
Removing the notion of free will invalidates a lot of philosophical waxing about what makes humans special over other creatures, but it does not invalidate our emotional need to feel our uniqueness and individuality.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Why?
Like how does it not invalidate them? Especially if say you don't generally feel those similar connections, and often find the extent to which folks say they exist seems at best... performatively exaggerated.
Because it is how we evolved.
Because it works.
Because feelings in general must be considered as they are an essential part of human nature.
Anyone who tries to dismiss another human being's emotional experience as being invalid without trying to accommodate or understand that feeling is engaging in a form of erasure (transgender erasure comes to mind for me, though I'm not sure if "erasure" is the right word to use here).
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I mean yeah that's what i'm saying it isn't even exclusionary erasure it's universal erasure dismissing all feeling as inanimate. Literally just hyper complex dominoes.
That's like the seeming end point this ideology runs to.
Why are feelings and actions determined by free will somehow more valid than feelings and actions determined by individual biology to you?
I think my feelings and actions have meaning to me as an emotional, experiential being regardless of whether I have free will or not. Free will is not required for me to be a being unique from others.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
The thing with accepting a strictly material universe is that everything you truly experience is still there, it just needs a few edits to the definition, like when we moved from alchemy to chemistry.
"Animate" remains a valid description, it's just not endowed with some beyond-material properties.
Your feelings and sense of morality are still real, but they operate differently than you thought they did.
Your choices are still choices, but instead of being self-contained they're the result of all of history and literally all that you are and all that you have experienced up to that moment. When you choose to love someone, all of space-time is with you!
Determinism, materialism, etc. mostly just unite us with the larger universe and each other, and give us new tools to change the world.
No it's that the example you give, a mother's love for its child, is just a bunch of super complex dominoes with nothing special about it.
That's literally just the end point determinism runs to.
If i accept determinism as indisputable truth the only end point it runs to is that no life matters and yes universal erasure is fine. Like I said this train goes straight to "the only option is to not play the game" territory. I'm really not seeing how it ends in anything but that. Other than like, "lol cause humans are dumb and are forced to feel stuff".
I guess I'm going to stick with a god is in the gaps there's something here we don't actually grasp and can't actually predict or determine. It might not be a giant gap, but there's definitely something there that can't yet be replicated or totally understood. Like to my understanding we barely even grasp why humans frickin sleep, and you're trying to tell me you've got the truth of how absolutely everything in the universe works cause you've got some newtonian physics?
I think I'm gonna deny the truth you're peddling here just like I did when Catholicism tried to sell me a bullshit truth they could never actually prove out. I'll file this right under weird ways folks try to fill in the gaps in human cognition and universal understanding like psychics and jesus, and go back to like enjoying shit and believing in an inherent sanctity of life. Which is a thing I can do because I'm a creature of will, and without hard undeniable proof otherwise i'm gonna go right on thinking determinism is like every other philosophical truth I've had someone try to pitch me... useless. At least fuckin Catholicism came with a few nuggets to steal like "treat everyone the way you want to be treated". Determinism seemingly just has, "Everything is little more than inanimate objects, Why care about anything? Might as well be dead... there's basically no difference between your living corpse and your dead corpse except you don't have to be cognizant of being an inanimate object victim to the unstoppable torturous forces of the universe anymore".
If it is a philosophical truth that can never be acted upon, then what's the fuckin point of it?
like seriously every time you guys try to justify morality or meaning the first step is to ignore this philisophical truth accept the fabricated meaning pressed upon me and just keep laughing along.