Data always seemed like a real hand-wavey, don't-think-about-it kind of "emotionless robot".
I mean he clearly has emotions.
He even expresses an emotion right there in that clip where he talks about not having emotions.
Data always seemed like a real hand-wavey, don't-think-about-it kind of "emotionless robot".
I mean he clearly has emotions.
He even expresses an emotion right there in that clip where he talks about not having emotions.
Pretty much exactly this.
He consistently insists he has no emotions but regularly exhibits them because he just doesn't conceptually grasp that a bunch of his programming seemingly mimics emotions.
Like the rest of the crew even kinda look at data and go... wait isn't that feelings?
Determinism is as much a supernatural explanation.
We are necessarily speaking over a conclusion that cannot be tested in the natural world in a concrete manner.
There need not be a soul for free will any more than you need a God for determinism.
All of those statements could be true and it would change nothing about my point, which is that you can have a workable concept of moral responsibility without relying on a version of free will that necessitates rejecting determinism.
Please describe how to build a moral responsibility if we have no free will cannot truly make our decisions and have no true control of our actions
I would rather argue that we are bodies continuously processing information about the world around us. We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us. But, being also possessed of a physical body that interacts with other physical objects, the information processing is not limited to information passively acquired, and can be a part of a causal process that brings about change. Someone can be an integral part of a certain causal process, to the extent that their absence would have meant no process. If someone is an integral part of a causal process in a way that implicates both their information processing and physical body, then they are responsible to some extent because the same things that make them who they are, are the things that made the situation turn out the way it did. What makes someone responsible on this account is the fact that who they are specifically is a cause of what happened.
I will grant we are beings of information I exist as the things that have happened a big old bank of information.
How do I possess the body? I can take no act with it, all of its acts are at the end of inevitably yes I as a being of information am processed as it happens and it leaves its records with me, but that's just it further using me without any active consent to being used I cannot necessarily consent as I do not have the will to do so.
You don't possess the body, you are the body.
How?
It is at best the vessel I as a being of information am imprisoned in/shackled to
That seems like an enormous claim to just casually assume is true, as if any other idea would be on its face absurd, somehow. Like I don't even know what it would mean to be an imprisoned being of information, versus a physical organism with a brain made out of... well, brain, that produces thoughts and emotions through physical means.
"We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us"
Willing to grant this point here
we exist as the record. If we are granting the premise I as a self aware being exist. At best that I is the record of information forced upon it by uncontrollable actions, that is processed by uncontrollable action, and is used to perform uncontrollable actions. That I is hopelessly shackled to a corporeal form it has no true control of.
Saying that we exist as the record arbitrarily excludes other parts of what we are. The record is part of what we are, but we are also the recording device, the process of recording, the process of interpreting, the interpretations, the storage system, and maybe more besides. All of those parts are necessary components of us. You keep breaking concepts by being overly reductive about what we are.
How could i be a thing i have no control over?
The recording, against my will, the process of recording, against my will, the process of interpreting, against my will, the storage... kinda also against my will,
I guess not against my will but totally without regard for my will as that will ostensibly does not exist.
That's all stuff that's happening without any other possible course.
You question "How could i be a thing i have no control over?" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why do you need to have control in order to be a thing?
Your "against my will" constructions also make no sense to me, because as far as I'm concerned, "my" connotes the things that are happening and the body they are happening to/with. If you can argue why the self is the record and nothing else, then my account may be wrong, but using my terms in a way that makes no sense isn't in and of itself an argument.
So that's again the point... where is the self?
If it's all interconnected dominoes working via physics then why does me end at my skin? The air around it is as responsible for its actions as anything else.
How exactly is the air just as responsible? What causal role does it play in what you do?
I mean you can't readily explain exactly how the causal forces work. ostensibly if we're going all the way down to the quantum level... every atom affects every atom near it.
On a more basic level
Without the air the body wouldn't be doing much would it?
Recall that responsibility, as I've described it, adheres to subjects whose information processing forms an integral part of a causal chain of events. I don't need to provide a detailed account of the causal chain that includes a description of all activity to a microscopic scale, because I don't need or want to say anything about events at that scale. Air is necessary for us to do anything other than die, but you need to do a lot more work to show how that makes air responsible for anything.
having a choice does not mean it's possible to act on that choice. Not being able to control your life does not mean that you don't have free will
What?
"You may choose A or B. But not B."
Not being able to control every aspect of your life doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have free will.
It means you have a free will heavily constrained by the context and causality it exists in.
There's still an uncertainty there that we'd call you or your free will.
*Where*?
In the part we can't perfectly replicate or predict
This is not dissimilar to the irreducible complexity argument against evolution "we cannot conceive how this thing works therefore it must be false"
And speaking of evolution, that implies that either
- free will is an evolutionary trait
- everything down to single cellular life has free will
- you have free will indistinguishable from randomness
I'm not even sure what the mechanism for the first could possibly be, the second is a much simpler test case, simulating a prokaryote instead of a brain and the third is not free will because while you could have theoretically done A or B the universe chose for you
Determinism is as much a supernatural explanation.
We are necessarily speaking over a conclusion that cannot be tested in the natural world in a concrete manner.
There need not be a soul for free will any more than you need a God for determinism.
All of those statements could be true and it would change nothing about my point, which is that you can have a workable concept of moral responsibility without relying on a version of free will that necessitates rejecting determinism.
Please describe how to build a moral responsibility if we have no free will cannot truly make our decisions and have no true control of our actions
I would rather argue that we are bodies continuously processing information about the world around us. We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us. But, being also possessed of a physical body that interacts with other physical objects, the information processing is not limited to information passively acquired, and can be a part of a causal process that brings about change. Someone can be an integral part of a certain causal process, to the extent that their absence would have meant no process. If someone is an integral part of a causal process in a way that implicates both their information processing and physical body, then they are responsible to some extent because the same things that make them who they are, are the things that made the situation turn out the way it did. What makes someone responsible on this account is the fact that who they are specifically is a cause of what happened.
I will grant we are beings of information I exist as the things that have happened a big old bank of information.
How do I possess the body? I can take no act with it, all of its acts are at the end of inevitably yes I as a being of information am processed as it happens and it leaves its records with me, but that's just it further using me without any active consent to being used I cannot necessarily consent as I do not have the will to do so.
You don't possess the body, you are the body.
How?
It is at best the vessel I as a being of information am imprisoned in/shackled to
That seems like an enormous claim to just casually assume is true, as if any other idea would be on its face absurd, somehow. Like I don't even know what it would mean to be an imprisoned being of information, versus a physical organism with a brain made out of... well, brain, that produces thoughts and emotions through physical means.
"We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us"
Willing to grant this point here
we exist as the record. If we are granting the premise I as a self aware being exist. At best that I is the record of information forced upon it by uncontrollable actions, that is processed by uncontrollable action, and is used to perform uncontrollable actions. That I is hopelessly shackled to a corporeal form it has no true control of.
Saying that we exist as the record arbitrarily excludes other parts of what we are. The record is part of what we are, but we are also the recording device, the process of recording, the process of interpreting, the interpretations, the storage system, and maybe more besides. All of those parts are necessary components of us. You keep breaking concepts by being overly reductive about what we are.
How could i be a thing i have no control over?
The recording, against my will, the process of recording, against my will, the process of interpreting, against my will, the storage... kinda also against my will,
I guess not against my will but totally without regard for my will as that will ostensibly does not exist.
That's all stuff that's happening without any other possible course.
You question "How could i be a thing i have no control over?" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why do you need to have control in order to be a thing?
Your "against my will" constructions also make no sense to me, because as far as I'm concerned, "my" connotes the things that are happening and the body they are happening to/with. If you can argue why the self is the record and nothing else, then my account may be wrong, but using my terms in a way that makes no sense isn't in and of itself an argument.
So that's again the point... where is the self?
If it's all interconnected dominoes working via physics then why does me end at my skin? The air around it is as responsible for its actions as anything else.
How exactly is the air just as responsible? What causal role does it play in what you do?
I mean you can't readily explain exactly how the causal forces work. ostensibly if we're going all the way down to the quantum level... every atom affects every atom near it.
On a more basic level
Without the air the body wouldn't be doing much would it?
Recall that responsibility, as I've described it, adheres to subjects whose information processing forms an integral part of a causal chain of events. I don't need to provide a detailed account of the causal chain that includes a description of all activity to a microscopic scale, because I don't need or want to say anything about events at that scale. Air is necessary for us to do anything other than die, but you need to do a lot more work to show how that makes air responsible for anything.
So merely because of an arbitrarily elected barrier because inspection to the myriad of causal forces is difficult. Like if my prior abuse is the causal factor for a bunch of my behavior why doesn't that take the lions share of responsibility off me? Isn't that causal force just as much me as anything else moving along my action? Is not every atom in the interim between that event now just as causal as the stuff under my skin?
having a choice does not mean it's possible to act on that choice. Not being able to control your life does not mean that you don't have free will
What?
"You may choose A or B. But not B."
Not being able to control every aspect of your life doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have free will.
It means you have a free will heavily constrained by the context and causality it exists in.
There's still an uncertainty there that we'd call you or your free will.
*Where*?
In the part we can't perfectly replicate or predict
This is not dissimilar to the irreducible complexity argument against evolution "we cannot conceive how this thing works therefore it must be false"
And speaking of evolution, that implies that either
- free will is an evolutionary trait
- everything down to single cellular life has free will
- you have free will indistinguishable from randomness
I'm not even sure what the mechanism for the first could possibly be, the second is a much simpler test case, simulating a prokaryote instead of a brain and the third is not free will because while you could have theoretically done A or B the universe chose for you
I wonder where on the DNA strand the free will is.
My understanding of the definition of 'free will' as it's being discussed here is that you can consciously make a choice which is independent of your physical body - the neuronal pathways created over a lifetime of experience and the wash of hormones and neurotransmitters.
If that's the case then how does that jive with the fact that the body begins taking actions up to 10 seconds prior to the conscious mind being aware of making the decision? doi.org/cs3rzv
Is free will exercised by the unconscious mind and you just realize that you've made a free choice after you've already made it?
My understanding of the definition of 'free will' as it's being discussed here is that you can consciously make a choice which is independent of your physical body - the neuronal pathways created over a lifetime of experience and the wash of hormones and neurotransmitters.
If that's the case then how does that jive with the fact that the body begins taking actions up to 10 seconds prior to the conscious mind being aware of making the decision? doi.org/cs3rzv
Is free will exercised by the unconscious mind and you just realize that you've made a free choice after you've already made it?
Not necessarily that you act in opposition to such factors, just that all of those factors are tragically unpredictable in their exact occurrence and result.
Maybe the will does lie in the subconscious. Full Lucid dreaming where you can change your environment would indicate as such. Though to my understanding we have no idea how dreams work.
My understanding of the definition of 'free will' as it's being discussed here is that you can consciously make a choice which is independent of your physical body - the neuronal pathways created over a lifetime of experience and the wash of hormones and neurotransmitters.
If that's the case then how does that jive with the fact that the body begins taking actions up to 10 seconds prior to the conscious mind being aware of making the decision? doi.org/cs3rzv
Is free will exercised by the unconscious mind and you just realize that you've made a free choice after you've already made it?
Not necessarily that you act in opposition to such factors, just that all of those factors are tragically unpredictable in their exact occurrence and result.
Maybe the will does lie in the subconscious. Full Lucid dreaming where you can change your environment would indicate as such.
That doesn't appear to make sense. The outcome is based on a set of knowable factors but you can't predict the outcome because...?
And I don't mean the Freudian subconscious - I mean the unconscious mind of autonomic processes which your brain handles for you independent of consciousness. Like how you jerk your hand back from a hot pot well before your conscious mind has been made aware that it's hot or how you keep on breathing all the time.
So, since we're not dealing with magic, what if your free will died, was removed, or was unable to communicate with the body due to a birth defect, accident, cancer, virus, surgery gone wrong, or whatever? Would there be any noticable difference?
Determinism is as much a supernatural explanation.
We are necessarily speaking over a conclusion that cannot be tested in the natural world in a concrete manner.
There need not be a soul for free will any more than you need a God for determinism.
All of those statements could be true and it would change nothing about my point, which is that you can have a workable concept of moral responsibility without relying on a version of free will that necessitates rejecting determinism.
Please describe how to build a moral responsibility if we have no free will cannot truly make our decisions and have no true control of our actions
I would rather argue that we are bodies continuously processing information about the world around us. We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us. But, being also possessed of a physical body that interacts with other physical objects, the information processing is not limited to information passively acquired, and can be a part of a causal process that brings about change. Someone can be an integral part of a certain causal process, to the extent that their absence would have meant no process. If someone is an integral part of a causal process in a way that implicates both their information processing and physical body, then they are responsible to some extent because the same things that make them who they are, are the things that made the situation turn out the way it did. What makes someone responsible on this account is the fact that who they are specifically is a cause of what happened.
I will grant we are beings of information I exist as the things that have happened a big old bank of information.
How do I possess the body? I can take no act with it, all of its acts are at the end of inevitably yes I as a being of information am processed as it happens and it leaves its records with me, but that's just it further using me without any active consent to being used I cannot necessarily consent as I do not have the will to do so.
You don't possess the body, you are the body.
How?
It is at best the vessel I as a being of information am imprisoned in/shackled to
That seems like an enormous claim to just casually assume is true, as if any other idea would be on its face absurd, somehow. Like I don't even know what it would mean to be an imprisoned being of information, versus a physical organism with a brain made out of... well, brain, that produces thoughts and emotions through physical means.
"We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us"
Willing to grant this point here
we exist as the record. If we are granting the premise I as a self aware being exist. At best that I is the record of information forced upon it by uncontrollable actions, that is processed by uncontrollable action, and is used to perform uncontrollable actions. That I is hopelessly shackled to a corporeal form it has no true control of.
Saying that we exist as the record arbitrarily excludes other parts of what we are. The record is part of what we are, but we are also the recording device, the process of recording, the process of interpreting, the interpretations, the storage system, and maybe more besides. All of those parts are necessary components of us. You keep breaking concepts by being overly reductive about what we are.
How could i be a thing i have no control over?
The recording, against my will, the process of recording, against my will, the process of interpreting, against my will, the storage... kinda also against my will,
I guess not against my will but totally without regard for my will as that will ostensibly does not exist.
That's all stuff that's happening without any other possible course.
You question "How could i be a thing i have no control over?" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why do you need to have control in order to be a thing?
Your "against my will" constructions also make no sense to me, because as far as I'm concerned, "my" connotes the things that are happening and the body they are happening to/with. If you can argue why the self is the record and nothing else, then my account may be wrong, but using my terms in a way that makes no sense isn't in and of itself an argument.
So that's again the point... where is the self?
If it's all interconnected dominoes working via physics then why does me end at my skin? The air around it is as responsible for its actions as anything else.
How exactly is the air just as responsible? What causal role does it play in what you do?
I mean you can't readily explain exactly how the causal forces work. ostensibly if we're going all the way down to the quantum level... every atom affects every atom near it.
On a more basic level
Without the air the body wouldn't be doing much would it?
Recall that responsibility, as I've described it, adheres to subjects whose information processing forms an integral part of a causal chain of events. I don't need to provide a detailed account of the causal chain that includes a description of all activity to a microscopic scale, because I don't need or want to say anything about events at that scale. Air is necessary for us to do anything other than die, but you need to do a lot more work to show how that makes air responsible for anything.
So merely because of an arbitrarily elected barrier because inspection to the myriad of causal forces is difficult. Like if my prior abuse is the causal factor for a bunch of my behavior why doesn't that take the lions share of responsibility off me? Isn't that causal force just as much me as anything else moving along my action? Is not every atom in the interim between that event now just as causal as the stuff under my skin?
I'll answer your questions in order. First, your experiences are part of you; how can a part of you take responsibility off you? At the same time, if you can make a compelling case that trauma is a major internal contributor to something you've done, then that should impact how we view your particular responsibility in that case.
Second, if by "that causal force" you mean something like "processing those experiences of abuse" then yes, see above. If you meant something else, then I'm not sure.
Third, no, interactions of different kinds have different kinds of results, or just more results than others. To use an exaggerated example, a supernova is more causal than the footfall of a millipede. If you want to argue for the idea that, say, if everything is caused or deterministic, then everything is the same, or something else along those lines, go right ahead.
My understanding of the definition of 'free will' as it's being discussed here is that you can consciously make a choice which is independent of your physical body - the neuronal pathways created over a lifetime of experience and the wash of hormones and neurotransmitters.
If that's the case then how does that jive with the fact that the body begins taking actions up to 10 seconds prior to the conscious mind being aware of making the decision? doi.org/cs3rzv
Is free will exercised by the unconscious mind and you just realize that you've made a free choice after you've already made it?
Not necessarily that you act in opposition to such factors, just that all of those factors are tragically unpredictable in their exact occurrence and result.
Maybe the will does lie in the subconscious. Full Lucid dreaming where you can change your environment would indicate as such.
That doesn't appear to make sense. The outcome is based on a set of knowable factors but you can't predict the outcome because...?
I'm not sure why we can't predict the outcome but we can't, we can't even totally predict the hormones and neurotransmitters exactly and definitely not uniformly for all humans.
It's definitely a god in the gaps, but determinism is as much a god for the gap as it is currently just as distinctly provable.
There's a bunch of gap there where we are expected to kinda accept that it is definitely knowable.
I'll grant it seems very much like we could know it eventually, but we currently don't, and that it is knowable isn't precisely proven out.
Yeah I guess I'm denying it simply because I want to. Guess I'm pretty willful like that.
This is literally like every other philosophy... easily ignorable.
So, since we're not dealing with magic, what if your free will died, was removed, or was unable to communicate with the body due to a birth defect, accident, cancer, virus, surgery gone wrong, or whatever? Would there be any noticable difference?
While I reject your conception of free will as a thing capable of death, etc., of course there's a noticeable difference when someone ceases to have free will. Someone in a coma or pseudocoma, or someone with some form of dementia, heck all of us when we're asleep, those are all examples of people who noticeably lose their free will.
Determinism is as much a supernatural explanation.
We are necessarily speaking over a conclusion that cannot be tested in the natural world in a concrete manner.
There need not be a soul for free will any more than you need a God for determinism.
All of those statements could be true and it would change nothing about my point, which is that you can have a workable concept of moral responsibility without relying on a version of free will that necessitates rejecting determinism.
Please describe how to build a moral responsibility if we have no free will cannot truly make our decisions and have no true control of our actions
I would rather argue that we are bodies continuously processing information about the world around us. We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us. But, being also possessed of a physical body that interacts with other physical objects, the information processing is not limited to information passively acquired, and can be a part of a causal process that brings about change. Someone can be an integral part of a certain causal process, to the extent that their absence would have meant no process. If someone is an integral part of a causal process in a way that implicates both their information processing and physical body, then they are responsible to some extent because the same things that make them who they are, are the things that made the situation turn out the way it did. What makes someone responsible on this account is the fact that who they are specifically is a cause of what happened.
I will grant we are beings of information I exist as the things that have happened a big old bank of information.
How do I possess the body? I can take no act with it, all of its acts are at the end of inevitably yes I as a being of information am processed as it happens and it leaves its records with me, but that's just it further using me without any active consent to being used I cannot necessarily consent as I do not have the will to do so.
You don't possess the body, you are the body.
How?
It is at best the vessel I as a being of information am imprisoned in/shackled to
That seems like an enormous claim to just casually assume is true, as if any other idea would be on its face absurd, somehow. Like I don't even know what it would mean to be an imprisoned being of information, versus a physical organism with a brain made out of... well, brain, that produces thoughts and emotions through physical means.
"We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us"
Willing to grant this point here
we exist as the record. If we are granting the premise I as a self aware being exist. At best that I is the record of information forced upon it by uncontrollable actions, that is processed by uncontrollable action, and is used to perform uncontrollable actions. That I is hopelessly shackled to a corporeal form it has no true control of.
Saying that we exist as the record arbitrarily excludes other parts of what we are. The record is part of what we are, but we are also the recording device, the process of recording, the process of interpreting, the interpretations, the storage system, and maybe more besides. All of those parts are necessary components of us. You keep breaking concepts by being overly reductive about what we are.
How could i be a thing i have no control over?
The recording, against my will, the process of recording, against my will, the process of interpreting, against my will, the storage... kinda also against my will,
I guess not against my will but totally without regard for my will as that will ostensibly does not exist.
That's all stuff that's happening without any other possible course.
You question "How could i be a thing i have no control over?" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why do you need to have control in order to be a thing?
Your "against my will" constructions also make no sense to me, because as far as I'm concerned, "my" connotes the things that are happening and the body they are happening to/with. If you can argue why the self is the record and nothing else, then my account may be wrong, but using my terms in a way that makes no sense isn't in and of itself an argument.
So that's again the point... where is the self?
If it's all interconnected dominoes working via physics then why does me end at my skin? The air around it is as responsible for its actions as anything else.
How exactly is the air just as responsible? What causal role does it play in what you do?
I mean you can't readily explain exactly how the causal forces work. ostensibly if we're going all the way down to the quantum level... every atom affects every atom near it.
On a more basic level
Without the air the body wouldn't be doing much would it?
Recall that responsibility, as I've described it, adheres to subjects whose information processing forms an integral part of a causal chain of events. I don't need to provide a detailed account of the causal chain that includes a description of all activity to a microscopic scale, because I don't need or want to say anything about events at that scale. Air is necessary for us to do anything other than die, but you need to do a lot more work to show how that makes air responsible for anything.
So merely because of an arbitrarily elected barrier because inspection to the myriad of causal forces is difficult. Like if my prior abuse is the causal factor for a bunch of my behavior why doesn't that take the lions share of responsibility off me? Isn't that causal force just as much me as anything else moving along my action? Is not every atom in the interim between that event now just as causal as the stuff under my skin?
I'll answer your questions in order. First, your experiences are part of you; how can a part of you take responsibility off you? At the same time, if you can make a compelling case that trauma is a major internal contributor to something you've done, then that should impact how we view your particular responsibility in that case.
Second, if by "that causal force" you mean something like "processing those experiences of abuse" then yes, see above. If you meant something else, then I'm not sure.
Third, no, interactions of different kinds have different kinds of results, or just more results than others. To use an exaggerated example, a supernova is more causal than the footfall of a millipede. If you want to argue for the idea that, say, if everything is caused or deterministic, then everything is the same, or something else along those lines, go right ahead.
Yeah that's the basic extrapolation everything's interconnected by causality and physics. Everything's a big interconnected machine. Attributing responsibility to anything in particular is flawed in the framing because, since we' can't really trace all the causal forces we can't really totally track where the eventuality came from. Fuck maybe gravitational disturbances prompted the activity being reviewed on a moral scale and we just couldn't tell. We could mistakenly attribute the action to the wrong body simply because some other external force fucked with their processing in a way we didn't see at the time, or can't currently comprehend.
Because simulation of these effects is complex and slow and we still have babby computers. Not even 10 years ago it was a big deal when folding@home could work at the millisecond level, these have to be computed at the nanosecond and picosecond scales
I don't believe in free will because I am a hardcore materialist. There is nothing but matter, end of story.
Our brains are matter. Matter has a set rule of laws on how it will act and react. The atoms in us have existed for far longer than even the earth. All a complex chain of action and reaction, slaves to cause and effect.
If humans can make a choice, where does this choice come from? What molecule, what atom, what strand of dna? Where does it exist?
I honestly don't think it does. I think we're more slaves to our biochemistry than we'd like to admit.
Determinism is as much a supernatural explanation.
We are necessarily speaking over a conclusion that cannot be tested in the natural world in a concrete manner.
There need not be a soul for free will any more than you need a God for determinism.
All of those statements could be true and it would change nothing about my point, which is that you can have a workable concept of moral responsibility without relying on a version of free will that necessitates rejecting determinism.
Please describe how to build a moral responsibility if we have no free will cannot truly make our decisions and have no true control of our actions
I would rather argue that we are bodies continuously processing information about the world around us. We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us. But, being also possessed of a physical body that interacts with other physical objects, the information processing is not limited to information passively acquired, and can be a part of a causal process that brings about change. Someone can be an integral part of a certain causal process, to the extent that their absence would have meant no process. If someone is an integral part of a causal process in a way that implicates both their information processing and physical body, then they are responsible to some extent because the same things that make them who they are, are the things that made the situation turn out the way it did. What makes someone responsible on this account is the fact that who they are specifically is a cause of what happened.
I will grant we are beings of information I exist as the things that have happened a big old bank of information.
How do I possess the body? I can take no act with it, all of its acts are at the end of inevitably yes I as a being of information am processed as it happens and it leaves its records with me, but that's just it further using me without any active consent to being used I cannot necessarily consent as I do not have the will to do so.
You don't possess the body, you are the body.
How?
It is at best the vessel I as a being of information am imprisoned in/shackled to
That seems like an enormous claim to just casually assume is true, as if any other idea would be on its face absurd, somehow. Like I don't even know what it would mean to be an imprisoned being of information, versus a physical organism with a brain made out of... well, brain, that produces thoughts and emotions through physical means.
"We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us"
Willing to grant this point here
we exist as the record. If we are granting the premise I as a self aware being exist. At best that I is the record of information forced upon it by uncontrollable actions, that is processed by uncontrollable action, and is used to perform uncontrollable actions. That I is hopelessly shackled to a corporeal form it has no true control of.
Saying that we exist as the record arbitrarily excludes other parts of what we are. The record is part of what we are, but we are also the recording device, the process of recording, the process of interpreting, the interpretations, the storage system, and maybe more besides. All of those parts are necessary components of us. You keep breaking concepts by being overly reductive about what we are.
How could i be a thing i have no control over?
The recording, against my will, the process of recording, against my will, the process of interpreting, against my will, the storage... kinda also against my will,
I guess not against my will but totally without regard for my will as that will ostensibly does not exist.
That's all stuff that's happening without any other possible course.
You question "How could i be a thing i have no control over?" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why do you need to have control in order to be a thing?
Your "against my will" constructions also make no sense to me, because as far as I'm concerned, "my" connotes the things that are happening and the body they are happening to/with. If you can argue why the self is the record and nothing else, then my account may be wrong, but using my terms in a way that makes no sense isn't in and of itself an argument.
So that's again the point... where is the self?
If it's all interconnected dominoes working via physics then why does me end at my skin? The air around it is as responsible for its actions as anything else.
How exactly is the air just as responsible? What causal role does it play in what you do?
I mean you can't readily explain exactly how the causal forces work. ostensibly if we're going all the way down to the quantum level... every atom affects every atom near it.
On a more basic level
Without the air the body wouldn't be doing much would it?
Recall that responsibility, as I've described it, adheres to subjects whose information processing forms an integral part of a causal chain of events. I don't need to provide a detailed account of the causal chain that includes a description of all activity to a microscopic scale, because I don't need or want to say anything about events at that scale. Air is necessary for us to do anything other than die, but you need to do a lot more work to show how that makes air responsible for anything.
So merely because of an arbitrarily elected barrier because inspection to the myriad of causal forces is difficult. Like if my prior abuse is the causal factor for a bunch of my behavior why doesn't that take the lions share of responsibility off me? Isn't that causal force just as much me as anything else moving along my action? Is not every atom in the interim between that event now just as causal as the stuff under my skin?
I'll answer your questions in order. First, your experiences are part of you; how can a part of you take responsibility off you? At the same time, if you can make a compelling case that trauma is a major internal contributor to something you've done, then that should impact how we view your particular responsibility in that case.
Second, if by "that causal force" you mean something like "processing those experiences of abuse" then yes, see above. If you meant something else, then I'm not sure.
Third, no, interactions of different kinds have different kinds of results, or just more results than others. To use an exaggerated example, a supernova is more causal than the footfall of a millipede. If you want to argue for the idea that, say, if everything is caused or deterministic, then everything is the same, or something else along those lines, go right ahead.
Yeah that's the basic extrapolation everything's interconnected by causality and physics. Everything's a big interconnected machine. Attributing responsibility to anything in particular is flawed in the framing because, since we' can't really trace all the causal forces we can't really totally track where the eventuality came from. Fuck maybe gravitational disturbances prompted the activity being reviewed on a moral scale and we just couldn't tell. We could mistakenly attribute the action to the wrong body simply because some other external force fucked with their processing in a way we didn't see at the time, or can't currently comprehend.
You don't need to trace all the causal forces back to where the eventuality came from in order to hold a person responsible for what they did. You just need to show that they were an integral part of the sequence of events and as more than just an interchangeable meat sack.
Is it possible to assign responsibility to people mistakenly with this model? Of course, if the inputs are wrong or inadequate in some way, the results will reflect those flaws. That's not an argument against the model, it's an argument against rushing to judgment, and an argument for allowing revisions to assessment of responsibility if new information comes to light.
So, since we're not dealing with magic, what if your free will died, was removed, or was unable to communicate with the body due to a birth defect, accident, cancer, virus, surgery gone wrong, or whatever? Would there be any noticable difference?
While I reject your conception of free will as a thing capable of death, etc.,
You're saying that there's a non-magical unkillable body part or system? You can throw free will into a black hole and it's fine?
of course there's a noticeable difference when someone ceases to have free will. Someone in a coma or pseudocoma, or someone with some form of dementia, heck all of us when we're asleep, those are all examples of people who noticeably lose their free will.
Okay, so a lack of free will in waking humans is dementia? Free will allows us to order our memories, or it just happens to be part of the system that allows it?
Determinism is as much a supernatural explanation.
We are necessarily speaking over a conclusion that cannot be tested in the natural world in a concrete manner.
There need not be a soul for free will any more than you need a God for determinism.
All of those statements could be true and it would change nothing about my point, which is that you can have a workable concept of moral responsibility without relying on a version of free will that necessitates rejecting determinism.
Please describe how to build a moral responsibility if we have no free will cannot truly make our decisions and have no true control of our actions
I would rather argue that we are bodies continuously processing information about the world around us. We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us. But, being also possessed of a physical body that interacts with other physical objects, the information processing is not limited to information passively acquired, and can be a part of a causal process that brings about change. Someone can be an integral part of a certain causal process, to the extent that their absence would have meant no process. If someone is an integral part of a causal process in a way that implicates both their information processing and physical body, then they are responsible to some extent because the same things that make them who they are, are the things that made the situation turn out the way it did. What makes someone responsible on this account is the fact that who they are specifically is a cause of what happened.
I will grant we are beings of information I exist as the things that have happened a big old bank of information.
How do I possess the body? I can take no act with it, all of its acts are at the end of inevitably yes I as a being of information am processed as it happens and it leaves its records with me, but that's just it further using me without any active consent to being used I cannot necessarily consent as I do not have the will to do so.
You don't possess the body, you are the body.
How?
It is at best the vessel I as a being of information am imprisoned in/shackled to
That seems like an enormous claim to just casually assume is true, as if any other idea would be on its face absurd, somehow. Like I don't even know what it would mean to be an imprisoned being of information, versus a physical organism with a brain made out of... well, brain, that produces thoughts and emotions through physical means.
"We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us"
Willing to grant this point here
we exist as the record. If we are granting the premise I as a self aware being exist. At best that I is the record of information forced upon it by uncontrollable actions, that is processed by uncontrollable action, and is used to perform uncontrollable actions. That I is hopelessly shackled to a corporeal form it has no true control of.
Saying that we exist as the record arbitrarily excludes other parts of what we are. The record is part of what we are, but we are also the recording device, the process of recording, the process of interpreting, the interpretations, the storage system, and maybe more besides. All of those parts are necessary components of us. You keep breaking concepts by being overly reductive about what we are.
How could i be a thing i have no control over?
The recording, against my will, the process of recording, against my will, the process of interpreting, against my will, the storage... kinda also against my will,
I guess not against my will but totally without regard for my will as that will ostensibly does not exist.
That's all stuff that's happening without any other possible course.
You question "How could i be a thing i have no control over?" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why do you need to have control in order to be a thing?
Your "against my will" constructions also make no sense to me, because as far as I'm concerned, "my" connotes the things that are happening and the body they are happening to/with. If you can argue why the self is the record and nothing else, then my account may be wrong, but using my terms in a way that makes no sense isn't in and of itself an argument.
So that's again the point... where is the self?
If it's all interconnected dominoes working via physics then why does me end at my skin? The air around it is as responsible for its actions as anything else.
How exactly is the air just as responsible? What causal role does it play in what you do?
I mean you can't readily explain exactly how the causal forces work. ostensibly if we're going all the way down to the quantum level... every atom affects every atom near it.
On a more basic level
Without the air the body wouldn't be doing much would it?
Recall that responsibility, as I've described it, adheres to subjects whose information processing forms an integral part of a causal chain of events. I don't need to provide a detailed account of the causal chain that includes a description of all activity to a microscopic scale, because I don't need or want to say anything about events at that scale. Air is necessary for us to do anything other than die, but you need to do a lot more work to show how that makes air responsible for anything.
So merely because of an arbitrarily elected barrier because inspection to the myriad of causal forces is difficult. Like if my prior abuse is the causal factor for a bunch of my behavior why doesn't that take the lions share of responsibility off me? Isn't that causal force just as much me as anything else moving along my action? Is not every atom in the interim between that event now just as causal as the stuff under my skin?
I'll answer your questions in order. First, your experiences are part of you; how can a part of you take responsibility off you? At the same time, if you can make a compelling case that trauma is a major internal contributor to something you've done, then that should impact how we view your particular responsibility in that case.
Second, if by "that causal force" you mean something like "processing those experiences of abuse" then yes, see above. If you meant something else, then I'm not sure.
Third, no, interactions of different kinds have different kinds of results, or just more results than others. To use an exaggerated example, a supernova is more causal than the footfall of a millipede. If you want to argue for the idea that, say, if everything is caused or deterministic, then everything is the same, or something else along those lines, go right ahead.
Yeah that's the basic extrapolation everything's interconnected by causality and physics. Everything's a big interconnected machine. Attributing responsibility to anything in particular is flawed in the framing because, since we' can't really trace all the causal forces we can't really totally track where the eventuality came from. Fuck maybe gravitational disturbances prompted the activity being reviewed on a moral scale and we just couldn't tell. We could mistakenly attribute the action to the wrong body simply because some other external force fucked with their processing in a way we didn't see at the time, or can't currently comprehend.
You don't need to trace all the causal forces back to where the eventuality came from in order to hold a person responsible for what they did. You just need to show that they were an integral part of the sequence of events and as more than just an interchangeable meat sack.
Is it possible to assign responsibility to people mistakenly with this model? Of course, if the inputs are wrong or inadequate in some way, the results will reflect those flaws. That's not an argument against the model, it's an argument against rushing to judgment, and an argument for allowing revisions to assessment of responsibility if new information comes to light.
But ostensibly any meat sack you put into your exact and full context would result in the same exact result
So, since we're not dealing with magic, what if your free will died, was removed, or was unable to communicate with the body due to a birth defect, accident, cancer, virus, surgery gone wrong, or whatever? Would there be any noticable difference?
While I reject your conception of free will as a thing capable of death, etc.,
You're saying that there's a non-magical unkillable body part or system? You can throw free will into a black hole and it's fine?
No I'm rejecting the notion that free will is the sort of thing that can be described in terms like "body part". I'm rejecting the idea that free will is something that could be thrown.
of course there's a noticeable difference when someone ceases to have free will. Someone in a coma or pseudocoma, or someone with some form of dementia, heck all of us when we're asleep, those are all examples of people who noticeably lose their free will.
Okay, so a lack of free will in waking humans is dementia? Free will allows us to order our memories, or it just happens to be part of the system that allows it?
No, sleeping people, comatose people, and people with dementia are all examples of people who don't have free will. I don't know what you're on about.
Determinism is as much a supernatural explanation.
We are necessarily speaking over a conclusion that cannot be tested in the natural world in a concrete manner.
There need not be a soul for free will any more than you need a God for determinism.
All of those statements could be true and it would change nothing about my point, which is that you can have a workable concept of moral responsibility without relying on a version of free will that necessitates rejecting determinism.
Please describe how to build a moral responsibility if we have no free will cannot truly make our decisions and have no true control of our actions
I would rather argue that we are bodies continuously processing information about the world around us. We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us. But, being also possessed of a physical body that interacts with other physical objects, the information processing is not limited to information passively acquired, and can be a part of a causal process that brings about change. Someone can be an integral part of a certain causal process, to the extent that their absence would have meant no process. If someone is an integral part of a causal process in a way that implicates both their information processing and physical body, then they are responsible to some extent because the same things that make them who they are, are the things that made the situation turn out the way it did. What makes someone responsible on this account is the fact that who they are specifically is a cause of what happened.
I will grant we are beings of information I exist as the things that have happened a big old bank of information.
How do I possess the body? I can take no act with it, all of its acts are at the end of inevitably yes I as a being of information am processed as it happens and it leaves its records with me, but that's just it further using me without any active consent to being used I cannot necessarily consent as I do not have the will to do so.
You don't possess the body, you are the body.
How?
It is at best the vessel I as a being of information am imprisoned in/shackled to
That seems like an enormous claim to just casually assume is true, as if any other idea would be on its face absurd, somehow. Like I don't even know what it would mean to be an imprisoned being of information, versus a physical organism with a brain made out of... well, brain, that produces thoughts and emotions through physical means.
"We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us"
Willing to grant this point here
we exist as the record. If we are granting the premise I as a self aware being exist. At best that I is the record of information forced upon it by uncontrollable actions, that is processed by uncontrollable action, and is used to perform uncontrollable actions. That I is hopelessly shackled to a corporeal form it has no true control of.
Saying that we exist as the record arbitrarily excludes other parts of what we are. The record is part of what we are, but we are also the recording device, the process of recording, the process of interpreting, the interpretations, the storage system, and maybe more besides. All of those parts are necessary components of us. You keep breaking concepts by being overly reductive about what we are.
How could i be a thing i have no control over?
The recording, against my will, the process of recording, against my will, the process of interpreting, against my will, the storage... kinda also against my will,
I guess not against my will but totally without regard for my will as that will ostensibly does not exist.
That's all stuff that's happening without any other possible course.
You question "How could i be a thing i have no control over?" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why do you need to have control in order to be a thing?
Your "against my will" constructions also make no sense to me, because as far as I'm concerned, "my" connotes the things that are happening and the body they are happening to/with. If you can argue why the self is the record and nothing else, then my account may be wrong, but using my terms in a way that makes no sense isn't in and of itself an argument.
So that's again the point... where is the self?
If it's all interconnected dominoes working via physics then why does me end at my skin? The air around it is as responsible for its actions as anything else.
How exactly is the air just as responsible? What causal role does it play in what you do?
I mean you can't readily explain exactly how the causal forces work. ostensibly if we're going all the way down to the quantum level... every atom affects every atom near it.
On a more basic level
Without the air the body wouldn't be doing much would it?
Recall that responsibility, as I've described it, adheres to subjects whose information processing forms an integral part of a causal chain of events. I don't need to provide a detailed account of the causal chain that includes a description of all activity to a microscopic scale, because I don't need or want to say anything about events at that scale. Air is necessary for us to do anything other than die, but you need to do a lot more work to show how that makes air responsible for anything.
So merely because of an arbitrarily elected barrier because inspection to the myriad of causal forces is difficult. Like if my prior abuse is the causal factor for a bunch of my behavior why doesn't that take the lions share of responsibility off me? Isn't that causal force just as much me as anything else moving along my action? Is not every atom in the interim between that event now just as causal as the stuff under my skin?
I'll answer your questions in order. First, your experiences are part of you; how can a part of you take responsibility off you? At the same time, if you can make a compelling case that trauma is a major internal contributor to something you've done, then that should impact how we view your particular responsibility in that case.
Second, if by "that causal force" you mean something like "processing those experiences of abuse" then yes, see above. If you meant something else, then I'm not sure.
Third, no, interactions of different kinds have different kinds of results, or just more results than others. To use an exaggerated example, a supernova is more causal than the footfall of a millipede. If you want to argue for the idea that, say, if everything is caused or deterministic, then everything is the same, or something else along those lines, go right ahead.
Yeah that's the basic extrapolation everything's interconnected by causality and physics. Everything's a big interconnected machine. Attributing responsibility to anything in particular is flawed in the framing because, since we' can't really trace all the causal forces we can't really totally track where the eventuality came from. Fuck maybe gravitational disturbances prompted the activity being reviewed on a moral scale and we just couldn't tell. We could mistakenly attribute the action to the wrong body simply because some other external force fucked with their processing in a way we didn't see at the time, or can't currently comprehend.
You don't need to trace all the causal forces back to where the eventuality came from in order to hold a person responsible for what they did. You just need to show that they were an integral part of the sequence of events and as more than just an interchangeable meat sack.
Is it possible to assign responsibility to people mistakenly with this model? Of course, if the inputs are wrong or inadequate in some way, the results will reflect those flaws. That's not an argument against the model, it's an argument against rushing to judgment, and an argument for allowing revisions to assessment of responsibility if new information comes to light.
But ostensibly any meat sack you put into your exact and full context would result in the same exact result
Any meat sack I put into my exact and full context would be me.
Lets look at Hobbes' State of Nature. Its basically is Lord of the Flies, a free for all where anything goes and there's no government. Hobbes says that we give up some of our freedoms for protection. To me, this seems like a pretty good assumption. Only instead of making the choice our selves, evolution did that for us. We're social creatures by nature. Living in groups allows us to thrive. Over time, our minds began to frown on behaviors we would view today as "anti-social". Murder, theft, and all other sorts of things. Because as a whole, those behaviors hurt the group. They create chaos and unstable living conditions, lessening an individuals chance to have children. The very basic answer of "why is murder wrong?" is because our dna evolved to frown upon it.
For the more complex reason: Well I'm enjoying life here. And according to my view everyone only gets one. To rob a person of that chance to live it is wrong, as it takes enjoyment away from them and others.While we may have less control over our lives than we though in my world view, we can still enjoy them. Happiness is not exclusive to free will.
That's my really short and condensed take on it, and it's late. Hope it makes sense.
Determinism is as much a supernatural explanation.
We are necessarily speaking over a conclusion that cannot be tested in the natural world in a concrete manner.
There need not be a soul for free will any more than you need a God for determinism.
All of those statements could be true and it would change nothing about my point, which is that you can have a workable concept of moral responsibility without relying on a version of free will that necessitates rejecting determinism.
Please describe how to build a moral responsibility if we have no free will cannot truly make our decisions and have no true control of our actions
I would rather argue that we are bodies continuously processing information about the world around us. We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us. But, being also possessed of a physical body that interacts with other physical objects, the information processing is not limited to information passively acquired, and can be a part of a causal process that brings about change. Someone can be an integral part of a certain causal process, to the extent that their absence would have meant no process. If someone is an integral part of a causal process in a way that implicates both their information processing and physical body, then they are responsible to some extent because the same things that make them who they are, are the things that made the situation turn out the way it did. What makes someone responsible on this account is the fact that who they are specifically is a cause of what happened.
I will grant we are beings of information I exist as the things that have happened a big old bank of information.
How do I possess the body? I can take no act with it, all of its acts are at the end of inevitably yes I as a being of information am processed as it happens and it leaves its records with me, but that's just it further using me without any active consent to being used I cannot necessarily consent as I do not have the will to do so.
You don't possess the body, you are the body.
How?
It is at best the vessel I as a being of information am imprisoned in/shackled to
That seems like an enormous claim to just casually assume is true, as if any other idea would be on its face absurd, somehow. Like I don't even know what it would mean to be an imprisoned being of information, versus a physical organism with a brain made out of... well, brain, that produces thoughts and emotions through physical means.
"We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us"
Willing to grant this point here
we exist as the record. If we are granting the premise I as a self aware being exist. At best that I is the record of information forced upon it by uncontrollable actions, that is processed by uncontrollable action, and is used to perform uncontrollable actions. That I is hopelessly shackled to a corporeal form it has no true control of.
Saying that we exist as the record arbitrarily excludes other parts of what we are. The record is part of what we are, but we are also the recording device, the process of recording, the process of interpreting, the interpretations, the storage system, and maybe more besides. All of those parts are necessary components of us. You keep breaking concepts by being overly reductive about what we are.
How could i be a thing i have no control over?
The recording, against my will, the process of recording, against my will, the process of interpreting, against my will, the storage... kinda also against my will,
I guess not against my will but totally without regard for my will as that will ostensibly does not exist.
That's all stuff that's happening without any other possible course.
You question "How could i be a thing i have no control over?" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why do you need to have control in order to be a thing?
Your "against my will" constructions also make no sense to me, because as far as I'm concerned, "my" connotes the things that are happening and the body they are happening to/with. If you can argue why the self is the record and nothing else, then my account may be wrong, but using my terms in a way that makes no sense isn't in and of itself an argument.
So that's again the point... where is the self?
If it's all interconnected dominoes working via physics then why does me end at my skin? The air around it is as responsible for its actions as anything else.
How exactly is the air just as responsible? What causal role does it play in what you do?
I mean you can't readily explain exactly how the causal forces work. ostensibly if we're going all the way down to the quantum level... every atom affects every atom near it.
On a more basic level
Without the air the body wouldn't be doing much would it?
Recall that responsibility, as I've described it, adheres to subjects whose information processing forms an integral part of a causal chain of events. I don't need to provide a detailed account of the causal chain that includes a description of all activity to a microscopic scale, because I don't need or want to say anything about events at that scale. Air is necessary for us to do anything other than die, but you need to do a lot more work to show how that makes air responsible for anything.
So merely because of an arbitrarily elected barrier because inspection to the myriad of causal forces is difficult. Like if my prior abuse is the causal factor for a bunch of my behavior why doesn't that take the lions share of responsibility off me? Isn't that causal force just as much me as anything else moving along my action? Is not every atom in the interim between that event now just as causal as the stuff under my skin?
I'll answer your questions in order. First, your experiences are part of you; how can a part of you take responsibility off you? At the same time, if you can make a compelling case that trauma is a major internal contributor to something you've done, then that should impact how we view your particular responsibility in that case.
Second, if by "that causal force" you mean something like "processing those experiences of abuse" then yes, see above. If you meant something else, then I'm not sure.
Third, no, interactions of different kinds have different kinds of results, or just more results than others. To use an exaggerated example, a supernova is more causal than the footfall of a millipede. If you want to argue for the idea that, say, if everything is caused or deterministic, then everything is the same, or something else along those lines, go right ahead.
Yeah that's the basic extrapolation everything's interconnected by causality and physics. Everything's a big interconnected machine. Attributing responsibility to anything in particular is flawed in the framing because, since we' can't really trace all the causal forces we can't really totally track where the eventuality came from. Fuck maybe gravitational disturbances prompted the activity being reviewed on a moral scale and we just couldn't tell. We could mistakenly attribute the action to the wrong body simply because some other external force fucked with their processing in a way we didn't see at the time, or can't currently comprehend.
You don't need to trace all the causal forces back to where the eventuality came from in order to hold a person responsible for what they did. You just need to show that they were an integral part of the sequence of events and as more than just an interchangeable meat sack.
Is it possible to assign responsibility to people mistakenly with this model? Of course, if the inputs are wrong or inadequate in some way, the results will reflect those flaws. That's not an argument against the model, it's an argument against rushing to judgment, and an argument for allowing revisions to assessment of responsibility if new information comes to light.
But ostensibly any meat sack you put into your exact and full context would result in the same exact result
Any meat sack I put into my exact and full context would be me.
So your exact and full context is you? Does that make other people that have affected that full context also you?
Determinism is as much a supernatural explanation.
We are necessarily speaking over a conclusion that cannot be tested in the natural world in a concrete manner.
There need not be a soul for free will any more than you need a God for determinism.
All of those statements could be true and it would change nothing about my point, which is that you can have a workable concept of moral responsibility without relying on a version of free will that necessitates rejecting determinism.
Please describe how to build a moral responsibility if we have no free will cannot truly make our decisions and have no true control of our actions
I would rather argue that we are bodies continuously processing information about the world around us. We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us. But, being also possessed of a physical body that interacts with other physical objects, the information processing is not limited to information passively acquired, and can be a part of a causal process that brings about change. Someone can be an integral part of a certain causal process, to the extent that their absence would have meant no process. If someone is an integral part of a causal process in a way that implicates both their information processing and physical body, then they are responsible to some extent because the same things that make them who they are, are the things that made the situation turn out the way it did. What makes someone responsible on this account is the fact that who they are specifically is a cause of what happened.
I will grant we are beings of information I exist as the things that have happened a big old bank of information.
How do I possess the body? I can take no act with it, all of its acts are at the end of inevitably yes I as a being of information am processed as it happens and it leaves its records with me, but that's just it further using me without any active consent to being used I cannot necessarily consent as I do not have the will to do so.
You don't possess the body, you are the body.
How?
It is at best the vessel I as a being of information am imprisoned in/shackled to
That seems like an enormous claim to just casually assume is true, as if any other idea would be on its face absurd, somehow. Like I don't even know what it would mean to be an imprisoned being of information, versus a physical organism with a brain made out of... well, brain, that produces thoughts and emotions through physical means.
"We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us"
Willing to grant this point here
we exist as the record. If we are granting the premise I as a self aware being exist. At best that I is the record of information forced upon it by uncontrollable actions, that is processed by uncontrollable action, and is used to perform uncontrollable actions. That I is hopelessly shackled to a corporeal form it has no true control of.
Saying that we exist as the record arbitrarily excludes other parts of what we are. The record is part of what we are, but we are also the recording device, the process of recording, the process of interpreting, the interpretations, the storage system, and maybe more besides. All of those parts are necessary components of us. You keep breaking concepts by being overly reductive about what we are.
How could i be a thing i have no control over?
The recording, against my will, the process of recording, against my will, the process of interpreting, against my will, the storage... kinda also against my will,
I guess not against my will but totally without regard for my will as that will ostensibly does not exist.
That's all stuff that's happening without any other possible course.
You question "How could i be a thing i have no control over?" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why do you need to have control in order to be a thing?
Your "against my will" constructions also make no sense to me, because as far as I'm concerned, "my" connotes the things that are happening and the body they are happening to/with. If you can argue why the self is the record and nothing else, then my account may be wrong, but using my terms in a way that makes no sense isn't in and of itself an argument.
So that's again the point... where is the self?
If it's all interconnected dominoes working via physics then why does me end at my skin? The air around it is as responsible for its actions as anything else.
How exactly is the air just as responsible? What causal role does it play in what you do?
I mean you can't readily explain exactly how the causal forces work. ostensibly if we're going all the way down to the quantum level... every atom affects every atom near it.
On a more basic level
Without the air the body wouldn't be doing much would it?
Recall that responsibility, as I've described it, adheres to subjects whose information processing forms an integral part of a causal chain of events. I don't need to provide a detailed account of the causal chain that includes a description of all activity to a microscopic scale, because I don't need or want to say anything about events at that scale. Air is necessary for us to do anything other than die, but you need to do a lot more work to show how that makes air responsible for anything.
So merely because of an arbitrarily elected barrier because inspection to the myriad of causal forces is difficult. Like if my prior abuse is the causal factor for a bunch of my behavior why doesn't that take the lions share of responsibility off me? Isn't that causal force just as much me as anything else moving along my action? Is not every atom in the interim between that event now just as causal as the stuff under my skin?
I'll answer your questions in order. First, your experiences are part of you; how can a part of you take responsibility off you? At the same time, if you can make a compelling case that trauma is a major internal contributor to something you've done, then that should impact how we view your particular responsibility in that case.
Second, if by "that causal force" you mean something like "processing those experiences of abuse" then yes, see above. If you meant something else, then I'm not sure.
Third, no, interactions of different kinds have different kinds of results, or just more results than others. To use an exaggerated example, a supernova is more causal than the footfall of a millipede. If you want to argue for the idea that, say, if everything is caused or deterministic, then everything is the same, or something else along those lines, go right ahead.
Yeah that's the basic extrapolation everything's interconnected by causality and physics. Everything's a big interconnected machine. Attributing responsibility to anything in particular is flawed in the framing because, since we' can't really trace all the causal forces we can't really totally track where the eventuality came from. Fuck maybe gravitational disturbances prompted the activity being reviewed on a moral scale and we just couldn't tell. We could mistakenly attribute the action to the wrong body simply because some other external force fucked with their processing in a way we didn't see at the time, or can't currently comprehend.
You don't need to trace all the causal forces back to where the eventuality came from in order to hold a person responsible for what they did. You just need to show that they were an integral part of the sequence of events and as more than just an interchangeable meat sack.
Is it possible to assign responsibility to people mistakenly with this model? Of course, if the inputs are wrong or inadequate in some way, the results will reflect those flaws. That's not an argument against the model, it's an argument against rushing to judgment, and an argument for allowing revisions to assessment of responsibility if new information comes to light.
But ostensibly any meat sack you put into your exact and full context would result in the same exact result
Any meat sack I put into my exact and full context would be me.
So your exact and full context is you? Does that make other people that have affected that full context also you?
Yes, I am my exact and full context. Things that are part of or played a role in my exact and full context are not also in and of themselves my exact and full context. So no, other people or other things that are part of or played a role in that full context are not me.
Determinism is as much a supernatural explanation.
We are necessarily speaking over a conclusion that cannot be tested in the natural world in a concrete manner.
There need not be a soul for free will any more than you need a God for determinism.
All of those statements could be true and it would change nothing about my point, which is that you can have a workable concept of moral responsibility without relying on a version of free will that necessitates rejecting determinism.
Please describe how to build a moral responsibility if we have no free will cannot truly make our decisions and have no true control of our actions
I would rather argue that we are bodies continuously processing information about the world around us. We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us. But, being also possessed of a physical body that interacts with other physical objects, the information processing is not limited to information passively acquired, and can be a part of a causal process that brings about change. Someone can be an integral part of a certain causal process, to the extent that their absence would have meant no process. If someone is an integral part of a causal process in a way that implicates both their information processing and physical body, then they are responsible to some extent because the same things that make them who they are, are the things that made the situation turn out the way it did. What makes someone responsible on this account is the fact that who they are specifically is a cause of what happened.
I will grant we are beings of information I exist as the things that have happened a big old bank of information.
How do I possess the body? I can take no act with it, all of its acts are at the end of inevitably yes I as a being of information am processed as it happens and it leaves its records with me, but that's just it further using me without any active consent to being used I cannot necessarily consent as I do not have the will to do so.
You don't possess the body, you are the body.
How?
It is at best the vessel I as a being of information am imprisoned in/shackled to
That seems like an enormous claim to just casually assume is true, as if any other idea would be on its face absurd, somehow. Like I don't even know what it would mean to be an imprisoned being of information, versus a physical organism with a brain made out of... well, brain, that produces thoughts and emotions through physical means.
"We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us"
Willing to grant this point here
we exist as the record. If we are granting the premise I as a self aware being exist. At best that I is the record of information forced upon it by uncontrollable actions, that is processed by uncontrollable action, and is used to perform uncontrollable actions. That I is hopelessly shackled to a corporeal form it has no true control of.
Saying that we exist as the record arbitrarily excludes other parts of what we are. The record is part of what we are, but we are also the recording device, the process of recording, the process of interpreting, the interpretations, the storage system, and maybe more besides. All of those parts are necessary components of us. You keep breaking concepts by being overly reductive about what we are.
How could i be a thing i have no control over?
The recording, against my will, the process of recording, against my will, the process of interpreting, against my will, the storage... kinda also against my will,
I guess not against my will but totally without regard for my will as that will ostensibly does not exist.
That's all stuff that's happening without any other possible course.
You question "How could i be a thing i have no control over?" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why do you need to have control in order to be a thing?
Your "against my will" constructions also make no sense to me, because as far as I'm concerned, "my" connotes the things that are happening and the body they are happening to/with. If you can argue why the self is the record and nothing else, then my account may be wrong, but using my terms in a way that makes no sense isn't in and of itself an argument.
So that's again the point... where is the self?
If it's all interconnected dominoes working via physics then why does me end at my skin? The air around it is as responsible for its actions as anything else.
How exactly is the air just as responsible? What causal role does it play in what you do?
I mean you can't readily explain exactly how the causal forces work. ostensibly if we're going all the way down to the quantum level... every atom affects every atom near it.
On a more basic level
Without the air the body wouldn't be doing much would it?
Recall that responsibility, as I've described it, adheres to subjects whose information processing forms an integral part of a causal chain of events. I don't need to provide a detailed account of the causal chain that includes a description of all activity to a microscopic scale, because I don't need or want to say anything about events at that scale. Air is necessary for us to do anything other than die, but you need to do a lot more work to show how that makes air responsible for anything.
So merely because of an arbitrarily elected barrier because inspection to the myriad of causal forces is difficult. Like if my prior abuse is the causal factor for a bunch of my behavior why doesn't that take the lions share of responsibility off me? Isn't that causal force just as much me as anything else moving along my action? Is not every atom in the interim between that event now just as causal as the stuff under my skin?
I'll answer your questions in order. First, your experiences are part of you; how can a part of you take responsibility off you? At the same time, if you can make a compelling case that trauma is a major internal contributor to something you've done, then that should impact how we view your particular responsibility in that case.
Second, if by "that causal force" you mean something like "processing those experiences of abuse" then yes, see above. If you meant something else, then I'm not sure.
Third, no, interactions of different kinds have different kinds of results, or just more results than others. To use an exaggerated example, a supernova is more causal than the footfall of a millipede. If you want to argue for the idea that, say, if everything is caused or deterministic, then everything is the same, or something else along those lines, go right ahead.
Yeah that's the basic extrapolation everything's interconnected by causality and physics. Everything's a big interconnected machine. Attributing responsibility to anything in particular is flawed in the framing because, since we' can't really trace all the causal forces we can't really totally track where the eventuality came from. Fuck maybe gravitational disturbances prompted the activity being reviewed on a moral scale and we just couldn't tell. We could mistakenly attribute the action to the wrong body simply because some other external force fucked with their processing in a way we didn't see at the time, or can't currently comprehend.
You don't need to trace all the causal forces back to where the eventuality came from in order to hold a person responsible for what they did. You just need to show that they were an integral part of the sequence of events and as more than just an interchangeable meat sack.
Is it possible to assign responsibility to people mistakenly with this model? Of course, if the inputs are wrong or inadequate in some way, the results will reflect those flaws. That's not an argument against the model, it's an argument against rushing to judgment, and an argument for allowing revisions to assessment of responsibility if new information comes to light.
But ostensibly any meat sack you put into your exact and full context would result in the same exact result
Any meat sack I put into my exact and full context would be me.
So your exact and full context is you? Does that make other people that have affected that full context also you?
Yes, I am my exact and full context. Things that are part of or played a role in my exact and full context are not also in and of themselves my exact and full context. So no, other people or other things that are part of or played a role in that full context are not me.
Why not, they are the progenitor of your future actions are they not?
Without them adding to your context even minutely would you have still ended up at the same absolutely deterministic end? How?
Yeaaaaah, that's straight up magic. Hard pass on that. Dualism is complicated enough without something that can survive going beyond the event horizon.
It's true that the "self" can be attributed to not only our bodies, but also our role in the communal organism of humanity, the world, etc., but we're severable from the gestalt and sure as heck can't survive being compressed to smaller than the radius of an electron field.
Yeaaaaah, that's straight up magic. Hard pass on that. Dualism is complicated enough without something that can survive going beyond the event horizon.
It's true that the "self" can be attributed to not only our bodies, but also our role in the communal organism of humanity, the world, etc., but we're severable from the gestalt and sure as heck can't survive being compressed to smaller than the radius of an electron field.
But those other folks are as absolutely integral to the determined outcome as you or I.
How are our actions severable from the gestalt other than arbitrarily?
Yeaaaaah, that's straight up magic. Hard pass on that. Dualism is complicated enough without something that can survive going beyond the event horizon.
It's true that the "self" can be attributed to not only our bodies, but also our role in the communal organism of humanity, the world, etc., but we're severable from the gestalt and sure as heck can't survive being compressed to smaller than the radius of an electron field.
But those other folks are as absolutely integral to the determined outcome as you or I.
How are our actions severable from the gestalt other than arbitrarily?
Not our actions, our "self". Our influence remains wherever we were, but we're no longer active participants as individual living beings in any meaningful way when we're tossed into a the gravity of a billion suns.
Yeaaaaah, that's straight up magic. Hard pass on that. Dualism is complicated enough without something that can survive going beyond the event horizon.
It's true that the "self" can be attributed to not only our bodies, but also our role in the communal organism of humanity, the world, etc., but we're severable from the gestalt and sure as heck can't survive being compressed to smaller than the radius of an electron field.
But those other folks are as absolutely integral to the determined outcome as you or I.
How are our actions severable from the gestalt other than arbitrarily?
Not our actions, our "self". Our influence remains wherever we were, but we're no longer active participants as individual living beings in any meaningful way when we're tossed into a the gravity of a billion suns.
Yeaaaaah, that's straight up magic. Hard pass on that. Dualism is complicated enough without something that can survive going beyond the event horizon.
It's true that the "self" can be attributed to not only our bodies, but also our role in the communal organism of humanity, the world, etc., but we're severable from the gestalt and sure as heck can't survive being compressed to smaller than the radius of an electron field.
We're talking past each other. Free will, as I'm presenting it, isn't something that can survive going beyond the event horizon, because it's not something to which the concept of survival applies. Free will is like a walk. It's more of a happening than an object, if that distinction means anything to you.
Yeaaaaah, that's straight up magic. Hard pass on that. Dualism is complicated enough without something that can survive going beyond the event horizon.
It's true that the "self" can be attributed to not only our bodies, but also our role in the communal organism of humanity, the world, etc., but we're severable from the gestalt and sure as heck can't survive being compressed to smaller than the radius of an electron field.
But those other folks are as absolutely integral to the determined outcome as you or I.
How are our actions severable from the gestalt other than arbitrarily?
Not our actions, our "self". Our influence remains wherever we were, but we're no longer active participants as individual living beings in any meaningful way when we're tossed into a the gravity of a billion suns.
What?
It's not super uncommon for people to view the self as a gestalt of not only our personal bodies and minds, but our place in the species, or even the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism
Just like you can toss an ant from the hive, you can toss a human from the planet.
However, it's a tangent, if a fascinating perspective.
Yeaaaaah, that's straight up magic. Hard pass on that. Dualism is complicated enough without something that can survive going beyond the event horizon.
It's true that the "self" can be attributed to not only our bodies, but also our role in the communal organism of humanity, the world, etc., but we're severable from the gestalt and sure as heck can't survive being compressed to smaller than the radius of an electron field.
But those other folks are as absolutely integral to the determined outcome as you or I.
How are our actions severable from the gestalt other than arbitrarily?
Not our actions, our "self". Our influence remains wherever we were, but we're no longer active participants as individual living beings in any meaningful way when we're tossed into a the gravity of a billion suns.
What?
It's not super uncommon for people to view the self as a gestalt of not only our personal bodies and minds, but our place in the species, or even the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism
Just like you can toss an ant from the hive, you can toss a human from the planet.
However, it's a tangent, if a fascinating perspective.
Yeah but even if you toss the ant from the hive it still plays a part in the determinism of the hive into the future. Technically it just needs to have existed to play a role in moving the deterministic universe from one state to the next.
Determinism is as much a supernatural explanation.
We are necessarily speaking over a conclusion that cannot be tested in the natural world in a concrete manner.
There need not be a soul for free will any more than you need a God for determinism.
All of those statements could be true and it would change nothing about my point, which is that you can have a workable concept of moral responsibility without relying on a version of free will that necessitates rejecting determinism.
Please describe how to build a moral responsibility if we have no free will cannot truly make our decisions and have no true control of our actions
I would rather argue that we are bodies continuously processing information about the world around us. We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us. But, being also possessed of a physical body that interacts with other physical objects, the information processing is not limited to information passively acquired, and can be a part of a causal process that brings about change. Someone can be an integral part of a certain causal process, to the extent that their absence would have meant no process. If someone is an integral part of a causal process in a way that implicates both their information processing and physical body, then they are responsible to some extent because the same things that make them who they are, are the things that made the situation turn out the way it did. What makes someone responsible on this account is the fact that who they are specifically is a cause of what happened.
I will grant we are beings of information I exist as the things that have happened a big old bank of information.
How do I possess the body? I can take no act with it, all of its acts are at the end of inevitably yes I as a being of information am processed as it happens and it leaves its records with me, but that's just it further using me without any active consent to being used I cannot necessarily consent as I do not have the will to do so.
You don't possess the body, you are the body.
How?
It is at best the vessel I as a being of information am imprisoned in/shackled to
That seems like an enormous claim to just casually assume is true, as if any other idea would be on its face absurd, somehow. Like I don't even know what it would mean to be an imprisoned being of information, versus a physical organism with a brain made out of... well, brain, that produces thoughts and emotions through physical means.
"We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us"
Willing to grant this point here
we exist as the record. If we are granting the premise I as a self aware being exist. At best that I is the record of information forced upon it by uncontrollable actions, that is processed by uncontrollable action, and is used to perform uncontrollable actions. That I is hopelessly shackled to a corporeal form it has no true control of.
Saying that we exist as the record arbitrarily excludes other parts of what we are. The record is part of what we are, but we are also the recording device, the process of recording, the process of interpreting, the interpretations, the storage system, and maybe more besides. All of those parts are necessary components of us. You keep breaking concepts by being overly reductive about what we are.
How could i be a thing i have no control over?
The recording, against my will, the process of recording, against my will, the process of interpreting, against my will, the storage... kinda also against my will,
I guess not against my will but totally without regard for my will as that will ostensibly does not exist.
That's all stuff that's happening without any other possible course.
You question "How could i be a thing i have no control over?" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why do you need to have control in order to be a thing?
Your "against my will" constructions also make no sense to me, because as far as I'm concerned, "my" connotes the things that are happening and the body they are happening to/with. If you can argue why the self is the record and nothing else, then my account may be wrong, but using my terms in a way that makes no sense isn't in and of itself an argument.
So that's again the point... where is the self?
If it's all interconnected dominoes working via physics then why does me end at my skin? The air around it is as responsible for its actions as anything else.
How exactly is the air just as responsible? What causal role does it play in what you do?
I mean you can't readily explain exactly how the causal forces work. ostensibly if we're going all the way down to the quantum level... every atom affects every atom near it.
On a more basic level
Without the air the body wouldn't be doing much would it?
Recall that responsibility, as I've described it, adheres to subjects whose information processing forms an integral part of a causal chain of events. I don't need to provide a detailed account of the causal chain that includes a description of all activity to a microscopic scale, because I don't need or want to say anything about events at that scale. Air is necessary for us to do anything other than die, but you need to do a lot more work to show how that makes air responsible for anything.
So merely because of an arbitrarily elected barrier because inspection to the myriad of causal forces is difficult. Like if my prior abuse is the causal factor for a bunch of my behavior why doesn't that take the lions share of responsibility off me? Isn't that causal force just as much me as anything else moving along my action? Is not every atom in the interim between that event now just as causal as the stuff under my skin?
I'll answer your questions in order. First, your experiences are part of you; how can a part of you take responsibility off you? At the same time, if you can make a compelling case that trauma is a major internal contributor to something you've done, then that should impact how we view your particular responsibility in that case.
Second, if by "that causal force" you mean something like "processing those experiences of abuse" then yes, see above. If you meant something else, then I'm not sure.
Third, no, interactions of different kinds have different kinds of results, or just more results than others. To use an exaggerated example, a supernova is more causal than the footfall of a millipede. If you want to argue for the idea that, say, if everything is caused or deterministic, then everything is the same, or something else along those lines, go right ahead.
Yeah that's the basic extrapolation everything's interconnected by causality and physics. Everything's a big interconnected machine. Attributing responsibility to anything in particular is flawed in the framing because, since we' can't really trace all the causal forces we can't really totally track where the eventuality came from. Fuck maybe gravitational disturbances prompted the activity being reviewed on a moral scale and we just couldn't tell. We could mistakenly attribute the action to the wrong body simply because some other external force fucked with their processing in a way we didn't see at the time, or can't currently comprehend.
You don't need to trace all the causal forces back to where the eventuality came from in order to hold a person responsible for what they did. You just need to show that they were an integral part of the sequence of events and as more than just an interchangeable meat sack.
Is it possible to assign responsibility to people mistakenly with this model? Of course, if the inputs are wrong or inadequate in some way, the results will reflect those flaws. That's not an argument against the model, it's an argument against rushing to judgment, and an argument for allowing revisions to assessment of responsibility if new information comes to light.
But ostensibly any meat sack you put into your exact and full context would result in the same exact result
Any meat sack I put into my exact and full context would be me.
So your exact and full context is you? Does that make other people that have affected that full context also you?
Yes, I am my exact and full context. Things that are part of or played a role in my exact and full context are not also in and of themselves my exact and full context. So no, other people or other things that are part of or played a role in that full context are not me.
Why not, they are the progenitor of your future actions are they not?
Without them adding to your context even minutely would you have still ended up at the same absolutely deterministic end? How?
A progenitor is not its product. Like, a car factory makes cars, that doesn't mean the car factory is a car or the car a car factory. I am not my parents, my parents are not me. This is pretty trivial stuff, I don't know where you're getting these other ideas from
having a choice does not mean it's possible to act on that choice. Not being able to control your life does not mean that you don't have free will
What?
"You may choose A or B. But not B."
Not being able to control every aspect of your life doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have free will.
It means you have a free will heavily constrained by the context and causality it exists in.
There's still an uncertainty there that we'd call you or your free will.
*Where*?
In the part we can't perfectly replicate or predict
...such as?
Such as all the parts, because we live in an entirely non-deterministic universe?
Seriously people, quantum mechanics is real. It affects everything.
Quantum mechanics really don't enter into the conversation in a meaningful way unless you have evidence that quantum fluctuations are sapiant occurances.
Yeaaaaah, that's straight up magic. Hard pass on that. Dualism is complicated enough without something that can survive going beyond the event horizon.
It's true that the "self" can be attributed to not only our bodies, but also our role in the communal organism of humanity, the world, etc., but we're severable from the gestalt and sure as heck can't survive being compressed to smaller than the radius of an electron field.
But those other folks are as absolutely integral to the determined outcome as you or I.
How are our actions severable from the gestalt other than arbitrarily?
Not our actions, our "self". Our influence remains wherever we were, but we're no longer active participants as individual living beings in any meaningful way when we're tossed into a the gravity of a billion suns.
What?
It's not super uncommon for people to view the self as a gestalt of not only our personal bodies and minds, but our place in the species, or even the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism
Just like you can toss an ant from the hive, you can toss a human from the planet.
However, it's a tangent, if a fascinating perspective.
Yeah but even if you toss the ant from the hive it still plays a part in the determinism of the hive into the future. Technically it just needs to have existed to play a role in moving the deterministic universe from one state to the next.
Sure. Ripple effect and all that. But it's no longer an active participant.
So, since we're not dealing with magic, what if your free will died, was removed, or was unable to communicate with the body due to a birth defect, accident, cancer, virus, surgery gone wrong, or whatever? Would there be any noticable difference?
"Free will' is not magic. In the absence of a soul, I present my definition of free will.
Free will is the ability for a being to make decisions that cannot be perfectly predicted for it as an individual being, which are informed by its prior experiences but not totally controlled by them. Free will must be governed by memory, not simply by the state variables which exist in the being (mass, temperature etc) and it must be capable of being unpredictable (IE, your response is never 100% certain other than for the most trivial systems) for the same set of external stimuli at different times, even if the underlying experience set of the being has not experienced significant change in the intervening time. Since the universe is not deterministic, and chaotic events do affect your brain over some timescales (somewhere between constantly, and taking days to create a random 'state' in you) I argue that humans have relevant free will in the universe we have. There's nothing magic to it, its just 'free enough' that its as free as something can be.
As an example. Your brain controls your breathing, BUT, almost everyone cannot order themselves to not breathe until they die. You do not have free will over whether or not you attempt to breath, even though your brain controls it. Conversely, when you approach a tree in the forest, you can choose to go around it to the left, or to the right, or just stop walking. I would advocate that in making that decision a human is informed by past experiences (Hmm, the left side is darker, maybe I'll go with the right...) but is not entirely predictable (eh, fuck it, I'm already closer to the left)
Honestly, I can't think of a 'freer will' than the one I've described in a real non-deterministic universe unless we brew up a soul and magically say, 'here's free will'
I don't see how the random elements of quantum mechanics are an argument for free will.
They seem like an argument for randomness of determination.
How could something determined at random be the product of (or result in) choice?
Determinism is as much a supernatural explanation.
We are necessarily speaking over a conclusion that cannot be tested in the natural world in a concrete manner.
There need not be a soul for free will any more than you need a God for determinism.
All of those statements could be true and it would change nothing about my point, which is that you can have a workable concept of moral responsibility without relying on a version of free will that necessitates rejecting determinism.
Please describe how to build a moral responsibility if we have no free will cannot truly make our decisions and have no true control of our actions
I would rather argue that we are bodies continuously processing information about the world around us. We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us. But, being also possessed of a physical body that interacts with other physical objects, the information processing is not limited to information passively acquired, and can be a part of a causal process that brings about change. Someone can be an integral part of a certain causal process, to the extent that their absence would have meant no process. If someone is an integral part of a causal process in a way that implicates both their information processing and physical body, then they are responsible to some extent because the same things that make them who they are, are the things that made the situation turn out the way it did. What makes someone responsible on this account is the fact that who they are specifically is a cause of what happened.
I will grant we are beings of information I exist as the things that have happened a big old bank of information.
How do I possess the body? I can take no act with it, all of its acts are at the end of inevitably yes I as a being of information am processed as it happens and it leaves its records with me, but that's just it further using me without any active consent to being used I cannot necessarily consent as I do not have the will to do so.
You don't possess the body, you are the body.
How?
It is at best the vessel I as a being of information am imprisoned in/shackled to
That seems like an enormous claim to just casually assume is true, as if any other idea would be on its face absurd, somehow. Like I don't even know what it would mean to be an imprisoned being of information, versus a physical organism with a brain made out of... well, brain, that produces thoughts and emotions through physical means.
"We receive a lot of information passively or involuntarily as the universe presents to us"
Willing to grant this point here
we exist as the record. If we are granting the premise I as a self aware being exist. At best that I is the record of information forced upon it by uncontrollable actions, that is processed by uncontrollable action, and is used to perform uncontrollable actions. That I is hopelessly shackled to a corporeal form it has no true control of.
Saying that we exist as the record arbitrarily excludes other parts of what we are. The record is part of what we are, but we are also the recording device, the process of recording, the process of interpreting, the interpretations, the storage system, and maybe more besides. All of those parts are necessary components of us. You keep breaking concepts by being overly reductive about what we are.
How could i be a thing i have no control over?
The recording, against my will, the process of recording, against my will, the process of interpreting, against my will, the storage... kinda also against my will,
I guess not against my will but totally without regard for my will as that will ostensibly does not exist.
That's all stuff that's happening without any other possible course.
You question "How could i be a thing i have no control over?" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why do you need to have control in order to be a thing?
Your "against my will" constructions also make no sense to me, because as far as I'm concerned, "my" connotes the things that are happening and the body they are happening to/with. If you can argue why the self is the record and nothing else, then my account may be wrong, but using my terms in a way that makes no sense isn't in and of itself an argument.
So that's again the point... where is the self?
If it's all interconnected dominoes working via physics then why does me end at my skin? The air around it is as responsible for its actions as anything else.
How exactly is the air just as responsible? What causal role does it play in what you do?
I mean you can't readily explain exactly how the causal forces work. ostensibly if we're going all the way down to the quantum level... every atom affects every atom near it.
On a more basic level
Without the air the body wouldn't be doing much would it?
Recall that responsibility, as I've described it, adheres to subjects whose information processing forms an integral part of a causal chain of events. I don't need to provide a detailed account of the causal chain that includes a description of all activity to a microscopic scale, because I don't need or want to say anything about events at that scale. Air is necessary for us to do anything other than die, but you need to do a lot more work to show how that makes air responsible for anything.
So merely because of an arbitrarily elected barrier because inspection to the myriad of causal forces is difficult. Like if my prior abuse is the causal factor for a bunch of my behavior why doesn't that take the lions share of responsibility off me? Isn't that causal force just as much me as anything else moving along my action? Is not every atom in the interim between that event now just as causal as the stuff under my skin?
I'll answer your questions in order. First, your experiences are part of you; how can a part of you take responsibility off you? At the same time, if you can make a compelling case that trauma is a major internal contributor to something you've done, then that should impact how we view your particular responsibility in that case.
Second, if by "that causal force" you mean something like "processing those experiences of abuse" then yes, see above. If you meant something else, then I'm not sure.
Third, no, interactions of different kinds have different kinds of results, or just more results than others. To use an exaggerated example, a supernova is more causal than the footfall of a millipede. If you want to argue for the idea that, say, if everything is caused or deterministic, then everything is the same, or something else along those lines, go right ahead.
Yeah that's the basic extrapolation everything's interconnected by causality and physics. Everything's a big interconnected machine. Attributing responsibility to anything in particular is flawed in the framing because, since we' can't really trace all the causal forces we can't really totally track where the eventuality came from. Fuck maybe gravitational disturbances prompted the activity being reviewed on a moral scale and we just couldn't tell. We could mistakenly attribute the action to the wrong body simply because some other external force fucked with their processing in a way we didn't see at the time, or can't currently comprehend.
You don't need to trace all the causal forces back to where the eventuality came from in order to hold a person responsible for what they did. You just need to show that they were an integral part of the sequence of events and as more than just an interchangeable meat sack.
Is it possible to assign responsibility to people mistakenly with this model? Of course, if the inputs are wrong or inadequate in some way, the results will reflect those flaws. That's not an argument against the model, it's an argument against rushing to judgment, and an argument for allowing revisions to assessment of responsibility if new information comes to light.
But ostensibly any meat sack you put into your exact and full context would result in the same exact result
Any meat sack I put into my exact and full context would be me.
So your exact and full context is you? Does that make other people that have affected that full context also you?
Yes, I am my exact and full context. Things that are part of or played a role in my exact and full context are not also in and of themselves my exact and full context. So no, other people or other things that are part of or played a role in that full context are not me.
Why not, they are the progenitor of your future actions are they not?
Without them adding to your context even minutely would you have still ended up at the same absolutely deterministic end? How?
A progenitor is not its product. Like, a car factory makes cars, that doesn't mean the car factory is a car or the car a car factory. I am not my parents, my parents are not me. This is pretty trivial stuff, I don't know where you're getting these other ideas from
Because if my actions aren't my own and are entirely the result of the context then the context and all members of it are me and i'm them because i'm part of their context as well. Every piece of the deterministic universe is a part of moving the state of the deterministic universe forward.
If we're already saying yeah we're essentially complex dominoes run on physics and chemicals where do we put the edge of that dominoe display considering it undeniably exists in a still larger field of dominoes?
Do we limit its definition arbitrarily by its limited perception?
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The point is that data is one of the most human characters.
Like the entire point, the central theme, of next generation is "how do you define humanity".
Data stands as the example that if it is moderately indistinguishable from "human"... you just treat it as "human".
"Human" being short hand for self aware sentient being.
I mean he clearly has emotions.
He even expresses an emotion right there in that clip where he talks about not having emotions.
Pretty much exactly this.
He consistently insists he has no emotions but regularly exhibits them because he just doesn't conceptually grasp that a bunch of his programming seemingly mimics emotions.
Like the rest of the crew even kinda look at data and go... wait isn't that feelings?
Recall that responsibility, as I've described it, adheres to subjects whose information processing forms an integral part of a causal chain of events. I don't need to provide a detailed account of the causal chain that includes a description of all activity to a microscopic scale, because I don't need or want to say anything about events at that scale. Air is necessary for us to do anything other than die, but you need to do a lot more work to show how that makes air responsible for anything.
This is not dissimilar to the irreducible complexity argument against evolution "we cannot conceive how this thing works therefore it must be false"
And speaking of evolution, that implies that either
- free will is an evolutionary trait
- everything down to single cellular life has free will
- you have free will indistinguishable from randomness
I'm not even sure what the mechanism for the first could possibly be, the second is a much simpler test case, simulating a prokaryote instead of a brain and the third is not free will because while you could have theoretically done A or B the universe chose for you
So merely because of an arbitrarily elected barrier because inspection to the myriad of causal forces is difficult. Like if my prior abuse is the causal factor for a bunch of my behavior why doesn't that take the lions share of responsibility off me? Isn't that causal force just as much me as anything else moving along my action? Is not every atom in the interim between that event now just as causal as the stuff under my skin?
I wonder where on the DNA strand the free will is.
If that's the case then how does that jive with the fact that the body begins taking actions up to 10 seconds prior to the conscious mind being aware of making the decision? doi.org/cs3rzv
Is free will exercised by the unconscious mind and you just realize that you've made a free choice after you've already made it?
Not necessarily that you act in opposition to such factors, just that all of those factors are tragically unpredictable in their exact occurrence and result.
Maybe the will does lie in the subconscious. Full Lucid dreaming where you can change your environment would indicate as such. Though to my understanding we have no idea how dreams work.
That doesn't appear to make sense. The outcome is based on a set of knowable factors but you can't predict the outcome because...?
And I don't mean the Freudian subconscious - I mean the unconscious mind of autonomic processes which your brain handles for you independent of consciousness. Like how you jerk your hand back from a hot pot well before your conscious mind has been made aware that it's hot or how you keep on breathing all the time.
I'll answer your questions in order. First, your experiences are part of you; how can a part of you take responsibility off you? At the same time, if you can make a compelling case that trauma is a major internal contributor to something you've done, then that should impact how we view your particular responsibility in that case.
Second, if by "that causal force" you mean something like "processing those experiences of abuse" then yes, see above. If you meant something else, then I'm not sure.
Third, no, interactions of different kinds have different kinds of results, or just more results than others. To use an exaggerated example, a supernova is more causal than the footfall of a millipede. If you want to argue for the idea that, say, if everything is caused or deterministic, then everything is the same, or something else along those lines, go right ahead.
I'm not sure why we can't predict the outcome but we can't, we can't even totally predict the hormones and neurotransmitters exactly and definitely not uniformly for all humans.
It's definitely a god in the gaps, but determinism is as much a god for the gap as it is currently just as distinctly provable.
There's a bunch of gap there where we are expected to kinda accept that it is definitely knowable.
I'll grant it seems very much like we could know it eventually, but we currently don't, and that it is knowable isn't precisely proven out.
Yeah I guess I'm denying it simply because I want to. Guess I'm pretty willful like that.
This is literally like every other philosophy... easily ignorable.
While I reject your conception of free will as a thing capable of death, etc., of course there's a noticeable difference when someone ceases to have free will. Someone in a coma or pseudocoma, or someone with some form of dementia, heck all of us when we're asleep, those are all examples of people who noticeably lose their free will.
Yeah that's the basic extrapolation everything's interconnected by causality and physics. Everything's a big interconnected machine. Attributing responsibility to anything in particular is flawed in the framing because, since we' can't really trace all the causal forces we can't really totally track where the eventuality came from. Fuck maybe gravitational disturbances prompted the activity being reviewed on a moral scale and we just couldn't tell. We could mistakenly attribute the action to the wrong body simply because some other external force fucked with their processing in a way we didn't see at the time, or can't currently comprehend.
Our brains are matter. Matter has a set rule of laws on how it will act and react. The atoms in us have existed for far longer than even the earth. All a complex chain of action and reaction, slaves to cause and effect.
If humans can make a choice, where does this choice come from? What molecule, what atom, what strand of dna? Where does it exist?
I honestly don't think it does. I think we're more slaves to our biochemistry than we'd like to admit.
You don't need to trace all the causal forces back to where the eventuality came from in order to hold a person responsible for what they did. You just need to show that they were an integral part of the sequence of events and as more than just an interchangeable meat sack.
Is it possible to assign responsibility to people mistakenly with this model? Of course, if the inputs are wrong or inadequate in some way, the results will reflect those flaws. That's not an argument against the model, it's an argument against rushing to judgment, and an argument for allowing revisions to assessment of responsibility if new information comes to light.
You're saying that there's a non-magical unkillable body part or system? You can throw free will into a black hole and it's fine?
Okay, so a lack of free will in waking humans is dementia? Free will allows us to order our memories, or it just happens to be part of the system that allows it?
But ostensibly any meat sack you put into your exact and full context would result in the same exact result
No I'm rejecting the notion that free will is the sort of thing that can be described in terms like "body part". I'm rejecting the idea that free will is something that could be thrown.
No, sleeping people, comatose people, and people with dementia are all examples of people who don't have free will. I don't know what you're on about.
Any meat sack I put into my exact and full context would be me.
Lets look at Hobbes' State of Nature. Its basically is Lord of the Flies, a free for all where anything goes and there's no government. Hobbes says that we give up some of our freedoms for protection. To me, this seems like a pretty good assumption. Only instead of making the choice our selves, evolution did that for us. We're social creatures by nature. Living in groups allows us to thrive. Over time, our minds began to frown on behaviors we would view today as "anti-social". Murder, theft, and all other sorts of things. Because as a whole, those behaviors hurt the group. They create chaos and unstable living conditions, lessening an individuals chance to have children. The very basic answer of "why is murder wrong?" is because our dna evolved to frown upon it.
For the more complex reason: Well I'm enjoying life here. And according to my view everyone only gets one. To rob a person of that chance to live it is wrong, as it takes enjoyment away from them and others.While we may have less control over our lives than we though in my world view, we can still enjoy them. Happiness is not exclusive to free will.
That's my really short and condensed take on it, and it's late. Hope it makes sense.
So your exact and full context is you? Does that make other people that have affected that full context also you?
Yes, I am my exact and full context. Things that are part of or played a role in my exact and full context are not also in and of themselves my exact and full context. So no, other people or other things that are part of or played a role in that full context are not me.
Why not, they are the progenitor of your future actions are they not?
Without them adding to your context even minutely would you have still ended up at the same absolutely deterministic end? How?
It's true that the "self" can be attributed to not only our bodies, but also our role in the communal organism of humanity, the world, etc., but we're severable from the gestalt and sure as heck can't survive being compressed to smaller than the radius of an electron field.
But those other folks are as absolutely integral to the determined outcome as you or I.
How are our actions severable from the gestalt other than arbitrarily?
Not our actions, our "self". Our influence remains wherever we were, but we're no longer active participants as individual living beings in any meaningful way when we're tossed into a the gravity of a billion suns.
What?
We're talking past each other. Free will, as I'm presenting it, isn't something that can survive going beyond the event horizon, because it's not something to which the concept of survival applies. Free will is like a walk. It's more of a happening than an object, if that distinction means anything to you.
Such as all the parts, because we live in an entirely non-deterministic universe?
Seriously people, quantum mechanics is real. It affects everything.
It's not super uncommon for people to view the self as a gestalt of not only our personal bodies and minds, but our place in the species, or even the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism
Just like you can toss an ant from the hive, you can toss a human from the planet.
However, it's a tangent, if a fascinating perspective.
Yeah but even if you toss the ant from the hive it still plays a part in the determinism of the hive into the future. Technically it just needs to have existed to play a role in moving the deterministic universe from one state to the next.
A progenitor is not its product. Like, a car factory makes cars, that doesn't mean the car factory is a car or the car a car factory. I am not my parents, my parents are not me. This is pretty trivial stuff, I don't know where you're getting these other ideas from
Quantum mechanics really don't enter into the conversation in a meaningful way unless you have evidence that quantum fluctuations are sapiant occurances.
Sure. Ripple effect and all that. But it's no longer an active participant.
"Free will' is not magic. In the absence of a soul, I present my definition of free will.
Free will is the ability for a being to make decisions that cannot be perfectly predicted for it as an individual being, which are informed by its prior experiences but not totally controlled by them. Free will must be governed by memory, not simply by the state variables which exist in the being (mass, temperature etc) and it must be capable of being unpredictable (IE, your response is never 100% certain other than for the most trivial systems) for the same set of external stimuli at different times, even if the underlying experience set of the being has not experienced significant change in the intervening time. Since the universe is not deterministic, and chaotic events do affect your brain over some timescales (somewhere between constantly, and taking days to create a random 'state' in you) I argue that humans have relevant free will in the universe we have. There's nothing magic to it, its just 'free enough' that its as free as something can be.
As an example. Your brain controls your breathing, BUT, almost everyone cannot order themselves to not breathe until they die. You do not have free will over whether or not you attempt to breath, even though your brain controls it. Conversely, when you approach a tree in the forest, you can choose to go around it to the left, or to the right, or just stop walking. I would advocate that in making that decision a human is informed by past experiences (Hmm, the left side is darker, maybe I'll go with the right...) but is not entirely predictable (eh, fuck it, I'm already closer to the left)
Honestly, I can't think of a 'freer will' than the one I've described in a real non-deterministic universe unless we brew up a soul and magically say, 'here's free will'
They seem like an argument for randomness of determination.
How could something determined at random be the product of (or result in) choice?
Because if my actions aren't my own and are entirely the result of the context then the context and all members of it are me and i'm them because i'm part of their context as well. Every piece of the deterministic universe is a part of moving the state of the deterministic universe forward.
If we're already saying yeah we're essentially complex dominoes run on physics and chemicals where do we put the edge of that dominoe display considering it undeniably exists in a still larger field of dominoes?
Do we limit its definition arbitrarily by its limited perception?