Sure. I’m not an expert or anything, but the term ‘neurogenesis’ would be what you want. I guess the fact that many neurons are formed in the womb, and last our whole lives still holds true, but the realization that at least some parts of the brain continuously generate new cells is significant.
From the introduction: ”For a long time, it was thought that the nervous system is fixed and incapable of regeneration. Although it is indeed true that most neurons in the brain are generated before birth and are never exchanged, it is now well established that new neurons are continuously generated by stem cells in at least two discrete regions in the brain throughout life in most mammals: the hippocampus—a seahorse-shaped structure underneath the cortex that is important for memory formation and cognitive functions; and the olfactory bulb (OB)—a structure located above the nasal cavity that is important for the sense of smell.”
To be honest, after reading a little more, I’m a little unclear on if ‘all taste buds taste all flavors’. I might be wrong to say it like that. I saw one thing that said there are actually different types of receptor cells, but they are not isolated into zones, and somewhat evenly distributed across the whole tongue.
It's completely unethical to have kids and like another commenter has said brings a great disadvantage economically. I would suggest to anyone to not follow your advice.
edit: I won't be further commenting on the topic because the same people asking everyone "when are you going to have kids like me?" are just going to downvote. Yes, I rather see an end to humankind because that ends suffering. Less suffering in a universe is better than a universe that experienced more. Yes, nobody cares about the ones that wish they never had been born because of whatever reason that was inflicted upon them.
I'm not intimately familiar with all the different strains of antinatalism, but I think that's kinda the point? an antinatalist would not consider funding existing people's retirements or possibly even the survival of the species to be sufficient justification for creating new conscious beings who cannot consent to their creation.
Seeing as a big chuck of what someone believes is culturally inherited from their parents, and thus hypothesizing that meme* survival partially follows parent-child relationships, I'd say that that's a problem that will end up self-correcting :)
* In the original Richard Dawkins sense, not in the funny gif sense.
Amusingly we have a case study for this: the Shakers.
"They practice a celibate and communal lifestyle, pacifism, uniform charismatic worship, and their model of equality of the sexes, which they institutionalized in their society in the 1780s."
yeah but you forgot about my platinum, enterprise-grade DNA. really good for the economy as a whole.
Other people are going to have kids, their kids will encounter hardships and need problem solvers among the pack. Its unethical to deprive their posterity of my web-scale® DNA.
That's what the corporations want you to believe because they want you to spend as much time and energy as possible being a cog in their machine and source the next generation of workers from the lowest bidder on the global scale.
What impact do you foresee any economic gains from childlessness having in 100 years, if your advice is followed universally? Who will inherit those gains?
I believe the context for the advice is directed to whoever is capable of having children. So, economic gains are meaningless to them when they're dead in 100 years.
Put another way: let's say everyone who is capable of children follows your advice. To whom are these economic gains meaningful in 100 years? Who would their parents be?
What you're implying is meaningless to the ones that are dead. So maybe you can now realize why I wrote my response and it was directed towards anyone considering conceiving a child.
OK, from a pure hedonistic view - let's say at some time in the future, there are no more humans left. Why would it make sense to invest anything into economic gain in the time before that happens? You'd rather run the economy into the ground to extract as much value as you could from it, before the end of human existence. You - or else someone else who is the last human alive - are "leaving something on the table", so to speak. Otherwise they are just leaving value around for wildlife.
In other words there would be a time, maybe dependent on the rate at which remaining humans can unwind the human economy, past which any effort at collective economic gain wouldn't be worth it.
I think of this as a non-issue; either my partner, or a friend, or a charity of choice will inherit my gains if I don't spend them all enjoying life first.
Can I just say we should really stop using these 'turf' labels, the flat-earthers, the anti-vaxxers, now this 'antinatilist' label.
It makes it seem like a binomial thing, you are either in my group or in the other. Discussion stops being about the ideas and more adversarial, focused on taking sides.
Also it creates a group identity which in my opinion makes it harder for people to change their minds based on discussion or new info.
If my aunt tells me vaccines are bad I might trust her. But if there is whole group of 'anti-vaxxer' people who make me feel good about myself then I suppose I am now an anti-vaxxer and that becomes an identity more so than an opinion which would be more fluid and mutable.
You might find the following interesting: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/choosing-children-ethical...
I, for one, would never bring another life into this world and while so much suffering occurs. It's ethical to adopt contrary to conceive children.
I am certain your parents had same ideas. Until they decided to have babies. Having kids is powerful natural drive after finding suitable enough mates.
Statistically, you will have children in future, if you’re under 30 right now.
> Please go out and meet people, men, women, in real life.
That's horrible advice, we're in a pandemic. But when it's over I would highly suggest taking your own advice. If you are really discussing in good faith and genuinely have never met or heard of a person who has chosen to go through life without having kids, to the point of legitimately not believing that such people even exist, it sounds like your world has been very small. I wish you the best of luck with expanding it.
Deflecting reality is not going to make it less real.
You exist because your parents make babies. All these so called people that claim they don’t want kids exist, because their parents make babies. Men and women make babies, because it is core biological drive in reality. No amount of rationalization will change reality.
Reality will bite people on their butt, one way or another. Biological drive will overcome any belief or thoughts, when circumstances become better for people.
We have everything from published papers to anecdotal accounts/lived experiences about people who chose not to have children. Completely denying that such people exist seems borderline delusional. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0192513X2094990...
It really does not sound like you are even trying to make any kind of legitimate argument and are just trolling at this point, I'm convinced this is a case of willful ignorance. So I'll leave this comment thread here; have a nice day.
Complete utter nonsense. Humans are as conscious as the hands on a clock moving from the gears that control them. Yes, there's no reason for anyone to believe the electrons making the hands on a clock, aren't aware of forces interacting with them at any given moment and the same can be said about humans.
I don't really understand the ending. Turning the simulation off could in a way be the morally right decision. Depends on how you think about suffering in the simulation. Some will suffer and what about them? That's why I think it's better to shut off the simulation.
It's amusing to observe "Location-Based Pay" just pop into existence and for the only purpose of lowering the wage of whoever's hired. Programmers have been capable of working from home since the internet matured. Value doesn't comes from location, instead it's from a programmer's skill and ability of simplifying the task needed to be completed by maintainable code. There's no serious argument for location-based pay. Yes, there's people all over the world. Nothing has changed recently besides programmers being forced to work from home because of the pandemic.
René Descartes ruined the perception and healthcare of mental illness. Patients and even a few doctors would be more informed if they understood the symptoms of mental illness occur because of physical changes in the brain. Instead a misinformed belief of a chemical imbalance exists and is assumed as a truth by some physicians & nurses.
Society is basically brainwashed into believing everyone has free will. The result is that people with the most capital prosper and I assume the foregoing wouldn't be the case if everyone was a determinist.
Mentally ill person here. I haven’t heard a mental health professional use the phrase ‘chemical imbalance’ or anything similar in 20 years. It’s my understanding it has been deprecated. It’s mostly repeated by laypeople in ignorance. It’s hard to flush something like that out of the popular lexicon, once established.
There’s a lot of maddeningly persistent misinformation about mental health on Internet forums.
They have a clear incentive to exaggerate a) the effectiveness of the drugs, and b) how well they understand how they work. There is an important distinction between knowing how drugs affect brain chemistry, vs knowing how they alleviate symptoms. The latter is still more empirical than theoretical.
Person with gender dysphoria here. I've still heard the phrase in Canada by nurses & staff. Also heard it several years ago when living in USA by doctors & staff. Unsure why you think I was referring to internet forums? I thought those were deprecated since 2009.
Unsure why you're linking that. Do you not realize by my first comment that I'm describing the theory as nonsense compared to what I wrote? edit: ah thanks for the clarification.
My intent was to support your comment, not contradict it. By reassuring anyone who might read this that the chemical imbalance angle has rightly fallen out of favor.
> if they understood the symptoms of mental illness occur because of physical changes in the brain. Instead a misinformed belief of a chemical imbalance exists
What's the difference? And how does that difference impact how people are treated by physicians and nurses?
I read “physical changes” as structural changes in neurons and neural connections themselves, as opposed to the (at least popular) thinking that mental illness is down to imbalances in neurotransmitters. There’s at least some research around this related to addiction, namely that overexpression of ΔFosB produces changes to neurons in the reward pathways.
It sounds like a very naive and simplistic distinction. Neurochemicals and the structure of the neurons themselves are interrelated in very complex ways.
> Society is basically brainwashed into believing everyone has free will. The result is that people with the most capital prosper and I assume the foregoing wouldn't be the case if everyone was a determinist.
Why do you assume this? If everyone believed in determinism rather than free will, couldn't those with the most capital (deterministically) say "Well, that's just the way it should be. They can't choose to be different."
I'm not inclined to think that will is all that free, but I can't seem to see the connection between that and capitalism.
The understanding of free will being an "illusion" opens a few doors for approaching life. One of them being how society is structured and regarding healthcare, housing, finances, education..
Anyway, people cast their votes by the beliefs as well and currently we're living in social systems designed from the belief of have free will. The idea of someone earned what they have, contrary to someone worse off and people aren't just destined by their life circumstances to end up homeless. Genetics, environmental factors and all proceeding moments are factored from the preceding forces.
Well, when you realize the foregoing about free will is untrue and you really take the time to adapt your thinking to the understanding of free will being illusion. I assume you become more compassionate because you're actually observing reality for how it truly is awful to some and those people had no control for their misfortune. I know from my own life when I understood it took a few years to truly get "it" but after I deeply feel more empathetic and disgusted by the current systems that refuse people the medical help they need or getting someone shelter & food.
Everyone is just assigned a life at birth without any say and that's the same to what happens after without any real control existing to alter your destiny. So a nihilist can say well so what?..everything is just destined. But that doesn't mean we should keep stalling people from being educated of how reality happens to be and designing better social systems that adapt to the true reality of the universe. Anyway that's my long rant/suggestion on it.
> when you realize the foregoing about free will is untrue and you really take the time to adapt your thinking to the understanding of free will being illusion. I assume you become more compassionate
You assume wrong. The most brutal totalitarian governments in history have been built on the same understanding of humans that you describe. So that understanding can go either way: it can make you more compassionate, or it can make you much less so.
Free will is best understood not as a "fact" but as a right. Every person has the right to make their own choices instead of someone else making those choices for them. And the most dehumanizing thing you can tell a person is that they are "destined by circumstances" (your phrase) to be in the situation they are in, instead of having the power to change it by the choices they make.
Sure, the power to make one's own choices is not unlimited. We can't choose to not be affected by gravity. We can't choose to be omnipotent or omniscient. And, most important, we can't choose how other people will make their own choices (more on that below). But that doesn't change the fact that people do make choices, and can change their situation by doing so. The proper role of compassion and charity is to help empower people to make better choices for themselves.
And the proper understanding of situations where some people are deprived of basic necessities through no fault of their own is not that it was just "destined by circumstances", but that other people made choices that created those situations. Trying to hand-wave that away and pretend that things like famines and homelessness are just accidents of nature, instead of products of deliberate choices made by particular people in power--the whole "how society is structured" that you slide by without really looking at where it comes from--only makes those problems worse.
Feel free to email me for further discussion. I have the impression you don't understand my definition of free will compared to your own definition. I will express here that the idea of making a conclusion by the past in history isn't fair or even comparable to what I could argue against people doing under the belief that people have free will. Anyway I'm not convinced by what you've expressed against my views and would appreciate a longer discussion by email if you're up to it. I fundamentally think it's morally wrong to keep someone in the dark from reality by deceiving them about their will or life outcome and especially if that person is homeless or suicidal for example.
How does that follow from a belief that people have free will? Is it somehow impossible for people who have free will to traffic in other human beings or force them into starvation? I don't see the logic.
Of course you are implicitly accusing those who "believe in free will" of saying that being trafficked or starving are the person's own fault; but I don't see the logic of that either. There is no requirement that believing in free will requires focusing on only one person's choices. The human traffickers and the corrupt leaders who allow their people to starve are making choices too--bad ones. And part of believing that people have free will is being willing to call a spade a spade when people make bad choices.
Because believing in free will as commonly referred to means it's ok to choose not to do something about bad behavior happening in the world. It's not ok to stand by and let child trafficking happen.
> believing in free will as commonly referred to means it's ok to choose not to do something about bad behavior happening in the world.
Yes, that's true. However...
> It's not ok to stand by and let child trafficking happen.
...unless child trafficking is happening right in front of you, you're not "standing by". There are a zillion bad things always happening around the world. Are we all supposed to stop all of them? And how would not believing in free will help stop all of them? I don't see how that follows at all.
Furthermore, let's say we do stop believing in free will; then what? Do we all get forced to drop everything else in our lives and go stop child trafficking? Says who? There is no way to even implement a scheme like that unless someone makes a choice and decides what needs to be stopped and tells others to go stop it. Calling this "not believing in free will" strikes me as pointless at best, and deliberate manipulation at worst.
Actually, yes, we should all stop what we are doing and fight child trafficking immediately. To argue anything else is a morally indefensible position.
Now, you might say you fight child trafficking currently because you vote for people who make the laws that say it's illegal and "dust your hands", but yet it's not enough because child trafficking still happens. At the end of the day, you are ok with child trafficking happening because, "Well, at least I choose not to traffick children, so that's enough."
Well, I am debating against someone who claims free will is what will stop child trafficking. If I can convince you to move your position to mine, I can't influence others to also move to my position, and if all people end up viewing it similarly to me, I believe we will solve child trafficking.
> I am debating against someone who claims free will is what will stop child trafficking.
I have made no such claim. I have said that, on net, a society where people's right to make free choices is respected will have less suffering and more good things than a society where it isn't. But that doesn't mean no bad things will ever happen in the former type of society. Nor is respecting others' right to make free choices the same as "free will" by itself.
If you can't see why respecting other people's right to make free choices is inconsistent with child trafficking, isn't it obvious? Child traffickers don't respect the right to make free choices of the children they traffic in. So getting more people to respect other people's right to make free choices would obviously reduce the prevalence of child trafficking.
Not it wouldn't and our society is largely a result of your way of thinking. We have yet to see how a society that advocates determinism would turn out.
> our society is largely a result of your way of thinking
It most certainly is not. Our society refuses to respect people's right to freedom of choice in all kinds of ways. And most of those ways can't even be justified on the grounds of harm to others, which is where your big sticking point seems to be. Our society throws people in jail just for having drugs in their possession, even if they haven't harmed anyone and are not threatening anyone. The poster I originally responded to in this thread had therapy they didn't want forced on them by their family, for something they didn't even think was a problem and which certainly didn't make them a threat of harm to anyone, and our society was just fine with that. From what I can see, in your vision of the ideal society, that would be happening all over the place.
> We have yet to see how a society that advocates determinism would turn out.
Sure we have. The Soviet Union was based on ideas like the ones you are advocating. So is Communist China today. Perhaps you want to live in Communist China; if so, you're welcome to move there (unless of course you already live there). I don't.
No, in your society, the one we live in right now, it is already happening. People have others choices imposed on them. A parent thrusts their choices onto their children often to much detriment as the aforementioned person.
In a society I'm proposing, those kind of choices aren't able to be thrusted on a person because the idea that you can choose for someone is removed. It simply is behavior that is exhibited, and we understand that behavior enough to change it or we need to learn more to understand the behavior. Your reality, the current one we live in, is the nightmare for some people.
The Soviet Union and Communist China, terms you want to use to describe them, do not sound like what I am advocating in the slightest. I'm advocating that we acknowledge the underlying reality that we are not free to make choices. There is only the illusion our brains create. How you interpret that is on you. It has nothing to do with other countries or systems of government. Stop trying to drag in straw mans because your ideas lack substance.
> in your society, the one we live in right now, it is already happening. People have others choices imposed on them.
Oh, for goodness' sake. I've already agreed that this is the case. I just don't think it means our society is based on respecting other people's freedom to choose. Are you not even reading what I post?
> In a society I'm proposing, those kind of choices aren't able to be thrusted on a person because the idea that you can choose for someone is removed.
Since you and I don't even agree on what "choice" means, I think we need to taboo that word for this discussion, because to me, what you are saying here looks like pure sophistry given as an excuse to allow you to do whatever you want to people without their consent--in other words, as I said, tyranny worse than the worst tyranny in history. The rest of your post has the same problem.
Elsewhere in this discussion, you said that if I had cancer, you would rearrange my brain if you thought it would cure the cancer. And I asked you a question in response. Your answer to that question will help me to understand whether the issue we are having here is just a matter of a difference in terminology, or a fundamental difference in viewpoint. You can respond where I asked the question, or here.
I did there. Let's consolidate our discussion to just a back and forth on that thread if you want to continue the discussion, which I thoroughly hope you do.
What would you rather me be doing to fight it? Be on TV everyday as single handedly bringing in the bad guys who are making their "choices" to traffick children? Are you ok with their "choices" to hurt children? Why aren't you on TV everyday bringing the bad guys into jail?
Honest answer? You and I, as individuals, can't fight it unless we are right there when it happens. As I have said, more than once now, the fact that we can make choices does not make us omnipotent.
In any case, I'm not the one that is saying everyone should drop everything and go fight child trafficking. You are. I am simply pointing out that you are not actually doing what you claim everyone should be doing.
We can't fight it unless it happens right in front of us? We can donate to organizations that do have the stated purpose. We can vote for politicians who propose laws and policies that make it extremely difficult for it to happen. How are you powerless to do anything about it unless it happens "right in front of you"?
And I'm pointing out how in my capacity I am doing everything I can to fight it. Part of that is convincing your (or more likely others reading this), that your position is wrong.
> We can donate to organizations that do have the stated purpose. We can vote for politicians who propose laws and policies that make it extremely difficult for it to happen.
Sure, if we think such organizations and politicians actually exist. (I'm skeptical that they actually do, but I'm willing to assume they do for the sake of this discussion.) But to me, that doesn't count as "drop everything you're doing and fight", which is what you said earlier that everyone should be doing. If what you meant by "drop everything you're doing and fight" is just "support organizations and leaders that you think will improve the situation", then I don't disagree with your suggestion as a general thing (though I might disagree with your specific selection of which organizations and politicians to support), but I think your choice of words was a very poor one. To most people, "drop everything you're doing and fight" means "completely rearrange your life so you are spending all of your time and effort fighting this problem".
And you would be wrong then, as most people define free will as the ability to actually control one's own actions rather than participate in a false world view where those "choices" are viewed as the important part of defining free will.
And I do ignore it. Not it of spite, but because it fails to hold up to intense rigor and scrutiny.
> I have the impression you don't understand my definition of free will compared to your own definition.
I think you are trading on the ambiguity in the term "free will" to avoid having to confront the actual issues involved. That's why I used the less ambiguous term "making choices".
If you don't think people can ever make choices that make a difference in their situation, then you and I have a fundamental disagreement that I don't think will get resolved by any discussion. Also, if that's your belief, I think you are being inconsistent; you talk about "designing better social systems", but that very process involves people making choices that will make a difference in their situation (as well as the situation of many, many other people).
If you just think the amount of difference a person can make in their situation by making choices varies with the situation, of course I agree with that. But that's not a problem that can be fixed by "designing better social systems". It can only be fixed by being willing to call a spade a spade when people in power make choices that disempower others, so that people in power can be stopped from doing that. The biggest barrier to people being able to change their situation by making choices is restrictions put on them by other people, not some abstract claim about free will being an illusion. "Designing social systems" makes that problem worse, not better.
> I fundamentally think it's morally wrong to keep someone in the dark from reality by deceiving them about their will or life outcome
I think you are confusing your opinions with "reality". Telling people they don't have free will, or that free will is an illusion, is just as much of an opinion as telling them they do have free will. Neither is a statement of "reality". That's why I say free will is best viewed as a right: because in my opinion, believing that people have free will is respecting their right to make their own choices, and believing that people don't have free will is not respecting that right--which just means arrogating to yourself the power to make choices that disempower them. Respecting people's right to make choices is not a factual claim about people; it's a policy, which I think should be adopted because it will end up helping people.
> especially if that person is homeless or suicidal for example
I don't see how it's any help to a person who is homeless or suicidal to tell them free will is an illusion. Nor would it be any help to tell them it isn't. A person who is homeless or suicidal has much more pressing things to think about than whether or not free will is an illusion. And helping such a person has nothing at all to do with your own opinions or beliefs, much less foisting them on others in the guise of "telling them about reality".
Claiming a different definition of free will does not make you right about free will existing.
At the fundamental levels of reality, free will does not exist. It isn't even meaningful to talk about. Particles react to their environment. That's it.
You are just a giant collection of particles reacting to it's environment. You will never be able to be anything other than a giant collection of particles reacting to it's environment.
Moving this collection of particles from one area that is unpleasant, say a really cold environment, to one that is warm is not an exercise in free will. It is largely a predictable process based on a sequence of events occurring within the collection of particles.
Defining free will as "making choices", such as building a fire to warm your house because you are cold is not proving free will exists. It intentionally lies about the fundamental nature of reality that you don't have to. Yes we make choices as far as we can tell from our experience of reality. But that doesn't disconnect you from the underlying reality that it is not up to you what your particles do.
> Claiming a different definition of free will does not make you right about free will existing.
You are missing my point. I explicitly said that I used a different term, "making choices", instead of the term "free will", exactly because it allows one to avoid all the pointless arguing about whether free will "exists" or not.
> Defining free will as "making choices", such as building a fire to warm your house because you are cold is not proving free will exists.
Again, you are missing the point. Sure, you can say that "free will" doesn't exist because "particles react to their environment". And my response is, who cares? Sure, people are ultimately made of particles reacting to their environment. That doesn't mean they can't make choices, and it doesn't mean the choices they make don't make a difference, to themselves and to others. It doesn't mean that some people's bad choices don't cause other people to suffer. It is perfectly possible to both understand that, at a microphysical level, everything is "particles reacting to their environment", and that, at a personal level, people make choices and their choices have consequences. And if you focus solely on the former and ignore the latter, the result is worse consequences, not better ones.
Free will does not exist, so telling people they have a form of free will called "making choices" is a misdirection. You aren't actively making choices even if you feel like you are. You are only reacting to the stimulus you receive from the environment. Change the stimulus, and the behavior changes.
Your definition of free will is useless because it doesn't accurately reflect the reality. I make what "feels" like a choice, but it isn't really a choice.
This kind of reasoning actually does lead to better consequences, not worse.
You can disagree. You can assert that believing people can't make choices in a true sense of free will causes other to suffer. You can also be dismissed for said assertion without providing any evidence.
For instance, if your assertion is true, why do I, as someone who does not believe I make my own choices, do no harm to others? Shouldn't I be on a killing spree according to your logic? Shouldn't I be repressing and hurting people left and right? All I have to do is prove it's possible to not believe you make your own choices and not do harm. That single data point is enough to prove your claims wrong.
> You can assert that believing people can't make choices in a true sense of free will causes other to suffer.
I didn't assert anything about "believing people can't make choices in a true sense of free will". Nor did I assert anything about individual cases.
Since you are apparently unable to properly understand statements that use terms like "choice", I will rephrase my assertion using your ultra-physicalist language:
There are causal processes that happen inside human brains. Those causal processes have effects outside of the particular human brains in which they take place. Those effects can include effects on what happens to the particular human in whose brain the causal processes are taking place, and effects on other humans besides that particular human.
The question is whether the causal processes that happen inside a particular human's brain have a much greater impact, on net, on what happens to that particular human, than causal processes that happen in other human brains; or, by contrast, whether causal processes that happen in other human brains have a much greater impact, on net, on what happens to that particular human.
My assertion is that a society in which the former is the case will have less human suffering, and more good things, than a society in which the latter is the case.
Note that the effects the causal processes inside human brains have outside those brains, whether on that particular human or on other humans, happen regardless of the beliefs held by the particular human in whose brain the causal processes are happening, unless you count the beliefs themselves as part of the causal processes. Which is fine with me personally, but in fact, in your ultra-physicalist language, the word "belief" is just as out of place as the word "choice"; in your ultra-physicalist language, people don't have beliefs any more than they make choices. But the causal processes happening in their brains have the effects they have regardless of what language you use to describe them. Using obfuscatory ultra-physicalist language to describe them, instead of the common, intuitive language of beliefs and choices that everyone understands, just makes it harder to think clearly about what is going on. It's like doing arithmetic using Roman numerals; yes, it's possible, but it's just making things much harder than they need to be for no good reason.
How can you claim things that happen inside the human brain have causal influences on things outside the brain and yet at the same time ignore the causal influences the outside world has on the internal brain processes? Information flow is a two way street if it can happen in one direction as far as I am aware. What you seem to not grasp is the idea that external events can influence your behavior.
> How can you claim things that happen inside the human brain have causal influences on things outside the brain and yet at the same time ignore the causal influences the outside world has on the internal brain processes?
I have done no such thing. Obviously the causal influences go both ways.
> What you seem to not grasp is the idea that external events can influence your behavior.
What you seem not to grasp is that one of the key roles that causal processes inside a person's brain play is to control how external events influence the person's behavior. The brain is not just a big switchboard where input A always leads to output B. Of course, vastly oversimplifying what actually happens in people's brains in order to avoid having to question one's theoretical model is a common mistake, going back at least to B. F. Skinner.
Can you ever willfully choose option C, if you never knew or had anything lead you to think that option C was even an option?
Or better yet, can you willfully imagine a new color that's not in any way related to the colors or any combination of colors you've already seen before? Or further, not related to ANY CONCEPT you're already aware of?
You can't. But if you could, how would you ever describe it to someone? After all, if you describe this new color using other ideas you're already acquainted with, then it is thus in some way related to those very ideas used to describe it...
This shows that, any "new" ideas you imagine, are nothing but a combination of ideas you're already familiar with. Otherwise, to become familiar with ideas that are not in any way related to what you're already familiar with, can ONLY come from your senses. Hence, all concepts/thoughts/ideas you ever have ultimately stem from your senses (seeing, hearing, etc).
Since all ideas ultimately originate from our senses, then the thoughts we have and decisions we make are ultimately subject to the stimuli inputted to us. Thus we are as mechanical as anything else in this world. Fundamentally no different than a rock in how it operates on the physical stimuli inputted on it. Granted we are much more complex than a rock and hence have much more complex responses to our stimuli, but nonetheless just as deterministic.
The brain may attempt to control what's external to it, but the way it does so has been programmed from the stimuli inputted on it (from DNA instructions, to nutrition, to physical stimuli).
Yes it is, because you are defining free will to be the illusion of choice, and that is not the common understanding of what free will means. You are intentionally misleading people who will read your comments about "free will" as a justification to continue believing free will actually exists.
What is invalid about them? You claim free will exists. Yet if you admit "free will" is simply believing you have a choice when the underlying reality is that you don't actually have a choice, only the illusion of it, you are intentionally not admitting the truth which is your definition of free will is a LIE!
External events are the only meaningful thing you can experience. Your whole internal world is built entirely around what you experience externally. It's why you don't wall around talking about dead people waking amongst us without having psychologists commit you to intuitions.
> why is my outcome not worse for believing I don't have free will?
You still don't get it. Your brain is doing the thing that I call "making choices", but which I called "causal processes" because you have trouble with words like "choices", whether you believe in free will or not. Those causal processes in your brain have a significant effect on your outcomes, whether you believe in free will or not. And how much of an effect the causal processes in your brain have on your outcomes, as compared with the effect that causal processes in other people's brains have on your outcomes, which is the thing I have said is important, has little or nothing to do directly with whether you or anyone else "believes in free will". It does have to do with whether you and other people respect other people's right to make choices, which I have also said is important.
But the has nothing to do with the idea that one has free will, only that I exhibit behavior that allows you to pursue your own desires, I.E I'm not actively harming you or putting you into prison. Redefine what free will means all you want, it doesn't make your arguments any more true.
Theoretically, if I could fix your brain without you even being aware of it so that you don't die from brain cancer, I would.
If I had to physically do it via surgery like our best attempts in science can do today, I would operate if you came to the hospital for the procedure.
When it comes to altering your brain so that you like vanilla instead of chocolate, I would not do that. Some things require consent absolutely. Some things do not, like resuscitating a person if you are an EMT and sworn to do no harm. Consent isn't the end all be all of the debate, not by a long shot.
For example, do you ask the murder to consent to going to jail or do you put the murderer in jail against their will?
> Theoretically, if I could fix your brain without you even being aware of it so that you don't die from brain cancer, I would.
Am I not even aware of it because I'm unconscious and incapacitated, and you're asking the consent of someone else who is empowered (say by my medical power of attorney) to give consent on my behalf?
Or am I not even aware of it because you have a stealthy way of doing it that I can't perceive even though I'm conscious?
I suspect it's the latter, but I'd like you to confirm.
> If I had to physically do it via surgery like our best attempts in science can do today, I would operate if you came to the hospital for the procedure.
Is this because you think it's important that I consent to the procedure, or just because our limited technology of today won't let you do it in a way I can't perceive at all?
Again, I suspect it's the latter, but I'd like you to confirm.
> When it comes to altering your brain so that you like vanilla instead of chocolate, I would not do that. Some things require consent absolutely. Some things do not, like resuscitating a person if you are an EMT and sworn to do no harm.
Oh, so you do think consent is important in some cases? Then where do you draw the line? I get the EMT resuscitating a person, that's an easy case--but it's an easy case because there is a default presumption that if the person were able to consent to being resuscitated, they would. But you are also saying (I think--see above) that you would cure my brain cancer without my consent if you could. Where's the line between that and you not being willing to alter my brain so I like vanilla instead of chocolate?
> do you ask the murder to consent to going to jail or do you put the murderer in jail against their will?
The murderer has already harmed others. That's where I am drawing the line about when consent is no longer required to imprison them.
The later for both, yes, and the line is when you make a judgment for what is likely to happen as a result of current events. If you have the power to make a better outcome happen 90 percent of the time versus 80 percent of the time, you choose 90 percent even if you are wrong some of the time. No ones has perfect information, yet we still make decisions that alter things despite perfect information. We just do the best we can, and sometimes that means we get ot wrong but should be moving in the better direction whenever possible.
The main reason for me of suggesting email is because I simply don't find writing responses on HackerNews as a great medium to have a conversation that likely will be lengthy. Basically, there's no good way to quote or even make a list with bullets and I prefer my macOS mail interface than a html textbox.
The phrase "making choices" is just semantics for the topic of free will being an illusion. There's no different outcome for how a person will live from start to end. That's the reality we live. Science hasn't proven otherwise and the current evidence from neuroscience suggests we don't have free will. Even logically it's impossible to imagine free will being possible when you're inside a system and every thought or act you perform is because of the system you're in. People are no different from water choosing to flow downstream.
Knowledge is power in society. Does it change your fate? The answer is no but generations do get better than the past because humans are progressing from knowledge. So the argument I think we truly are having is whether the norm of the populace should be deceived that they have free will or told the truth that there is no free will.
You already know what I believe the answer is for the foregoing. I have my own personal reasons as well. My life was fairly damaged by people that believed in free will because of religion and after many years of self reflection. I realized they were in fact acting mentally ill because of their belief that people make choices when regarding one's sexual orientation and gender identity.
I don't blame them or ever want to desire they had free will because I would've sought vengeance for the conversion therapy I suffered. Instead I'm glad fate had me realize they weren't to blame but how the universe unraveled and no individual had any power over how they came to be. I personally don't think that means people should be left scot free when they violate others. I think the social systems just need to change to a rehabilitation system like how the healthcare system treats people that get sick. It just happens in life and the systems are what make people behave the best and have the best life contrary to other systems.
Anyway I'm writing in a text box and if you want to have lengthy discussion about it. I really do enjoy email back & forth about it. I personally could probably chat about the topic in-person and never get bored about it.
Thanks. I felt lucky to read your responses to the person that's stuck on semantics or by whatever force(s) that make him assume he has choices when there's no choices.
Majority of people I've been able to have the discussion with do eventually understand free will is an illusion and "making choices" is just a human expression that doesn't describe reality. So, I think it's possible that one day determinists will out number free will believers. Would be nice to have been born into such a society that's modern and well structured for everyone's health with a dream of equality.
Btw, I have cancer so I don't have as much energy and cannot write on HackerNews as much as I used to be able to. Once again, thanks for writing what you did and even when it was just by fate.
Ahh to have been born into a society that is free of misinformation and the willing propagation of it indeed would be something else.
I'm sorry you have cancer. =/ I wish we would have figured this one out by now but it seems we are more interested in how to sell batteries instantly over the internet more than we care about solving the medical problems of others. We are still a very self centered form of life for the moment. I wish you the best of luck and if I can donate at all to your fight against cancer, I hope my small contribution would make a difference none the less.
I'm not getting treatment because life has never been great by being disfigured from the wrong puberty and while remembering the conversion therapy with everything else that happened back then.
I'm now somewhat curious if your understanding of not having free will makes you okay with death as well? I've had a few conversations with my Oncologist and most patients of his are really fearful of death.
I personally think under different circumstances life would've been amazing to know free will is an illusion in my younger years for also having a stronger mentality of protecting myself from people I wanted to love but were really ill in a controlling way of thinking choices are everything. That's why I think understanding free will is an illusion allows oneself to have a better life even if everything is fated. Since that added information will make a person be able to realize how they need to adjust when they can, improve realization of why others are acting ill towards them and maybe even mental health would really benefit from it. I think that because I was surrounded by people that would sit & pray and well that never did anything lol.
I am Okay with death not necessarily because of my views on free will being an illusion (which I think it can help people cope with death), but my far more potent though on death is that I see it exactly as before I was born. I do not remember before I was born, and therefor I'm just as likely to not remember my death, but one thing is for sure.
I can enjoy whatever slice of infinitesmially small time I have here on Earth, or I can not exist faster than what nature is trying to do to me. I'll continue to exist for as long as I can simply to spite it all and make my time here as long as possible, even if ultimately I would later realize I would have liked to end it sooner, I simply have made this a resolute position I will not falter on and will strive to find a way to make this existence as pleasant for me and others as I am physically and mentally capable of. Who knows if I will succeed, but I'm gonna try my hardest to be like that.
> The phrase "making choices" is just semantics for the topic of free will being an illusion.
I disagree. See my response to Layke1123 just now.
> Knowledge is power in society. Does it change your fate? The answer is no
Again, I disagree; see my response to Layke1123 just now. I understand the attitude you are taking; I just don't think it's a good idea. Believing this will cause more harm and more suffering. More on that below.
> I realized they were in fact acting mentally ill because of their belief that people make choices when regarding one's sexual orientation and gender identity.
I'm very sorry you went through what you went through. And how you deal with it personally, in your own life, is of course entirely your choice. But that very observation (see the irony?) illustrates the error in the general conclusion you are drawing from it.
Even if people's sexual orientation and gender identity are not choices they make (which I agree they aren't), that doesn't mean there are no choices at all, period. For example, even if you can't choose your sexual orientation, you still choose who you partner with, and those choices make a difference. And that's not all; see further comments below.
> I don't blame them or ever want to desire they had free will because I would've sought vengeance for the conversion therapy I suffered. Instead I'm glad fate had me realize they weren't to blame but how the universe unraveled and no individual had any power over how they came to be.
First, as your very next sentence illustrates--"I personally don't think that means people should be left scot free when they violate others."--you admit that the matter of vengeance is separate from the question of choice. Whether or not people make choices is a separate question from how we should respond to what people do.
Second, even if your family didn't choose the religion they got brought up in, or the beliefs that religion inculcated in them, they did choose to put you through the ordeal they put you through. They could have chosen otherwise. What's more, they themselves might not have realized that they could have chosen otherwise (more irony)--those very same religious beliefs quite possibly included the belief that they were forced to do what they did, and if they had instead believed they had free will, the ability to make their own choices, they might have stopped to think instead of just acting automatically on their beliefs about sexual orientation and gender identity. In other words, they were blaming you for what they claimed was your choice (when it wasn't), but they were also refusing to admit their own ability to make choices and that those choices affected you. Whatever that is, it is not a simple "belief in free will" and wouldn't be fixed by a simple eradication of "belief in free will".
> I think the social systems just need to change to a rehabilitation system like how the healthcare system treats people that get sick.
But that system is screwed up as well. Homosexuality used to be defined as "sickness"--and the system then forcibly medicated people with sex hormones to "cure" them. (Look up what happened to Alan Turing, arguably one of the best mathematicians of the 20th century.) And don't even get me started on all the other ways the healthcare system disempowers people and thereby makes their condition worse instead of better.
The only way to avoid having people be abused is to respect their freedom of choice. What should happen in cases like yours is that the person themselves should choose how they want to deal with whatever it is they are dealing with. Their family shouldn't dictate it to them. No "system" should dictate it to them. No "system" should label them, whether it's labeled as "sickness" or "non-standard sexual orientation" or "gender dysphoria" or whatever. No system should tell them they need "rehabilitation". If people ask for a particular kind of help or care, that's fine; but a belief like "free will doesn't exist" has always been a handy excuse for others or "the system" to force "treatment" on people and abuse them.
> I'm very sorry you went through what you went through. And how you deal with it personally, in your own life, is of course entirely your choice. But that very observation (see the irony?) illustrates the error in the general conclusion you are drawing from it.
No. I didn't have a choice at all. You keep using the word "choice" or assuming it when there's no choice and I'll repeat there's truly no choice. I think or act from a set of unique forces that interacted upon me in the past and even now. The only possibility things could've been different is if the starting point of the universe made the unique set of forces different and resulted in a different outcome because of it. Similar to everything else you write, I disagree.
I also am aware that the "feeling" I have from what happened to me and how I became aware about free will being illusion.. is outside my control as well like everything else in life. Anyway I think you're not willing to have a lengthy discussion by email and so for some reason by fate that won't happen. I'm always up for the emails though because it's an interesting topic that some people are destined to grasp while others aren't.
> I think you're not willing to have a lengthy discussion by email
Correct. I'm sorry you had to go through what you went through (and I'm sorry you have cancer and have to deal with that too, I saw your post upthread about that). I wish you the best, and I will leave it at that.
Your reasoning defeats itself. No system should tell people they need "rehabilitation", and yet you still support prisons that try to "rehabilitate" prisoners.
People do not have choices. They are particles reacting to their environment, and what you describe as a "choice" is actually a carefully choreographed cascade of chain reactions. You can attribute a sense of "making choices" to that all you want, it doesn't change the fact that if I interject into that process and stop any one piece of that chain reaction, your behavior is altered.
You only have the illusion of free will, because you don't understand exactly how the system works. You brain has hallucinated not just the outside world, but your internal world as well. It is inescapable, and rather than fight it, you should embrace it like some us do and learn to operate in this new mental paradigm, not out right reject it because you fail to be able to operate in that space.
The fact that I exist is the only evidence you need to show that "not believing in free will" doesn't lead to your prediction of "worse outcome".
> you still support prisons that try to "rehabilitate" prisoners
You don't get to declare by fiat what I support and what I don't. The fact that I can make choices does not make me omnipotent. You are simply failing to recognize the fact that everybody makes choices--including the people who set up our current prison system and who keep it running. If the prisons they are running are abusing people, that is their responsibility, because they are the ones that made those choices.
> you should embrace it like some us do and learn to operate in this new mental paradigm
I don't understand what "new mental paradigm" you are even describing. But even without understanding it, I can still ask an obvious question: has this "new mental paradigm" enabled you to fix the prison problem you describe? If so, how?
I didn't declare it by fiat. You claimed no system should dictate how you behave, and yet you dictate how a person should behave. Your own argument defeats itself.
"New mental paradigm" means you don't think like you used to. I.E., if you were ever religious, that was one mental paradigm. If you ever lose your religious beliefs, now you have a new mental paradigm to understand the world and operate in it.
As for fixing the prison problem, it absolutely does. It means what we have decided as acceptable public behavior is to be cultivated, and if we can remove the part of your brain that wants to violently subject others your will, we excise it and then you suddenly become a productive member of civilized society again. It's not even your whole being, just a small part of your collection of particles that we annihilate.
Putting a person in prison because, say, they murdered someone, is not dictating how they should behave. It is imposing a consequence on their behavior.
Evidently you are unable to tell the difference between those two things. That doesn't mean there isn't one.
> As for fixing the prison problem, it absolutely does.
You are either extremely ignorant and naive, or trolling. Anyone who has seen One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest has seen an excellent depiction of what happens when people who think the way you describe actually get the power to implement their ideas. No, thanks.
Forcing consequences on a person is absolutely imposing your values and beliefs onto said person. All it a consequence a you want, at the end of they day you are removing their ability to choose murder.
As for your One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest comment, next I expect you to tell me Whote Walkers are headed my way because narrative episodes are so indicative of what happens in the real world. /s
> at the end of they day you are removing their ability to choose murder.
No, I'm not, because the consequence only gets imposed after they have made that choice. Removing their ability to choose murder would mean changing them beforehand so they don't choose to murder in the first place. Which, if it can be done while respecting their right to freedom of choice, would of course be vastly preferable.
You can't respect someone's freedom to murder without approving of said murder. You actually do not believe what you are saying or are being intentionally obtuse.
If you could prevent the unlawful murder of someone, you don't give a damn about their choice. You are making the choice for them by saying it is not allowed. Your implementation of that forced choice is currently handled by the law. In the future, it might be before they are even able to generate a murderous impulse.
> You can't respect someone's freedom to murder without approving of said murder.
Sorry, but I disagree.
> You actually do not believe what you are saying or are being intentionally obtuse.
No, I just have a viewpoint that you apparently can't understand.
> Your implementation of that forced choice is currently handled by the law.
This is obvious nonsense since having a law against murder does not prevent someone from committing a murder. It just imposes a punishment on them afterwards.
> In the future, it might be before they are even able to generate a murderous impulse.
Which is very, very different from the current scheme of law we have now. And, as I have said elsewhere in this discussion, to me looks like tyranny worse than the worst tyrannies in history.
So you think it is value added to society for a person to be able to murder someone?
I understand it fine. It's objectively wrong.
Imposing a punishment is PRIMARILY a preventative action. The threat of being thrown in jail or even executed is not to retroactively deal with the situation, but to give people an incentive to not murder. If it didn't discourage murder, then people would find a different way to dissuade people from murdering.
How is it tyranny to curb a person's ability to murder? Or you trying to argue that allowing people to murder others is a net gain for society?
> So you think it is value added to society for a person to be able to murder someone?
I have never claimed any such thing.
> Imposing a punishment is PRIMARILY a preventative action.
Punishing murderer A can certainly deter potential murderer B. But punishing murderer A obviously can't change the fact that murderer A committed a murder. And it might not deter potential murderer C, who either thinks they can escape punishment or has what they think is such a good reason to murder that they don't care about the punishment. So if your goal is to prevent all murders, punishment doesn't achieve that goal.
If your goal is simply to decrease the number of murders, then punishment can do that, yes. But you seem to be taking the position that just decreasing the number is not enough; that only preventing all murders is acceptable.
> How is it tyranny to curb a person's ability to murder?
It's not tyranny to put a murderer on trial and imprison them if they are found guilty. (This assumes that the trial is fair, which in our society is often not the case. But I don't want to go off on another tangent.)
It is tyranny to force a person who has not murdered anyone to go through some kind of brain surgery which is claimed to remove their propensity to murder. Which is what you appear to be proposing.
Then if you could change a person and make them incapable of murder, would you not do it? If you could prevent murder, why aren't you morally compelled to? If you chose to let it happen, that means you approve of it.
My position is that reducing murder as much as you can is the correct position, to include making that number zero, just like stopping all rape is better than just reducing the number of rapes.
Is it OK for a parent to have their child circumcised? Or have their ears pierced? If thats OK, I don't see why removing your ability to murder someone is seen as so drastic. Would you not elect to have your ability to murder removed?
> if you could change a person and make them incapable of murder, would you not do it?
I should have commented earlier in this discussion that you are presuming an awful lot of certainty about something where I don't think any such level of certainty is even possible. How could you possibly be so confident that some brain procedure would really, truly make a person incapable of murder? And would do so without impairing their capacities in any other respect? I can't even put myself in the position of imagining being in that kind of state of knowledge. So I'm not sure I can even respond to questions about what I would or wouldn't do in such a state.
Furthermore, my comments in this discussion about tyranny are based on historical knowledge about past societies where people have held beliefs like the ones you describe--where they really, truly, honestly believed, with certainty or even with what they thought was a high enough probability, that forcing other people to do something, or forcing some kind of treatment on them, would achieve some obviously desirable social goal. And in every single case in history that I know of, those people were wrong. Not just sort of wrong, not just a little bit off--terribly, horribly wrong; lots and lots of people dying wrong.
So when you describe a scenario in which you say you know, with certainty, or even with high probability (you threw out a figure of 90 percent in another part of this thread--I'll respond more specifically to that there), that you could change a person and make them incapable of murder, by some sort of brain surgery or some secret ray that they can't perceive, or by any means other than convincing that person, through discussion and argument, that murder is wrong, I simply don't believe that's actually possible. So I don't factor such impossibilities into my thinking about what I should or shouldn't do.
> Is it OK for a parent to have their child circumcised? Or have their ears pierced?
Personally, no, I would not force either of those things on a child without their consent.
Circumcision is an edge case because there was a time when circumcision was widely believed to be desirable for health reasons, but that belief is now thought to be false. If a parent sincerely believed it was necessary for health reasons, I would not say they were wrong to have a child circumcised. But such beliefs should be checked very carefully--more carefully than, from what I can gather, people checked the belief about circumcision during the time when that belief was widespread.
> Would you not elect to have your ability to murder removed?
As above, I am unable to even consider this as a real possibility.
Because I'm confident the brain is physical, and just like chemicals (alcohol, opoids) and viruses or bacteria (toxoplasmosis) can already brain behavior, so can a person alter than brain through similar methods. It only comes down to knowing how the brain forms new thoughts and making it incapable of exhibiting murderous thoughts.
And I say historical evidence does not lend you credence, but actually the opposite. Nazi Germany believed in capitalism and the doctrine of free will. The is considered the worst of the worst, and that is your society and historical fact you choose to ignore a m ought the rest of atrocities the western philosophy of that has inflicted through war. Or are you trying to tell me every war the US has been involved with was necessary to protect lives and promote less horrendous death and suffering?
If I can't convince you that murder is wrong, I will do my best to force you out of civilized society. I will not tolerate it in my sphere of influence just as you would not either. I simply take it not just in the external sense but the internal sense as well. If you think about murdering someone, I would ask why and if you are at fault for said thoughts and couldn't not provide an answer that justified your position, I would "cancel" you and your contributions to our society. We don't need murderers or violent offenders, whether its internal or external.
As for your inability to conceive of an idea of a real possibility, that's a lack of imagination on your part. I can clearly consider it a possibility but even more so an eventuality. Your world view is limited, not mine.
> You brain has hallucinated not just the outside world, but your internal world as well.
Very interesting. I agree with these statements--yet I also think they are perfectly consistent with people making choices. In your ultra-physicalist language, human brains hallucinating "the outside world" and "the internal world" are just part of the causal processes that happen inside those brains. And those causal processes still have effects outside those brains even so.
Those causal processes still have effects outside those brains does not remove the idea that your brain only exists because of external causal events, and your brain is only reacting to those external causal events. At no point is there a spontaneous reaction that is unpredictable according to the known laws of physics, therefore, you don't have free will.
> your brain is only reacting to those external causal events
No, it isn't "only reacting". It is processing the incoming causal events, in a very complex way that "only reacting" doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of describing.
> At no point is there a spontaneous reaction that is unpredictable according to the known laws of physics, therefore, you don't have free will.
This definition of "free will" is pointless. Obviously nobody can violate the laws of physics, so if "free will" means violating the laws of physics, of course it's impossible. But nobody cares about that kind of "free will". The kind of free will people care about is having their right to make choices respected. Your metaphysical claims do not address that at all; and from what I can gather of your image of what society should be, it would be a horror worse than the worst tyrannies in history.
You can't claim it that "only reacting" doesn't help explain the process because at the end of they day, you, nor I, can exactly explain how consciousness works. The only evidence we have to likely explain it is that it likely is a cause and effect system like EVERYTHING we can observe externally so far.
And again, just because you claim my world view would be tyrannical DOES NOT make it true. My definition of free will is the common understanding of free will that you are trying to redefine to fit your world view.
Of course consciousness is a cause and effect system like everything else. I have never claimed otherwise, and the viewpoint I am defending certainly does not require otherwise.
> My definition of free will is the common understanding of free will
The common understanding of free will is that people can make choices and that those choices affect what happens to them. That can be true even in the deterministic universe you say you believe in.
It is not free will in the sense that you can spontaneously decide it for yourself. I can choose to eat vanilla yogurt or plain yogurt. That is the narrative my brain hallucinates. The reality behind the illusion is that the choice was made before I even am aware of the "story I tell myself" that I chose one or the other.
> It is not free will in the sense that you can spontaneously decide it for yourself.
If "spontaneously" means "outside of the laws of physics", then of course I agree. I just don't think that kind of "free will" is the only possible kind of free will, nor do I think that impossible kind of free will is the kind of free will that matters.
> I can choose to eat vanilla yogurt or plain yogurt. That is the narrative my brain hallucinates. The reality behind the illusion is that the choice was made before I even am aware of the "story I tell myself" that I chose one or the other.
Of course this is true in the sense that, as far as we can tell, the brain process of you being aware of your choice happens either at the same time as, or after, the brain process that makes your choice. But so what? All those processes are still happening in your brain.
Compare what you just described with this scenario: you want vanilla yogurt, but I force you to have plain yogurt instead because I believe it's healthier for you. Here there are still processes happening in your brain, which, if I weren't there, might well have led to you eating vanilla yogurt--but because I am there and I force you to eat plain yogurt, your brain processes do not determine what kind of yogurt you eat--instead, my brain processes do.
Do you see any meaningful difference between those scenarios? I sure do. (And note that I think that difference is meaningful even if it is true that the plain yogurt would be healthier.) If you don't, then we have a fundamental disagreement that I don't think any discussion can resolve.
You can't redefine what free will means and expect people to take you seriously. Free will means you have the ability to choose, and if you agree with me that the universe is deterministic, then you have to admit that making a choice is only an illusion. I can make choices in the same way that a neutron chooses to move toward more massive objects. I eat vanilla ice cream over dirt because I have taste buds that allow me to taste the difference between the two. Eating dirt instead doesn't prove I had a choice, because now I'm not eating dirt for taste, but to win an imaginary argument about free will. It's not the external world I'm reacting to now, but the internal one.
Your scenario is irrelevant because you admit that those processes, which you don't control happening in your brain, are still you. But if they are you, and you don't have control over them, you only become aware of them after the fact, then you JUST ADMITTED you don't have any choice. The choice was already made by something you have no control over, but only watch as a passenger. Your heart beats without your choice. You will pass out and have to breath because your brain will force you to at some point stop holding your breath. You will remove your hand from an external heat source that you did not expect AUTOMATICALLY, and only then become aware that your body moved milliseconds after the stimulus has already short-circuited through your PNS and not your CNS. If you think that the distinction doesn't matter, then you are still willfully lying about the reality, or intentionally want to deceive people about the physical world and how it works by redefining any word you need to to maintain your hallucinated reality.
Please stop getting hung up on the term "free will" as an excuse to avoid answering my actual question.
You proposed a perfectly clear scenario, and I proposed a perfectly clear second scenario. In scenario A, causal processes in your brain determine that you eat vanilla yogurt. In scenario B, causal processes in your brain determine that you want to eat vanilla yogurt, but causal processes in my brain determine that I force you to eat plain yogurt instead.
I see an important difference between these two scenarios: the first allows your brain processes to determine what kind of yogurt you eat; the second does not, it has my brain processes determining what kind of yogurt you eat.
Do you think that difference is important? Yes or no.
In both scenarios, no free will exists. I didn't trigger my brain processes, only observed them. Neither did you.
You are trying to paint a single scenario in which there is an important distinction and then ignore any other scenario where your reasoning fails.
For instance, if I chose to kill myself, and you stop me, and I later thank you for stopping me from killing myself, is that difference important? Yes or no?
Not by your definition, no. It does by mine. As I have repeatedly remarked in various places in this discussion, please stop getting hung up on that term; I purposely did not use it at all in my description of the two scenarios in order to avoid that.
> I didn't trigger my brain processes, only observed them. Neither did you.
Your brain processes are part of you, just as my brain processes are part of me. So to say "you" didn't trigger your brain processes is nonsense.
> if I chose to kill myself, and you stop me, and I later thank you for stopping me from killing myself, is that difference important?
You mean the difference that you thanked me afterwards? As opposed to telling me you wished I hadn't stopped you? Yes, that difference is important, because it tells me whether or not my choice to stop you was the right one.
However, your implication that my reasoning "fails" in a situation like this is incorrect. I have never claimed that respecting other people's free choice is the only value, or that it should automatically override all other values. One can always find cases where different values clash, and there is no way to resolve any such case without violating some value. So pointing out that my viewpoint is vulnerable to this proves nothing. So is yours. So is anyone's.
Your definition is wrong. It is not what people think making choices are. People feel they are free to make choices. That doesn't mean they actually had a choice if you permit that you are not on control of your brain processes even if you consider that "you". Your subjective experience of those processes is what people associate with choice, not an observation of some part "you" making the decisions that you are unaware of. You indeed are just a chest in the machine according to your owns words just now in these scenarios. It's intellectually dishonest to just redefine making choices however you want. It's a non- starter.
Further more, you claim any your reasoning doesn't fail, and yet you also admit your viewpoint is vulnerable? It is an admission outright that your arguments don't withstand rational scrutiny. However, you have yet to articulate a an argument that does make my position vulnerable to scrutiny.
I fully believe my decisions and actions are largely determined long before I am fully aware of what is taking place.
This doesn't make me despair or not care to do anything, but makes me extremely resilient and adaptable to changing situations. I can acknowledge that no matter what I want to do, I cannot stop my leg from twitching when someone hits the nerve underneath my kneecap.
I also accept that if I make bad decisions because of an addiction or deficient reasoning process, I willingly would accept a mechanism to correct said process or improve my deficiency.
It's not that free will is necessary to understand reality. It's that free will is necessary for YOUR reality. Some of us get along just peachy without it.
> I also accept that if I make bad decisions because of an addiction or deficient reasoning process, I willingly would accept a mechanism to correct said process or improve my deficiency.
If that's what you want, you are free to choose to accept it, yes. If you're happy with how things are for you, more power to you.
Just don't try to force your way of being happy on me. If I make bad decisions, for whatever reason, I want to have the choice of how to improve. I don't want anything else, whether you want to call it a "mechanism" or not, forcing something on me that someone else thinks is an "improvement".
But you don't actually believe that! You would put someone in prison if they attacked you physically for no reason. You would willingly force that person into confinement until they no longer tried to inflict violence on you. You can't have ti both ways.
No, you can't have it both ways. You didn't say you would willingly accept prison. You said you would willingly accept a mechanism to improve your deficiency. The way you have described prison elsewhere in this thread, you clearly believe that prison doesn't do that. So you wouldn't accept prison. You would only accept a mechanism that "improves your deficiency".
What I said is that I want to have the choice about how to improve. That doesn't mean I have the right to harm others with impunity. Choices have consequences, and if I make a bad choice that has the consequence that I get thrown in prison, well, that's the consequence of my choice. I personally avoid that consequence by not making choices that will predictably get me thrown in prison. Someone else might choose to do such things anyway--and yes, if they do that I won't stop the consequences from happening. Respecting someone's right to make choices doesn't mean choices don't have consequences.
If your objection is that the consequence of getting thrown in prison is somehow artificial, well, the natural consequence of attacking someone physically for no reason is that you get physically harmed or killed yourself. If you want to argue that letting that consequence happen is better than throwing the person in prison, given what prisons are like, sure, go ahead and argue that. But to argue, as you are, that respecting people's right to make choices means I should refrain from imposing any consequences at all on other people's behavior when it affects me is not only a non sequitur, it makes for an even worse society with even more suffering.
No it doesn't, and I'm not advocating for a violent person to not be stopped. You are. You say the most important thing is to defend a person's right to "choose" their behavior. In that case, you are a hypocrite because then you turn around and say I am OK with subverting the will of a person as long as it affects me negatively. If it affects someone else, well, do you really care? From your answers, you seem not to care in the slightest.
> I'm not advocating for a violent person to not be stopped.
You're advocating for "stopping" them by having someone else rearrange their brain so they won't be violent any more. And you refuse to acknowledge the fact that that someone else is making a choice that has consequences; to you it's all just particles reacting to their environment. Yet you also seem to think suffering is bad--but if it's all just particles reacting to their environment, there is no such thing as suffering, any more than there is such a thing as choice. So you are the one who is being inconsistent, not me.
> If it affects someone else, well, do you really care? From your answers, you seem not to care in the slightest.
You clearly don't understand my actual position, and I don't know how to explain it any better than I already have.
Absolutely! Re-education, rehabilitation is exactly THAT! It's altering the synaptic connections in the brain to bring their behavior in line with what we view should be the case in civilized society. You just seem to have a problem with making that process more efficient.
And it is all just particles moving around, but that doesn't mean we have to ignore what is very likely an unpleasant experience from your subjective, internal point of view. I don't dismiss your personal experience of reality, just your rational understanding of what's going on.
And I do, I really do, but you are inconsistent. You say you should be free to make your choices, but then also want to put people in jail fornmaking their free choices. You call it consequences, and yet that doesn't eliminate the fact that you then want to LIMIT THEIR FREEDOM TO CHOOSE to do it again. You are self contradictory. At best, you are picking what choices people are and aren't allowed to make.
> You just seem to have a problem with making that process more efficient.
No, I have a problem with that process being done without the consent of the person, even in cases where there the person has not harmed anyone else. I have asked you about that elsewhere in this discussion; your response will tell me whether it actually is an fundamental difference in our viewpoints or whether you are just describing things using very different terminology than I would use.
In cases where a person has harmed someone else, it's the fact that they have harmed someone else (more precisely, that they have harmed someone else without an extremely good reason, such as self-defense, for doing so) that creates the consequences I have talked about. There are consequences for people's choices regardless of whether we have a society or not. Sometimes, as a society, we alter the consequences from what they would be in a state of nature (for example, we put murderers on trial and then imprison them if they are found guilty, instead of just letting the families and friends of the murder victim take private vengeance, which is what would happen in a state of nature with no society). But it is simply ridiculous to say that respecting people's freedom of choice is inconsistent with there being consequences for people's choices. If you choose to jump off a cliff, you will die. If you choose to harm other people for no good reason, they will retaliate. Calling that "limiting freedom to choose" is just sophistry.
It isn't sophistry, it's showing that your own reasoning fails to hold because a word like choice is meaningless when you really analyze it. If free will doesn't exist, then there are no choices, only the illusion that you made a choice.
You keep getting hung up on the word "choice" instead of addressing the actual substance of what I'm saying. I don't see any point in further discussion on those terms.
Because you keep referring to choice and free will in a completely different definition than anyone coming along and reading this conversation understand it to me. It's intellectually dishonest and preys on minds that won't be able to distinguish the subtly and instead just see, "pdonis mention free will, me likely, updoot."
No, it isn't. The definition of free will that I am using is common in the literature on free will and cognitive science, i.e., among people who have actually worked on understanding how human brains work based on exactly the same physicalist principles that you say you believe. I also have disagreed several times with your claims about what "anyone coming along and reading this conversation" would understand.
I have responded to your misleading comment elsewhere, but in fact the commonly accepted definition of free will as known to the general English speaking population is that free will is not an illusion of choices but a direct ability to influence the world without prior cause, something that is IMPOSSIBLE according to the know laws of physics, both quantum mechanics and general relativity. Even the Copenhagen interpretation permits the universe is infinitely "splitting" to handle different "choices" or "events" happening.
As for your blatant attempt to misrepresent the cognitive science communities belief on the subject, again, put up or shut up by linking to anything that backs up your claim that current cognitive scientists support your point of view. I know for a FACT, that you can't because papers and talks on the subject are FREELY available to watch and/or read!
To add to my previous response to this: while I do think it's justified to imprison a convicted murderer, I do not think it's justified to force someone imprisoned for murder to undergo, say, brain surgery that is claimed to remove their propensity to murder.
So forcing them to do everything else is fine, just as long as no one touches the brain. Removing a foot ok though? What about the death penalty? That can be done without rearranging the brain.
> forcing them to do everything else is fine, just as long as no one touches the brain.
I have made no such claim. You keep attacking straw men instead of addressing what I'm actually saying.
> Removing a foot ok though?
I have made no such claim.
> What about the death penalty?
I have already pointed out that the natural consequence (i.e., in a state of nature if there is no society) of attacking someone else for no good reason can be death. So imposing death as a penalty for a sufficiently heinous crime seems to me to be justifiable in principle, if you are sure to a moral certainty that the person did the crime.
Where our current system falls down horribly is in that last part: we impose the death penalty when we are not even close to meeting the strict standard of moral certainty that I just stated.
Incorrect. You willingly lock people up for premeditated murder even if the murder did not happen. If I hire a hit man, and they turn out to be an FBI undercover agent, I am now in jail not for committing murder but trying to commit murder.
Yes, conspiracy to commit murder is also a crime under our current legal system. Do you not think it should be? If not, why not? Instead of name calling, how about some actual arguments?
Where did I ever name call you? My position is if you have thoughts to carry out murder and actually show actions that indicate your thoughts might become reality, they can absolutely be used as evidence in the court to convict you of conspiracy to convict murder without ever having to have actually committed murder.
By your whole argument, this person shouldn't be held criminally responsible UNTIL murder has actually occurred.
I agree with almost everything except that to say that famine and homeless can be caused both by human choices and accidents or events outside of human control.
> famine and homeless can be caused both by human choices and accidents or events outside of human control
Yes, I agree that accidents or events outside human control can cause bad things to happen. I would also point out, though, that how bad those things get has far more to do with human choices. There are many choices that people can make to be better prepared for accidents and events outside their control if and when they happen.
They will think its justified, just like the masses will justify taking all the hoarded wealth. Fairly distributing capital and power is the only reasonable solution in a world that is so obviously deterministic.
While cute, it misses the point. If I say a car is coming, it is then up to the person to decide whether they step into the street or not. This is not a rhetorical argument.
You say that the world being deterministic somehow makes “we should be nice to each other” an inescapable conclusion… but really, it's just a framing that lets you escape the existing divisive rhetoric. If it became widespread, we'd get new rhetoric.
Rhetoric doesn't stop a car from running over you no matter how the warning is phrased if you choose to not understand said rhetoric. This is not a rhetorical argument.
The wealthy can't convince you they deserve wealth if they are dead. Does that make more sense now? The idea is that all the words in the world can't hide the truth of a situation and what ends up happening as a result of said situation.
See how well, "Why don't they just eat cake?" turned out.
I think a lot help is needed towards the "poor" concerning the subject of justice. No matter where someone lives, there should be forms & guides on court websites for filing a lawsuit or defending oneself and currently only a few places provide that help.
> But are these life-endings [of a young person and an old person] equivalent? Perhaps, on a philosophical level, they are. On a practical level, however, the death of an 85-year-old person from a preventable cause has cost them a few years at the end of life, while a 25-year-old has, on the same calculation, lost over 60 years of life, including their most active and event-filled years.
Every time I think about the USA, I get a strong feeling that the current structure of systems are designed for the old to flourish and at a heavy cost of the young. I would be surprised if my feeling is actually wrong and everything isn't actually designed for the older population to continue flourishing the longest at the cost of the young. I'm curious what HN thinks. I personally think the value of the young should be set higher to flourish than the old and the systems of society should be designed that way.
The more accurate picture is that the US is designed for the wealthy to flourish. As it happens, the wealthy tend to be older for a variety of reasons.
A wealthy 25 year old is unlikely to face any significant risk that they will miss out on a medical procedure vs. an older adult, or ultimately face any existential risk for that matter.
How many billionaires have had multiple bankruptcies?
I don’t understand the logic here. Yes, of course a wealthy person will be able to pay for procedures and avoid going broke. Isn’t this universally true? Perhaps you meant the US is poorly designed for poor people, which is not something you can say about every country.
The previous generations got a lot of stuff for free by promising each other pensions and not funding them. Obviously they were better off than we were: we don't have access to this trick anymore, and have to make actual sacrifices today if we want to retire in the future. To say nothing of the taxes we will have to pay in exchange for services long gone.
Corporations (and the mob) generally stole the funds of the pension and used them. And they were promised pensions in line with prevailing wages, which were higher.
My impression of the US in the pandemic era is that the value of the old is not held in high regard. Even prior, culture was focused on the young.
However the value of money (which on average the old may have more of?) and catering to those who have it is definitely real and may be what you are suggesting.
