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Comment by abellerose | Hacker News Reader

I’ve given up on the idea of free will. I think the illusion does more harm than good to society but everyone deeply has been conditioned to think it’s true and things will never change in my lifetime.

The article doesn’t do the necessary job of convincing me that quantum physics has any real impact on people having responsibility over their thoughts & actions. I’ve always wanted to see how a person could somehow not be effected by the system being the universe and where the person is a subsystem. I think that would be the most interesting thing for me. Sadly the belief that a God just made it so isn’t logical and not something I can even begin to see how it would work. Determinism being partially untrue by some outside force making the universe truly random doesn’t allow a person making personal choices they should be responsible over. In fact such an existence would be terrifying. Performing thoughts & actions that just randomly happen with no valid reason. I’m predicting society will eventually throw away the free will illusion when science destroys inequality.

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Maybe you're familiar with Yuval Noah Harari's position in the free will vs. determinism debate. He argues that, not only is the idea of free will a myth, it's harmful to society: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/14/yuval-noah-har...

Also, it seems you're getting at an interesting idea: we can understand determinism, and we can understand chance, but free will seems to want to combine the two concepts in some incomprehensible/nonsensical way, which nobyd can understand.

Combining them is easy. Lookup Compatibilism, which is the dominant view among philosophers.

Yes, so easy it doesn't really combine them. Compatibilism gives an explanation that essentially redefines what is meant by "free will". Compatibilism makes compatible a concept of determinism and a specific concept of "free will". Yes, it gives a coherent way of speaking about these two seemingly contradictory things; enabling us to avoid nonsense or self-contradiction. However, the compatibilist notion of "free will" is in fact incompatible with what most people mean (or think they mean) when they say they "have free will".

> However, the compatibilist notion of "free will" is in fact incompatible with what most people mean (or think they mean) when they say they "have free will".

I disagree, and the data seems to disagree as well: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...

But he has no evidence of either case. I read more about technological fears and the perspective is interesting, but personally I am more optimistic.

If there is no free will there is certainly a mechanism that fools us on that fact for any practical purpose. We also strive for control, at least for or own lives, and there are certain elements in his perspective that shifts the topic to that instead towards the prevalence or absence of free will. The discussion around free will are ancient, so are discussion about ascension (mostly through unpopular topics if we are honest to ourselves) or elevation above others. I am used to it in engineering circles but am still able to see it. Could also be some coping for how often he sees others being manipulated.

Sounds critical now, but I believe he is a nice guy.

Free will is inescapable. Without it, you have no ability to assign moral blame, which means law and order become impossible. If someone punches you in the face unprovoked, you are just as responsible for putting your face where his fist was going to be. Thus, there's no justification for your attacker to be rehabilitated rather than you, an innocent victim.

Your issue is not with free will, but with retributive justice, ie. the argument that moral blame deserves punishment.

> Thus, there's no justification for your attacker to be rehabilitated rather than you, an innocent victim

Free will or not, it's pretty easy to see which party we should confine to reduce the frequency of future face injuries.

Why "should" we do anything in the absence of free will. What will happen is what will happen. Everything is inevitable, including the punch to the face.

Why do you feel like a novel has suspense, when the ending is sitting right there in front of you, already written, in the pages that you haven't read yet?

Determinism or not, you have to wait to find out what tomorrow will bring. And tomorrow still depends on what you do today -- even if what you do today is fully determined by yesterday.

If losing the illusion of free will means you'll sit there on your sofa letting time pass, because why make any effort if the future is already written, then you're just misunderstanding determinism. I believe the future is already written, but I'm still going to work as hard as I can to make sure that it turns out to be as good a future as possible. Once you've internalized a deterministic worldview, this is not a contradiction.

(If you're familiar with Newcomb's problem, I'd choose one box). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox

Any book has suspense for myself because it might have utility and lessons that enrich my understanding of life. Not simply because it is not-yet-known to myself. This analogy doesn't make sense to me.

Whether you think it is an illusion or not is irrelevant. A deterministic world means you were determined to believe it is an illusion. Just as others may be determined to believe that it isn't an illusion. Thus it is impossible for me to sit on a couch and do nothing, because I would be determined to believe in free will and not sit on a couch and do nothing.

On a personal note, I often feel that things that don't have free will don't deserve moral blame, but this also means they don't deserve anything at all. No punishment, no reward. One can judge such things in the same way one might judge a rock.

Causality there goes in the opposite direction. Fatalism is inspired by existential crisis, not by practical considerations. And trading practicality for existential crisis is unwise: you only lose everything and don't obtain anything.

Imposing the false concept of free will just to be able to morally put someone in jail seems immoral. Imposing laws that most of society agrees with is a pragmatic necessity.

> Imposing the false concept of free will just to be able to morally put someone in jail seems immoral

Who said that? In fact, I said that this exact argument is a mistake, conflating free will with retributive justice.

No. Nobody being responsible doesn't negate rehabilitation for the person that is deranged. The goal of humanity is debatable but generally having everyone functioning in a way that doesn't harm others and including themselves is preferred. So I don't see how it's logical to place the blame on the victim and unless you're just trying to be silly with not really understanding determinism is just from the basis of logic like the foregoing.

> Nobody being responsible doesn't negate rehabilitation for the person that is deranged.

There is no way to justify who is deranged without moral blame. There is no victim and no perpetrator. A person who attacked you without provocation is just responding to the environment established by society. Your expectation that you should not be punched in the face is the same. Why is your expectation to not be punched justified over his desire to punch you?

The approach you’re proposing is illogical that’s why. Although everything is destined, that doesn’t negate the majority desire to treat a person who becomes ill and potentially very sick. Similar as someone that becomes mentally deranged by his/her order of events resulting in being mentally ill.

I used to have a colleague that shared your rhetoric and he very much made a big leap in his assumption that people adopting determinism will all of a sudden become metaphorically motionless by thinking the majority will not try to fix people that become ill.

> Although everything is destined, that doesn’t negate the majority desire to treat a person who becomes ill and potentially very sick.

So majority desires are all that matters? So you agree with mob rule and think the tyranny of the majority is perfectly ok?

> I used to have a colleague that shared your rhetoric and he very much made a big leap in his assumption that people adopting determinism will all of a sudden become metaphorically motionless by thinking the majority will not try to fix people that become ill.

I have no problem with determinism as I'm a Compatibilist. I think you've made a few assumptions about what I believe that aren't justified, so if you're actually interested in understanding what I'm saying, you can read my elaboration on free will here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23476919

I'm not interested in what a compatibilist thinks. You're illogical by being one if you understand determinism.

I'm not implying mob rule and that response makes me think you're a troll. The benefit of treating illnesses outweighs the negatives of not treating illnesses. You're just being illogical or a troll. So no reason for me to continue with you.

I've elaborated elsewhere in this thread on why positions like yours are inadequate and why Compatibilism makes perfect sense. None of the points you've raised so far have any bearing on this. Suffice it to say, Compatibilism is the only sensible conception of free will we currently have, which is why 60% of modern philosophers are Compatibilists.

And no, this isn't an argument from authority, this is a suggestion that if the professionals who devote their lives to studying this topic disagree with you, it might be worth questioning your assumptions and reviewing the subject matter more closely.

Your other points in this thread are inadequate.

Compatibilism may make perfect sense for you but that doesn't render your opinion correct against someone that disagrees with your definition of free will and the common definition of free will. I find it humorous you're attempting to use mob rule now and which is why I decided to comment.

If by any chance you would like to have a discussion by maybe voice? I would very much like to discuss your views vs my own and go over why I'm a hard determinist compared to being a compatibilist such as yourself.

I do like to discuss these topics once in awhile with someone over chat. I try to keep an open mind and hopefully learn something new whenever that may be in my fate. Although if you're a person that's fixated on semantics and or just assumes your 60% of philosophers must be right. There isn't much point.

> Compatibilism may make perfect sense for you but that doesn't render your opinion correct against someone that disagrees with your definition of free will and the common definition of free will.

There is no "common definition" of free will, there are a series of context-specific definitions used in ethics, science, law, theology, etc. and this conflation causes considerable confusion. The notion of a "common definition", often trotted out to dismiss Compatibilism, is simply false.

I don't want to be dismissive myself, but I've said my piece about hard determinism here [1] and in other posts. After participating in literally hundreds of debates on this topic on the philosophy subreddit over the years, I don't think I'll hear anything particularly new, and I think I've spent enough time on this thread at this point.

I only debate this extensively sometimes because while hard determinism enjoys widespread support among scientifically minded people who conflate "free will" in science with its use in ethics, Compatibilism is unfairly dismissed and misunderstood.

Cheers!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23482205

Okay, no point with you then. Have a good life.

So much like a human evaluates clocks

An outside force can evaluate me, and decide if I was good or not. It wasn't my choices or anything from myself that led to that

Interesting. You could go a long way with that logic. Since you can go a long way, there is also little that can be disagreed with -- even though the way you go can take you many places, and many of them good (in my non-outside-force opinion)

I would ask:

So there is something that makes some clocks good, and some bad. Something outside of my influence -- so from my reference point it is not determined

Is this just semantics. Can I just redefine human to be human+thing_not_determined?

The outside force at a minimum should be an algorithm deciding whether clocks are good or bad. The force can be fully determined, and the clocks can be fully determined. But what causes variance in clocks? The source of that variance can also be fixed -- a fully deterministic universe

But from the outside force's reference point, is that variance external or internal to the algorithm?

External; then the algorithm has an effectively non-deterministic view of clocks

Internal; then it is no longer evaluating clocks, rather an evaluation of itself+clocks. No longer a good or bad clock; we have a good or bad God

---

Conclusion:

Compatibilism is compatible with a non deterministic universe

Any fully determined system can be seen as non-determined when looking at a subset. Is quantum mechanics fully determined or not? In a sense it doesn't matter -- since our view of the universe will never be full, and so we can never take a fully deterministic view point??

> Free will is inescapable. Without it, you have no ability to assign moral blame, which means law and order become impossible.

Even if that were the case, that doesn't bear on whether or not free will exists. Having reasons to want something to be true doesn't in itself make it true.

You're missing the last step that closes the loop: in order for society to exist and function, moral blame is essential. Therefore some notion of moral responsibility for breaking the law must be imposed, so we invent some quasi-free will notion that's compatible with determinism in order to do this.

But how do you know this quasi-free will notion isn't exactly what people really mean by free will. In fact, that appears to be the case:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...

>You're missing the last step that closes the loop: in order for society to exist and function, moral blame is essential. Therefore some notion of moral responsibility for breaking the law must be imposed, so we invent some quasi-free will notion that's compatible with determinism in order to do this.

If your argument that it is necessary for the public to believe in free will (because of the negative consequences if they don't), regardless of whether or not it actually exists, then that's different. I thought you were arguing that free will must necessarily exist because of those consequences. I apologise and withdraw.

> I thought you were arguing that free will must necessarily exist because of those consequences.

I'm saying that this is exactly what most people really mean by free will [1], and that people like you who claim that free will doesn't exist are making a mistake in assuming free will is something that it isn't. Typically, you're arguing against a theistic conception of free will with "souls" and whatnot, but that's just one (incoherent) conception of free will and not the whole debate.

"Free will" is ultimately some notion of control over one's actions that grounds moral responsibility: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/

If you acknowledge that being able to designate who is responsible for some undesirable outcome is a necessary condition for being able to remedy it, then you are acknowledging some notion of moral blame.

If you further accept that people's actions can be described counterfactually by their thoughts, feelings and beliefs, then that implies some sort of control over those actions.

Therefore we have control + moral responsibility, and that's free will (in Compatibilism).

If this seems kind of familiar, it should! Compatibilism was first formulated from our notions of free will from law. Notice how if you remove the control requirement (say they had a tumour driving some behaviour, or they're insane), a person is no longer acting of their own free will and so are not responsible for their actions.

This is what I meant by free will being inevitable. No society can exist without blame for breaking the law. You might define the terms to avoid terms like "blame" and "free will", as hard determinists try to do, but the ultimate function will be the exact same.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...

> people like you who claim that free will doesn't exist

Where did I claim that free will doesn't exist?

You're right, mixed you up with another poster in this thread, sorry!

No problem!

I find the 'control' part of this iffy. People's actions are caused by their thoughts, feelings and beliefs, but their thoughts, feelings and beliefs are themselves caused by various other things. This is why I think the root question is whether you could have chosen differently. If you could only have ever made one choice, how much control do you really have?

The fact that moral responsibility requires the assumption that people have control doesn't mean people do have control. It just means that people who like moral responsibility (including myself!) have an inconvenient reality to contend with. It means we have to find some way to run a society morally despite the shaky grounding on which we find ourselves.

I would find the compatibilist argument more convincing if it simply said, here are some beliefs that would benefit us if we assumed they were true, rather than saying they are true. We can define free will as 'the assumption that is needed to make moral responsibility work,' and we can even make that assumption in order to have a practical, working framework for moral responsibility, but it still doesn't prove the assumption is true.

> I find the 'control' part of this iffy. People's actions are caused by their thoughts, feelings and beliefs, but their thoughts, feelings and beliefs are themselves caused by various other things.

That trips most people up, but it goes right back to our first discussion about cars also being "not real". If I say to a coworker, "I got in my car and drove to work", and they reply with, "Well that's impossible, because cars don't exist, nor do day jobs", that's kind of nonsense right, because there I am at work, standing in front of my coworker with my car in my parking spot. It's a category error, and it's the same error made when people say that a choice wasn't really ours because it's dictated by the movements of particles.

The fact that thoughts, feelings and beliefs may be caused by deterministic underlying physics is actually irrelevant, which is why Compatibilism is compatible with determinism. What matters is that thoughts, feelings and beliefs counterfactually dictate your choices, and so, by changing thoughts, feelings and beliefs via moral feedback, you change behaviour.

Moral blame is that feedback. The type of control that's needed is simply not the type of control that you're assuming it must be. This is the mistake incompatibilists make as well: they assume the type of control needed has certain logical properties, but these properties have been shown to be flawed.

Now what consequences follow from blame is a completely separate question (of justice), and I mention this because it trips a lot of people up: they assume blame entails punishment, and given they cannot justify punishment when some things are simply beyond one's control, they want to do away with blame itself. But that's unnecessary, because blame by itself doesn't immediately entail retributive justice with punishment, there are plenty of other forms of justice that would serve equally well.

If I’m understanding you correctly, for purposes of free will and moral responsibility, the details underlying the ‘control’ people have don’t matter—all that matters is that they change their behavior in response to feedback that what they did was wrong. In order to give that feedback, we need to take for granted the ‘they did’ part of the sentence. Is that a fair summary?

If so, I think I agree. But it makes me feel like we’re talking about different things. I think we may just have a namespace collision over the phrase “free will” (which I think is part of your whole point).

I guess my question is, if your main concern is being able to assign moral blame, defined as saying someone did something and that thing was right or wrong, why does that require free will? Without it you can still say people do things (in the car sense) and make value judgments about them. Why define free will this way, instead of in the straightforward sense of choice?

> In order to give that feedback, we need to take for granted the ‘they did’ part of the sentence. Is that a fair summary?

"They deliberately did/felt justified doing", but yes that's essentially it, modulo the considerations I discuss below.

> I think we may just have a namespace collision over the phrase “free will” (which I think is part of your whole point).

This is part of what makes the debate so frustrating and confusing for many, because we have religious "free will" with souls and whatnot, we have philosophical "free will" for ethics and moral responsibility, we have scientific "free will" for experimenters (free will theorem), and all of them overlap in some ways, but not in all ways, which leads to considerable confusion.

Incompatibilists think "free will" in all of the above contexts mean exactly the same thing, ie. theistic free will and experimental free will and philosophical free will all mean some sort of freedom from antecedent causes, and that this is necessary for moral responsibility. This is why you'll see scientists and science fans claim we don't have free will, because the nuance between the above contexts is lost.

> Without free will you can still say people did things (in the car sense) and make value judgments about them. Why define free will this way, instead of in the straightforward sense of choice?

Because not every choice is freely made, or an expression of their will. Some people are coerced into making choices, some people have cognitive impairments and so are not capable of making free or willed choices (insanity, dementia, etc.), some people are not of sufficient age for them to understand the choice they're making, and so on. How do we package up all these considerations into a term of art that describes when a person of sound mind and body makes choice freely? Free will.

Compatibilism emerged from the notion of free will in law. Consider all the conditions for legal culpability, and I think you'll begin to see how nuanced this is, and how these considerations are deeply entrenched in how people approach moral reasoning.

This is just mumbo jumbo, because you are not providing any alternative medium for exercise of control than deterministic cause and effect, and so what you are describing is just a veneer.

There is no choice in that case, and so no meaningful exercise of will.

Only if you presuppose "will" to mean "non-determinstic choice", in which case you should justify why that's relevant for moral responsibility.

I've asserted that deterministic choice is perfectly compatible with responsibility, and that our moral and legal reasoning is compatible with this conception.

I do presuppose will to mean something nondeterministic, yes, or the term serves no purpose.

And what you describe empirically doesn't match my experiences. People tend to get strongly morally conflicted when faced with the prospect of determinism because they don't see eg punishment as compatible with a view of the world where people don't have agency over choices.

'Deterministic choice' is not a choice for the person - it is just cause and effect. There is nothing free about it, and no will involved.

The very idea gets people incredibly worked up when you drill down into it.

> I do presuppose will to mean something nondeterministic, yes, or the term serves no purpose.

It serves the purpose of labelling a process of deliberation over a set of choices. Whether that deliberation is deterministic or not is a red herring.

> People tend to get strongly morally conflicted when faced with the prospect of determinism because they don't see eg punishment as compatible with a view of the world where people don't have agency over choices.

So? People struggle to explain how lightning works. The vikings would have gotten quite worked up if you claimed Thor didn't cause thunder. Why does this have any impact on the natural facts of lightning?

It does not imply any sort of control in any meaningful way.

For you to have "control" you would need to be able to produce different decisions from the same starting point, or there is no control - just determinism.

And those differences needs to not just be purely random, or there again is no control.

There then needs to be some mechanism that makes that choice. If you can not derive that from cause and effect of interactions of the physical aspects of the brain, then that is dualism. But that does not resolve the free-will issue:

That just means that there is an unknown decision mechanism, that needs to be subjected to the same question of how it makes the decision in a way that is not deterministic, and not random, yet produces outcomes that differ when re-run with the same state.

Free will basically would require some third distinct category between determinism and randomness, that infuses some sort of agency into a process (and that is not just a combination of the two, but qualitatively different).

I've yet to see someone come up with a description of this "something" that is not just entirely obfuscation.

> For you to have "control" you would need to be able to produce different decisions from the same starting point, or there is no control - just determinism.

The principle of alternate possibilities was debunked by the Frankfurt cases back in the 60s. An unrestricted ability to do otherwise is simply not relevant to moral responsibility.

I've elaborated on why the control I describe is sufficient below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23478747

I read that comment and it makes no sense unless you accept a compatibilist definition. But to me a compatibilist definition of free will is meaningless - it is just veneer over determinism.

I assume by "determinism", you mean "hard determinism". Here are just two distinctions among many:

1 . Compatibilists don't assert that determinism is true, they assert that determinism doesn't matter. Which means if the world is non-deterministic, Compatibilism still applies. This is not true of hard determinism.

2. Hard determinists have no way to assign blame in a way that disallows morally repugnant conclusions. If someone punches you in the face unprovoked, how does a hard determinist argue that the unprovoked attacker is the person requiring rehabilitation? Why shouldn't the law be changed to allow unprovoked face punches? Why shouldn't you be rehabilitated to learn to duck faster? There is no moral blame, so anything is permissible.

If someone provides a viable definition that does not devolve to a veneer over hard determinism, I'd consider it. You haven't and neither have anyone else.

To #2 the reason to continue mostly as before is because it is what we intuitively feel is fair and that minimises harm. The idea you need to blame someone to do this is a typic religious argument against atheists - we do not need blame to have a feeling for what we consider right and wrong. A belief in determinism shifts those feelings.

It's very simple to reconcile - the only change is that punishment for the sake of punishment rather than to minimise harm is not justified if people have no agency.

To a lot of people that is a belief they come to anyway without a belief in determinism, because of the number of moral systems that includes forgiveness as a central concept.

Consider the prison system in Norway vs US for example. Norways prison system was awful up to the 60s where a reform movement won support for a focus on rehabilitation over punishment.

Its all semantics. If there's no free will, then we have no choice over assigning moral blame either. It is what it is.

Arguments also become irrelevant, since we're destined to play out the drama exactly as we have. Like some static 4D statuary in a forgotten temple. There's no point in trying to convince anyone, as they have 'already' been sculpted as they are. So argument can't be said to have any real effect, as its just more posed stone.

Sorry for posting this here, this is from a prior comment chain. I've just taken quite a while to read and then summon the energy to respond :P. It takes me a while to write about this topic without: a) seeming like I'm insane, and b) not getting carried away with the amount of topics that come to mind.

> Yes, some things are simply impossible. Not even a traditional concept of God, could have or make free will be real and knowing so is from understanding the logic of cause & effect. Not even true randomness can make us be free agents.

Agreed, and good point.

> Although I think randomness is an impossibility because there's always a cause and that can be passionately debated for the theory of quantum physics in our universe. But randomness doesn't matter in regard to free will being an illusion.

Also agree here, I think 'random' is a human descriptor for when prior events are too numerous, or complicated, or not known. I'm open to change on this though, as the delayed choice / quantum eraser experiment is mind boggling - and we know that our intuitions mean next to nothing for determining the truth :).

As you say, even if we did have 'true randomness' in the mix (if such a thing exists, which we both doubt), that would be evidence against us having any say in what we think or do.

> Furthermore, the idea of free will being an illusion made it simpler for me personally to understand harder concepts than before. How humans created the concept of good & evil, but we simply apply it incorrectly and to what we observe throughout our existence.

That's really cool that it directly informs your view on concepts, e.g. good vs evil. I guess it probably does for me as well, but I 'feel like' it is far down the chain of reasoning for me - maybe because I came across the concept of free will relatively recently (early twenties, in my late twenties now). I think studies have shown though that our 'reasoning' or explanation of how we arrive at a thought are typically delusions anyway, so maybe it does directly inform my views and I am just not aware :).

> My reflection from a mirror has the same control as I do

I've read this a few times and it halted my brains execution on each attempt, haha. That sentence is really cool - it sounds vaguely ridiculous but I completely agree with it. I can't even articulate why it 'seems' ridiculous to me. I have looked in the mirror before and experienced what is tantamount to an existential crisis - I feel like I'm one entity, when really we are composed from billions of cells / bacteria which are also living. We just happen to have a stream of chemical and electrical impulses driving our every action making us feel like we're the pilot.

> Providing me with wishful thinking that the universe could repeat and where the same conditions that made our life, could happen repeat again & again; with improvements occurring each iteration depending on the starting variables. Maybe like a brute-forcing algorithm. That's the spiritual part I get out of understanding the concept of cause & effect.

That's an interesting take. I think I view it quite selfishly, and given that my consciousness probably (?) wouldn't be involved in the later iterations removes the wishful quality for me, haha.

It's an interesting point though, if we live in a deterministic universe it means it would in theory be possible to have a giant simulation of which we are unwitting participants. Maybe our brain compute while a tedious resource to create / evolve, is actually good at solving certain types of problems the grand architects are bad at :P? I jest, but I think that's why sci-fi as a genre is so cool - it circles around these profound questions.

Perhaps there are 'n' universe in parallel or sequence with the naturalistic laws mutating across each universe. I've definitely read that notion written elsewhere.

I struggle to take anything especially spiritual out of it though. Even when I was in the hands of religious indoctrination I never especially had a desire or understanding to seek out the 'spiritual'.

> There's no reason for me to care if free will is an illusion because it has always been and if life doesn't repeat, well I find that more perplexing than the idea of the universe repeating for infinity.

I think it is truly bizarre that 'there is anything'. This probably sounds like the statement of a 6 year old, but it really does seem strange. The universe encompassing 'everything' is a problem for me straight out of the gate - how can anything encompass everything? How can there not be an 'outside'?

I've watched probably hours of youtube videos trying to develop a math-illiterate understanding of the double slit / delayed choice experiment. Those experiments say to me that we have a long way to go before understanding some pretty fundamental information/behaviours of our universe. The laws that govern our universe seem so complicated and detailed - these are just static rules that exist in isolation to everything?

I'm not really sure if there's a point here, but I just think it would be a lot less confusing if there were nothing at all :P

> Now, the concept of rehabilitation being superior makes the most sense if society desires to progress humanity and to the purest essences of equality. The concept of judgement & punishment being a deterrent, is a fallacy, and just a one sided convenience for the privileged. The ones born into a life where they'll never be judged & punished while the misfortunate individuals born into a life where they will eventually commit a crime. They were needing help from the start and were used & thrown away like a piece of trash throughout life. I find the current day justice system similar to the Salem witch trials. I think any hard determinist Judge forced into caring out the justice system of today, simply punishes an individual for the sake of the health of someone harmed and while the one harmed hasn't grasped there isn't free will. Otherwise I think the person harmed would have a tough time placing the blame on anyone or desiring it.

I completely agree once again here. I would maybe just quickly add that if someone took an action that killed someone you loved dearly, I suspect you'd feel the typical human emotions of outrage and injustice etc. I think this is what I mean by juggling the intellectual understanding with conditioned responses to external events. I prescribe agency to others when it suits me, I think, even though I know we're all pinball's bouncing off the side of the box we're in.

Some people have the most unfair lives it is crazy. To be able to sit here on this website and spend time musing on this topic is seriously spoiled. I'm not even the most spoiled person I know, haha.

> Nevertheless, I'm a pacifist from the understanding and somewhat grateful it happened. I think the world will eventually adapt when it becomes common knowledge. I personally would have preferred to be born into such a society and instead of the current day one if humans collectively cherish equality above all else. My fear of death is gone as well and I find things more interesting than the past.

I've skipped a bit just before this because my stamina is wearing out (in terms of responding not reading). I agree that religion has caused extreme harm to society, and I would not be sad to see it go.

I have a slightly different take on the above though: I'm pretty glad to be born when I am, for fear of us self destructing in the next 50 or 100 years, be it war, or climate change. It seems like the 'great filter' is perhaps just human nature, or 'biological nature' having an upper limit on capacity/understanding vs our desire to reproduce and not having a reward function which benefits a long term civilisation.

I also fear death a great deal. I think it's the journey to death I fear the most. I've always had a complex about 'missing out on the party' / have generally been a hypochondriac. If our civilisation does last substantially longer I would be pretty annoyed I couldn't have lived in a more intellectually curious time haha (not that I'd have anyway of knowing..). But I just struggle to see how we are going to last the long haul. I feel like we need some sort of simultaneous social and educational revolution. Dare I mention the president of the USA, I feel like he is a figurehead for the anti-intellectual - but I'm a bit worn out on that topic.

The reward function of society is completely the opposite to what is needed for us to become a space faring civilisation. We don't see amazing scientists getting crazy amounts of followers on instagram (a bit of a contrived analogy).

Usually I'm quite parasitic on forums - I will and ask people leading questions without every responding hoping to read something interesting, so hopefully somewhere in that incoherent ramble was something you found interesting as well :)

Edit: added asterisks around quotes, the formatting options on this site aren't amazing imo

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