That is such an arbitrary distinction. As if being "just a slacker" doesn't have a number of deeper reasons behind it as well. Brains are just machines at the end of the day, every behavior is a result of something material...
Dr. K suggests the brain is optimized for efficiency. If something is not seen by the brain as being unnecessary, then the brain is unlikely to trigger a response that motivates you to complete the task. The example used was going to the restroom - your bladder fills up and your brain tells you it's time to go. Motivation in areas of life was seen as being similar.
In the case of laziness, the bladder filling up is analogous to, let's say, shame reaching a level to where you're prompted to finally clean your room. Obviously increasing shame would be less than ideal, but there are other means for motivating yourself (e.g., purpose in service to others, duty, dharma, etc). He also draws a distinction between apathy and detachment, which are also part of the problem.
Anyways, I'm not sure I agree with everything he said/says, but it's worth checking out and an interesting perspective nonetheless!
Source: https://www.healthygamer.gg/asmongold-talks-to-healthygamer-...
The analogy that brains are like machines is harmful because it makes it sound like there is some operating manual and simple cause effect relationships that are known. Our knowledge of the brain is in fact very little. It's a false reassurance and reductionist view to see the brain as a machine simply because it is made of material parts that seem to act in a reliable way towards some end.
Why? We have complex machines and systems as well, where nobody would claim that there are only simple cause effect relationships and you only need a two-page owner's manual.
Drugs work pretty reliably. While you can't predict what exactly is going to happen when you take LSD, you can be pretty sure that something is going to happen. Why, if not because the brain reacting to some chemical?
This idea of "don't say it's a machine, you're oversimplifying it" is what's harmful in my eyes. It leads to anti-scientific positions, mysticism and fatalism. If there's nothing we can do to help, and nothing we can learn because it's so super hyper duper complex and "emergent", why bother. It's not, of course. While we don't know everything, we do know something. And we should extend our knowledge. Pretending that we can't know isn't useful.
There are a lot of ways to think about the differences between machines and people. One very simple one is that machines typically function in only a very limited subset of the space of their available degrees of freedom and small deviations are usually catastrophic. Biological systems don't usually have this property.
Another way to think about it is that machines show evidence of design, which you might characterize as a certain economy of ideas. Two clocks in a computer a much more likely to be identical or to share major conceptual underpinnings than two clocks in a biological system, for example.
I used to have your view of things and then I read Deacon's "Incomplete Nature," a book whose thesis fails to land but is never the less a comprehensive analysis of the properties of living organisms in a unified if rickety system which encompasses the basic laws of physics. It really convinced me that the analogy between brain and machine is poor.
The question of what a mind is and how it relates to the brain is not settled science or philosophy, at any rate. It doesn't do anyone any good to pretend it is.
(footnote): This is a reasonable assumption to make but its hardly widely believed by the general public nor settled scientific fact. Luminaries like Penrose still assert a fundamental disjunction between what brains do and what machines do and he isn't alone among physicists, to say nothing of the broader philosophical community or the lumpen mass of human opinion.
inputs (sensors, environment, external chemicals) + current state ---> outputs (behavior) + new state
kinda like computers or robots, in a deterministic manner (except it is practically impossible to recreate the exact same inputs, or the exact same state). You don't have to take it too literally, people who read it generally understand what it means.
Machines are in some sense constituted by an enormous, intentional, simplification of the possible dynamics of a clump of matter and its relations to the outside world. Their design is profoundly impacted by both our own cognitive limitations and the contexts in which they are manufactured and used. Biological systems simply don't have these constraints and they operate in what are often totally different ways from machines.
My point is that there is considerable scientific and philosophical scholarship on this issue which casts this metaphor into doubt at least with regard to base utility.
It's just not a very helpful metaphor, because we are nowhere close to having a way to simulate or compute that function.
So treating people as agents with goals, desires, personalities, experiences and histories and traumas, and drawing on our hard wired abilities for empathy, can be a far more useful model for actually helping and healing people than just giving them a pill.
But that's not a dichotomy. Nobody is saying to either disregard biochemistry and believe that God gave us free will by some magical act or just throw random pills at people.
You can see people as all that and still not reject the idea that chemical imbalances can negatively influence their goals, desires and personalities, and that chemicals can also positively influence them,
And honestly, there's a lot of complexity to even the smallest thing. A particularly good read, "I, Pencil" goes into how nobody knows how to make even a simple pencil.
What I was getting at is the fact that there is no fundamental difference between "I did it" and "my illness caused me to do it" (other than maybe probability).
Or in other words, no "free will", in the way that some people view that term.
My issue with the word machine is that in most people's minds that brings up ideas of cross sections, gears, cogs, repairs and so on. People aught to be thinking of a complex system instead like perhaps the ecosystem in the Amazon rainforest.
It's kind of like trying to put a rocket into space in the stone/bronze age. Or figuring out the Google codebase if it was handed to you in Assembly.
It's just that the physical composition of our bodies are knwon down to the protons (and even deeper). How they all work is a different question, but there is a specific way they work. Just have to figure it out.
When I say machine, I mean it as "construct" of any kind, not just electromechanical. Imo, it would be really nice if we could grow and reattach whole body parts, or grow bodies for transplant, but obviously those ideas bring a lot of negative connotations and ethical problems, so we're investing in electromechanical alternatives instead.
I think there is some admin access. The problem is it probably isn't a good idea to sudo | grep | awk > overwrite_file.model very often. Brains might just be a jumble of extremely efficient and over-fitted regression models and neural nets with a really shitty training dataset.
There was an SSC article that had some good discussion on this at some point, but thanks to NYT I can no longer link it.
When compared to doing nothing and tolerating them, I can definitely see that. But I still think there have to be more effective approaches than either (even if we don't know what some of them are yet).