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Comment by feanaro | Hacker News Reader

The fact that your process knows about and is able to comprehend and reason about its own workings gives it the opportunity to change itself based on this knowledge.

To hear about it and to then decide "this absolves me of any guilt, because I couldn't have done it any differently" is also a choice your process made. Counterfactually, it could've made the opposite choice (though it didn't do so).

Now, me pointing this out presents yet another choice and opportunity for change. And these opportunities keep happening for the rest of your life.

In essence, even though you cannot change your actions in a very deep sense, concluding "I can't change myself because it's already determined" is always a premature conclusion, whenever it is made.

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Why do we absolve some people of guilt for being a product of their genes and environment and not others? Where do you draw the line? It would seem that "they couldn't help it" just as much as the people that you describe.

The line is subjective and arbitrary.

> just as much as the people that you describe.

I'm not sure which people you mean. I'm saying that it is both true that you "cannot help it" in one sense and false in another sense.

There is always a causal level in which you could not have helped it. But it is never correct to conclude that there is nothing you could've done to help it, because this is also a choice and making it prevents higher-order changes.

... because it's a good idea?

If a person with Tourette's said profanities to you during your Zoom meeting, would you hold them equally responsible as a person not having it? No, because it's a symptom and you assume it is out of their control and they didn't have a malicious intent. If both persons said "sorry it wasn't in my control", you'd think

1) the person A didn't do bad, because they have a tic and they definitely don't have negative feelings towards me

2) the person B has an anger management issues and may or may not have negative feelings towards me, maybe he's bad

We assume intent is malicious when a person has the capability to stop themselves from doing something negative towards us and yet they "chose" not to.

A CPU that doesn't work when power is off could be a good CPU, but a CPU that doesn't work when power is on is a faulty CPU.

> t is out of their control and they didn't have a malicious intent

We just established nobody chooses what they do or how they feel, so at best it's like a matter of degree and at worst it's completely arbitrary.

You can replace "out of their control" with "almost zero chance to go in the else{} branch".

And "can choose to" with "can go to else{} if rx is true" - and social interaction and reward/punishment can make rx == true.

> Why do we absolve some people of guilt for being a product of their genes and environment and not others? Where do you draw the line?

These questions are decided in legal contexts all the time, so you can look up precedent. Generally there are considerations of coercion, mental fitness, and age/experience, because your responsibility is proportional in some sense to how much you know/have learned. If you literally have never learned right from wrong, say you were raised by wolves, then you are generally not held responsible until you do (or rather, you are held responsible, but the penalties are teaching you right from wrong rather than something more severe).

Guilt requires an ability to act on it to be meaningful. It's meaningless to put guilt on people without such ability: they can't act on it anyway, similar to how it's meaningless to scream at a wall.

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