Since I realized this, I am more meticulous when choosing what I do and don't do, there is no going back.
But in the spirit of what you've said, I try to avoid doing dumb, damaging, or boring things twice.
Or maybe just, like many readers, I love buying new books almost as much as reading them, and this is just an excuse to buy more... :)
There’s always a reason to say no, and it’s probably bullshit.
It also has the added benefit of uplifting others - it transforms their idle thought into something that actually happens.
Hearty agreement, from the experience of both the receiving and offering ends of that gesture.
Maybe at the end of the day simple platitudes only work for the lucky.
But sometimes you can move out of a chain of bad luck events by doing something else and not repeating the same stuff while hoping for change.
That infamous quote typically attributed to Einstein notwithstanding, really most of learning and progress is done by doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different outcomes.
> Isn't this also just a form of survivorship bias? You wouldn't be posting this from prison for example.
Note that "pretty much everything" is a proper subset of "everything" and could well be defined as "everything except the obviously stupid stuff that's highly likely to lead to bad outcomes", and this from a sample that's already biased in your favour -- e.g. the vast majority of places you can go in the universe would kill you instantly, but the vast majority of places someone might suggest going to, or offer to go to with you, won't.
If you filter out the "let's go see the Titanic in my home-made submarine" ideas, your odds are actually quite good.
Thing is, when you start saying yes to stuff, and start finding yourself in new places with new people, new opportunities present themselves. I am much materially wealthier now than I ever was when I worked for a living, partly due to income through new connections, partly due to a vastly decreased cost of day to day living by emigrating, and travel has become considerably cheaper as friends I made along the way make for happy hosts, or travel companions to split the cost of something outlandish with.
For example, I invested in an Australian I found wading in the mud at Aralsk, I befriended and helped out a PMC owner I met in Antarctica, and I robbed a Russian oligarch I met on a megayacht, in that order. All were lucrative. One of those falls into the “probably shouldn’t have” category (no prizes guessing which), but is still a “wait, I actually did that?”, and taught me more about myself and this strange world than I anticipated.
Time remains a luxury, but life is short, and easily squandered, so I spend it thoughtfully.
In all seriousness, I liked that line you quoted in the song. I wonder if there is a literary term for that repetition. It's not alliteration I don't think as the words themselves repeat.
Chiasmus?
Why are all rhetorical devices given such arcane names?
That's why they're magic! If people used these words every day they'd end up starting fires or summoning demons.
Scremaèlitude?
We're just making up words at this point, right?
As a parent I tell my kids: "Make lots of mistakes. Learn from them and don't repeat them; avoid the fatal ones". Then I try to remember my own words before I chastize them for their multitude of dumb decisions (teenage boys)...
I mean, in the long we are all dead, but we have to say that there can be ultimately fatal decisions made in which the person does not immediately die.
Hence, book burnings, censorship, and suppression of free speech are problematic.
(That said, I also believe that free speech should be curtailed on platforms with large audiences)
One of the worst censor/suppressor of free speech is also the largest web search.
Libraries are a treasure that represent the best of humanity.
Having lived in quite a few different cities and towns, I've come to the conclusion that the quality of the library (i.e. of the space, atmosphere, and resources provided) correlates with the quality of the community.
We all exist in the world, not apart from it, and no amount of exclusion or creation of “sterile spaces” will change that.
(I'm not referring to intellectual videos, but instead just "some random person" that has amassed 10M followers because they .. well I don't know what they do, except market themselves well. Then start blathering on about literally the dumbest blather ever.
For example, taking medical advice from some guy living in a van, or taking scientific advice from some dude who doesn't even understand ... anything.
Populism to the extreme. Lookit me, I'm purdy, ergo my opinion on everything supersedes everyone.)
Filling the day with any video's seems to have downsides.
>moderation is key. Not too much, or too little
Watching videos all day, even 'good' videos isn't moderation. Your physical body, therefore your mind suffers from lack of exercise.
The surrounding reality in the world doesn't change but the gp was talking about deliberate curation of that reality.
Maybe another example using advertising to help highlight the difference:
- block ads during web surfing with PiHole and uBlock. <-- the curation perspective of gp y04nn's, "I am more meticulous when choosing what I do and don't do, there is no going back.
- no amount of blocking ads will change the fact that ads exist in the world <-- your perspective
Yes, you're correct that "ads still exist" but browsing the web without it is still a nicer experience.
As a general life strategy, I think it’s always better to “filter” rather than “block.”
Before retiring, I trained new hires, the age gaps were sometimes very interesting. The younger they were, the more they wanted to know. (obviously their experience level was pretty low.) I used adages to bring a point home when explaining a difficult concept. It worked every time.
I guess you could call it "folk wisdom" but it seems more like a restating of the obvious to me.
But more importantly, we are creatures of habit before we are creatures of intellect. Stating things like "you are the sum of your experiences" isn't necessarily to reveal new and profound information, it is to emphasize a fact of existence that can easily become overlooked or underappreciated. Especially as we get on in the years and more and more of our behavior is on autopilot. There is value in reminding people to look for potential blindspots and providing some motivation a more careful consideration of the aspects of your life that have become unconscious even if the message comes in a trite or tautological package.
It's like people who have been stuck for the past 5 years spending 2+ hours every day scrolling a social media feeds littered with bad news, snapshots of arguments, and fake representations of the world but can't make a connection between this maladaptive behavior and the growing sense of cynicism and existential malaise that's impacting their happiness. Sometimes it is helpful to hear this kind of stuff (assuming it actually gets through) even though it should be obvious.
I've been practising information hygiene for a while - if I can't change anything about problem X and it does not affect me or my family, should I be deeply informed about it? - and it has done wonders for my mental health.
Your past experiences also teach you what to ignore. You are free to do that to my comment. :)
Highly debatable.
And yet we dance.
The point in debating is enjoying the debate, learning new things. What else is there to do?
Free will is the experience of making a decision. If we define free will as the ability to make a decision independently of our current state (sensory input, memory, emotions), that's utterly asinine. Neither are you an unfeeling, unthinking slave to entropy, simply printing outputs. You are an introspective machine, which can ask itself why it made decisions and update its own internal state to make different decisions in the future. That's what "free will" is.
Free will is something that we experience which provides extremely compelling evidence that it is true. Things don't have to be empirically proven in order to be true, if that were the case then empiricism itself would fail the test as it has never been established to be true empirically.
When experiencing a negative emotion, some people seem to believe they can ‘free will’ their way out of it by thinking positively or something there over, but that intention too is also just a thought that appears in consciousness. To decide what to think in a manner compatible with what most people think free will is would require you to decide what to think or feel before actually thinking or feeling it, which is not possible.
And when you think about the causality of feelings or thoughts, which are just neuronal signaling patterns/chains in the brain, it begins to appear much more mechanical than free will intention.
Perhaps it's that we all think in somewhat different ways, yet because our own mind is the only one that we will ever know - we simply posit that everybody else must think the same way, or at least quite similarly. For instance there's that weird datum that supposedly some huge percent of people don't have an inner monologue, at all. I find it extremely difficult to believe, but if it were true then it would certainly be much easier to understand how somebody else might not believe in free will.
And based on what do you decide ? Probably your past experience, your knowledge, your education and your moral values. Which are all somehow environmental factors.
I'm largely swayed by the 'conscious experience.' Presumably neither of us believe that if you make a program to add 2+2, that some entity suddenly pops into existence and imagines itself to be adding 2+2 only to then zip out out of existence. Where we may differ is that I don't think that changes if we go from adding 2+2, to instead sequentially carrying out arbitrarily more simple instruction.
Yet here we are - 'passenger' or 'driver' in a body feeling as though we have complete control over our own actions. I tend to believe what lay before my eyes. And so in this case, I am obligated to reject this as being an emergent property of complexity, or as a facade. Which, in turn, obligates me to reject physicalism.
A lot of our reasoning are applications of observations and best practices rules that we are sometimes not really aware of unless challenged by circumstances or outsiders.
This is to some degree necessary - the outside world is too complex to fully model inside our minds. The most important things that we can only build approximate models about are other people.
The chain of causality that leads to thoughts and emotions in consciousness is completely determined by the structure and action potentials that propagate through our brain and nothing else, and this doesn’t leave room for some conscious agent in our brain also pulling levers and further modifying causality.
The differences between the lives of even identical twins in the same environment are a lot more than a flap of a butterfly's wings. They don't spend every second of their lives together, so their experiences will differ quite a bit.
I have no reason to doubt my common sense experience.
> we don’t determine how we feel, we are simply served it.
No definition of free will that I have encountered considers it an absolute freedom from any form of determinism. We’re obviously influenced by our nature and external influences. For instance my emotional predispositions are largely determined and my thoughts are not entirely under my control but I do have scope to shape both my emotions and my thoughts over time by what I choose to focus on. I can choose to do what is necessary to change my behavior and to treat people differently than what comes naturally. I know all of this because I have done it, I have experienced it. No materialist philosophy of mind has produced any compelling evidence to contradict my experience of free will in this capacity.
This seems to be an idiosyncratic definition of free will.
This seems like a separate question. Having the power to choose doesn't mean you have every conceivable option in mind, nor that you have the power to exercise every choice, nor even that you like any of the choices.
Did the first particles that ejected from the big bang have free will?
This sounds much too broad - I can't tell what it means. The things I listed are the normal constraints around how we define free will:
> > doesn't mean you have every conceivable option in mind
I think this is what you were exploring in your reply.
> > nor that you have the power to exercise every choice
I might choose to fly, but that doesn't mean that that is what will happen
> > nor even that you like any of the choices
I might be choosing between allowing myself to be robbed and risking being shot, but I am choosing within my horrible options.
> Did the first particles that ejected from the big bang have free will?
I don't think anyone's claiming they did, no.
Whatever happens you'll end up crossing the road right now.
In one example, you absent-mindedly cross the road.
In another example a thought comes to you to get coffee, and you cross the road to get it.
In another example you consider not getting coffee, and going to the park instead, but end up choosing coffee because you feel sluggish.
If there's no free will, any amount of thinking before the decision doesn't prove there's free will. It's just more stuff that was also predetermined. You having an illusion of choice doesn't prove anything.
It's not reasonable to assume one's experience is an illusion without sufficient evidence which is a bar you haven't crossed. Therefore your argument begs the question.
That's why people thought the Sun moved around the Earth. I mean, it's just "common sense" -- you see the Sun in the East in the morning, and then it's in the West in the evening. It turns out "common sense" is not useful for understanding how things work.
It’s not like all thoughts leap into my mind fully formed either. Hell, I edited this message before hitting reply.
Surely you must see this is problems all the way down.
I would be shocked if I was the only one on HN who ever thought, “I don’t want to think about this right now, I want to think about <whatever>” and then stopped thinking about the first thing. In aviation there’s even actually training on division of attention and learning to prioritize and concentrate selectively. You evaluate the situation and classify things as “important” or “not important” then focus in the important stuff. Literally choosing what to think about in the moment.
You’ve never said “gotta concentrate on this now,” and then concentrated on it very hard? Everyone on here is going overly reductive and going into infinite regress as though that proves their point, but it’s Sorites Paradox. “Oh where did the decision about its importance come from? Well that’s entirely the product of your environment! Checkmate free will!” But it’s a lot simpler than that, in the heat of the moment if you don’t have time you tend to fall back to your training, but in other decisions - even when making a choice about what to think about - you can even hold a bit of a discussion with yourself, or lay out the pros and cons to decide what to do, evaluate them all and then choose.
You can absolutely choose to think about one thing or think about another. That’s its own sort of free will. As I read a lot of these comments I really pity the people who don’t believe they’re imbued with free will. It really makes me wonder about their lives and upbringing.
But then again, the addict also says he willingly chooses to drink another beer.. I’m sorry, I can’t let go. But I get your point and TBH I don’t really care either way. I just like to introspect and get at the bottom of things and then let go.
You choose based on your past experience. If you know doing A is better than B, you didn’t choose A, it’s just that your brain already knows that A is the best option based on past experience or knowledge or beliefs.
Even if you choose the seemingly "worst" option B, it’s just that you know that new experiences can be rewarding so your brain is ok to try it.
And there is the extreme example : given you are in good mental health, you are totally, physically, unable to chose to kill someone (or even yourself) without a very important reason (to you).
Also, if the absence of free will at biological levels don’t make the concept useless at the society level. Accepting that environment, culture, knowledge and society have such an influence on us just shows the importance of shaping a good society.
Accepting absence of free will at a biological level can just makes us more empathetic towards others.
It doesn’t means society have to accept any wrong behavior from humans but rather something way more positive : society is ultimately responsible for individuals behaviors and have the power to change them for the benefit of everyone.
Typing out such a long rambling reply was itself a choice.
First sentence GP wrote is: "Choosing is not free will.". Did you choose to ignore what GP wrote when writing your reply?
Free will isn't about making choices, at least not according to any definition I've heard. After all, it is obvious that in some way we do make choices. As far as my understanding goes free will is, depending on the definition, either about choosing differently when all else is equal or not having a gun pointed at your head when making a choice.
Free will largely isn't about making choices or having choices. It is largely about how/why we make choices.
Bacteria can move, thus bacteria have a choice of direction in which to move. Bacteria move, so it is making a choice.
If GP has free will just because they made a choice to write a reply to you, as you claim, then it must follow that bacteria also have free will. Am I wrong or do you think that bacteria have free will?
As for reflex versus choice, if someone hits my knee just right my legs going to kick out. If someone pushes in the same spot and says “kick your leg out” and I don’t want to, I don’t have to.
There may be constraints on that, obviously at gun point I’m going to, but yah, if you’re able to think about then choose to do something or not do something that seems qualitatively different than a reflex.
My tongue-in-cheek answer here is: Correct, badly, and it looks like the obsessive-compulsive desire to check social media and/or the news.
Sometimes I feel like a lot of the folks I hear advocating against free will (which is really a stance against choice and even our own consciousness at its core) have never had to make any real “no-shit” choices in their life with serious consequences. I don’t mean to sound like an ass, but I both pity and envy these folks. Obviously you don’t have control over a lot of things, but the idea that this is all on rails screams “I’ve never had to do anything that had any real risk to it.”
I think it's the other way around. Because as a society we believe in free will, we easily ignore the effect of environment on our choices. We let social media companies make their products addictive, because we believe that it's a choice to use them. If we ackwnoledged the fact that our choices are the result of our genetics and experiences, we could start creating a society that avoids such practices and would be a better place to live in.
Let's say you were addicted to social media and you never in your life have heard or read anything bad about it. No one has ever mentioned quitting social media to you. Do you think the thought to do so would come to your mind? Or is the "choice" to quit social media just a path carved into your brain by all the negative experiences you have had or heard about?
False dichotomy.
What you can change, you can change. What you can't, you can't. Both exist, but not only those.
People can also want and seek help to change parts of yourself beyond your own control — to put the cookies beyond reach; to ensconce yourself in a monastery or nunnery to avoid being around those you're ashamed to fancy; to block the websites you can't resist typing in the URL for when half asleep.
And beyond that even; "thinking outside the box" isn't just a business cliché, there can be ways to change that were already possible, yet the mere thought had not formed and could not spontaneously emerge within a mind, yet when heard it is easy.
> Seriously - it’ll be hard, but just try to change. I bet you’ll be surprised.
If you made the bet to me, you would lose.
My main surprise in this life has been expecting to be able to change more, to resist more temptations, to have more self control.
At university, first year, we had a challenge. With appropriate safety gear, climb a telegraph pole, jump from the top to a trapeze. The teacher framed it in advance: "You'll think you can't, but you can. Remember that going forward, remember the voice saying you can't is wrong."
I climbed without fear. They had to tell me to slow down to keep the safety role taught. I expected it to be fine. I got my torso above the top… and my limbs froze. I still felt no fear, but my limbs were no more responsive to my desire to climb further and stand on the top, than when I have sleep paralysis. This was annoying, frustrating, but not scary. I came down by jumping sideways off the tower, and amused those on the ground by flapping my arms as if they were wings.
The lesson for me was the exact opposite of what had been intended by the teacher: I thought I could, but even without fear I could not.
Why are my expectations wrong in the opposite direction than you expect? Unclear even to me; perhaps because, by the standards I was raised in, so little even tempted me in the first place.
I have a hunch that the universe is more complicated than that and might likely be beyond human understanding, but maybe that's just another superstitious belief. Regardless, we should keep using Science to explore because it is the best model we have so far and continue to use Philosophy to question things.
Personally I feel that I have free will and understanding of my emotions gives me more free will. Even if I am wrong, I prefer living in a non-free will universe and believing in free will than living in a free will universe and not believing in free will. In the former case that would just be my destiny, haha.
"""Addiction is a neuropsychological disorder characterized by a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behaviour that produces natural reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences. Repetitive drug use often alters brain function in ways that perpetuate craving, and weakens (but does not completely negate) self-control.[1] This phenomenon – drugs reshaping brain function – has led to an understanding of addiction as a brain disorder with a complex variety of psychosocial as well as neurobiological (and thus involuntary)[a] factors that are implicated in addiction's development.[2][3][4] Classic signs of addiction include compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli, preoccupation with substances or behavior, and continued use despite negative consequences. Habits and patterns associated with addiction are typically characterized by immediate gratification (short-term reward),[5][6] coupled with delayed deleterious effects (long-term costs).[3][7]""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction
I block some social media entirely, and I have to block rather than simply "choose to stop", due to the "compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli" and habituation to patterns "characterized by immediate gratification (short-term reward)".
I can easily recognise the long term deleterious effects social media, especially when it comes to just being horizontal in bed, either needing to go to sleep or to get up in the morning, and wanting to open up a browser on my phone to check for replies rather than either of those.
> which is really a stance against choice and even our own consciousness at its core
The me of the id is not the same as the me of the ego, or the superego.
The me of tomorrow can curse the expanding waistline caused by the cake eaten by the me of today.
There is only one thing any of us can choose to do in any given moment while remaining true to ourselves; but which of the selves is truly "our"?
I met a young guy while I was backpacking last year who was quitting heroin cold turkey. He was back packing to quit - he’d simply chosen to walk out of his home and go without heroin for thousands of km from the trail system by his home in France.
He was a nice guy - I wonder what became of him, but still, he chose to simply stop. I think you have a lot more agency than you think. Yeah, things cannot be undone, but you can definitely will yourself to change a great many things. It’s just hard and our body resists doing hard things.
Think of it like having a preemptive multitasking scheduler that is unable to keep track of the state of the previous task.
I also wonder if this sort of “free will is not real” sort of mindset comes from a world that’s removed all agency from them?
What is free will when you are suffering from pathological procrastination, depression or addiction ?
If you accept the fact that, like in addictions, your brain chemistry makes you smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol even when you know you’ll die from it and know it makes you miserable then how can you be convinced that you really control your normal behaviors ?
Why does anxiety makes me stay in my couch and antidepressants makes me want to go outside ?
I understand free will as a moral concept but at a biological level, i feel like it adds a lot of shaming and suffering to people who struggle to modify their behavior because science now knows that changing behavior is hard and impossible without physical modification of the brain structure.
You can fail to take action, you can take drugs to manage the negative situation more comfortably, but, if abuse is the underlying issue, a genuine change of circumstances is required.
However it can take a while to realize the problems and manage to get out. This may have effects that last for a good while. People do not deserve abuse or the negative effects of such abuse, just because they technically could have made a change, or made it earlier.
You just moved the shaming from "look they are lazy and don't move from the couch" to "they are lazy because they made bad decisions"
Sometimes, the outcome of one's decisions (bad is an unnecessary value statement here. Was it a "bad" idea to start a restaurant that failed and made you sad? Cmon).
However, a huge swath of mental illness, including depression, is the result of environmental and genetic factors utterly outside your control. Your mom smoked crack when you were in her womb and somehow that's "the outcome of your bad decision?"
Your brain chemistry is part of this will, though.
> science now knows that changing behavior is hard
I don't think science knows things. And while changing behaviour is hard, and much harder for some than others, it still doesn't mean that the total system that makes up your mind, including biological predispositions, is not your will.
But here's the thing, given enough knowledge that chemistry is deterministic.
Will seems to be one of those words we've created from deep ignorance, much like consciousness, and the more we learn about the world and ourselves the less our old views make sense.
What causes someone to suppress doing something they want to do, but have decided is wrong, even if they will never be caught? Or to do something they don't want to do, but have decided is right, even if no-one will ever know?
I would call that "will".
Free will is certainly constrained, and our material and biological conditions do matter - there’s no amount I can will to make myself fly, but they are not necessarily as rigid of constraints as many would have you believe. We can overcome our biology, our predilections, and many of our shortcomings. We have to consciously choose to do so though.
Why can’t I be angry? Surely you must see anger is and never will be rational (and also not free).
My anger at your slapping is as much determined as your slapping. I see no problem.
Free will arguments usually refer to these “justice requires freedom”-like arguments and I feel that’s not the case at all.
You can punish, you can feel anger. It’s all included. You cannot separate reactions, this one is free, this one is not. It’s a package deal.
Still, all these free will deniers are basing their worldview on the (radical) assumption that.
1. Everything has a cause 2. Everything is explainable 3. physical matter is all there is 4. Science can describe literally everything about the universe 4a. Corollary - things that aren’t describable by science don’t exist
All of those claims are unfalsifiable at best and demonstrably false at worst (depending on how hard you squint). Science is effective for repeatable experiments, but that’s not a guarantee that there aren’t events that are one-and-done.
This feels like a God of the gaps type argument and those give off a particular smell.
Hmm, no we can't. And the few people who seemingly can do that, it's because their biology/environment allowed that. So kind of circling back to determinism. Free will is a myth that's used to lock people up.
If you slap someone in the face, we'll lock you up somewhere because we don't know if you'll do it again. It doesn't matter if there is free will or not. Society has decided to put annoying elements in a huge bastille and call it a day.
If someone can't "decide" to slap their neighbor in the face and is determined to do that, why can't the same reasoning be applied to society? Society didn't freely choose to lock someone up, it was determined to do so.
Free will is a matter of definition, and certain definitions, no matter how hard we try, can't be formulated as easily as one does in, say, Euclidean geometry.
So you can come up with a definition of the free will you don't have, let's call it "absolute determinism", and it has all sort of interesting criminal applications, beyond slapping people on the face (yes, who does that anyway?).
For example, you could use your[^1] absolute determinism to build a very advanced AI that relies on a pseudo-random generator with a fixed seed. Fallibility is the result of using stochastic search methods, and your AI shows it. In that respect and many others, your AI acts exactly as a human would because you programmed it that way. Yet, you have the strongest argument possible to affirm that the AI you created has no free-will. One day, the AI leaves a bunch of children mentally dysfunctional[^2]. But it has no free-will, all it is emanates from you. So you must be charged for the AI's crime.
Your lawyers come to court and state that you in turn have no free-will, that you are God's creature. The prosecutor brings a priest to say that God gave you free will. The judge says that precedent demands you be thrown from a high mountain, but it's feeling like a good day for a crucifixion. Of course, the trial is a shamble, a racket run by Sapiens' genes to ensure that they are passed down. And from that point of view, you committed the ultimate sin.
The way out? Submit to your genes, do what they tell you to. Believe in free-will.
[^1] I wash my hands.
[^2] Wait, did that happen already?
That is not true. Your gene expression is influenced by experiences, and not just yours, but your grand-grand parents' experiences, too. See: epigenetics and transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.
> Your lawyers come to court and state that you in turn have no free-will, that you are God's creature.
Some say that lack of free will, i.e. determinism undermines moral responsibility, which in turns means that it conflicts with punishment and so forth. I believe that it ultimately does not matter; you can punish for the behavior alone.
Normally there is not much I can say to change your mind on that, but just note—there are other views, like idealistic monism, which unlock other possibilities wrt. free will, and which cannot be disproven or proven compared to physicalist monism (which cannot be proven or disproven either).
As parent said, many open questions and interpretations become relatively trivial under idealism, while preserving 100% of our scientific understanding and method.
I think the best resource are his books. He also has several online interviews. The guy used to work at CERN and ASML, turned to philosophy.
https://www.essentiafoundation.org/analytic-idealism-course/
A compressed version of the same material
https://www.essentiafoundation.org/ef-keytoe-analytic-ideali...
The PhD dissertation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iyoiJmWvSs
Enjoy the rabbit hole :)
That is, I don't have the free will to believe in free will or not.
Yes I can, because I didn't choose to be angry either.
Of course they could. Anger is a way for the body to react without choosing as a defense mechanism against the next slap. Either your biology would recognise the anger and step back, or the other person would punch you back, making you afraid to repeat what you did.
I’m not siding with or against free will, I just don’t think your example works to prove the point.
tongue-in-cheek
slap
Free will is the foundation of most judeo-christian moral systems, which were inherited by liberalism. It's the justification for punishshing and rewading individuals.
It seems to work relatively well, but I find it very cruel.
What's a better and less cruel alternative?
I find re-education, be it camps or not, a lot less cruel and effective than e.g. throwing people in prisons or killing them.
I've heard it said that the concept doesn't even exist in many cultures and that its importance in western culture can be largely attributed to the need to justify the concept of 'original sin'.
For me at least, free will is a concept with no value.
You think metaphysical libertarianism is meaningful ("meaningful free will"),
You also think it's false (why, if it's meaningful?),
You aren't bothered by this,
And something vague about empathy. Is that like "it's not your fault, you had no free will"? So about blame?
But the function of blame is to manipulate people's choices, and that works even when we acknowledge that the choices result from physical processes.
> You also think it's false (why, if it's meaningful?),
Why would we expect any coherent phrase like "metaphysical libertarianism" to be true simply because it contains meaning?
[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/592344/determined-b...
My criticism is that they all seem to make the same error, in treating the existence of free will as some sort of binary decision.
My view is that the more one's model is coherent with the underlying reality, the more options are available to the individual. The greater the selection, the more free will you have.
Eg, if someone pulls a gun on you, you may think you have no free will. However, if you have a gun of your own, you have a different set of options. Similarly, if you are a trained martial artist or hostage negotiator, you will evaluate your options differently - you have more options.
Put simply one doesn't know what one doesn't know. Most likely this will occur in the case where one is certain of one's 'knowledge' of something that is actually false, ie one is operating within a lie/fantasy and has been tricked. Here, one will have a constrained set of options and therefore less free will.
But to me those examples are just knowledge. Regardless of how many possible options, the process of making the choice would be free will, if it existed.
My one is that one is more free if one is aware of the full scope of one's options. This is not an ephemeral idea, it is not related to the 'what might have been' aka the 'opportunity cost' of choosing. One's present awareness (and potential expansion of that awareness) has an impact on how free one is.
With this said having more knowledge expands your ability to explore the problem space of existence. Lets imagine that you are a single bit, you have the 'choice' of being one or zero. From an outside observer the problem space of the outcome is very predictable in the sense we know it's going to be a 1 or 0. Now, keep adding random bits and our ability to predict the outcome of any state drops dramatically very quickly. But that's choosing at random, what if most bit states are bit random at all? For example this digital creature we're talking about now is millions of bit states long set by a learning algorithm, it so advanced it has an internal Turing machine that can simulate potential outcome states far into the future when executing code. You would look at this and say "well, it doesn't have free will, it just has an incomputably large set of potential bit states" But an outside observer unaware of the programs nature and it's starting state (for example it's performing a Turing test against the machine) would probably think the entity has free will.
You are a very large set of states, because of this you cannot prove free will. You've reversed causality in your summary.
In movies. In real life, 99% of the time if someone pulls a gun on you in close range with the intent of harming you before you have your gun pointing at them, then you are going to be harmed and your martial arts or gun is going to be useless.
"Everyone learns from experience. The wise try to learn from other people's experience."
Obviously our environment influences us, but we are largely a product of ourselves. And that aspect is what drives us to seek out the things we do. Which can then, in turn, make it seem that the things we seek out have turned us into who we are.
You'd have to pay attention and find any step forward possible for them to begin to enter the discomfort that is holding them back - which may be the biggest challenge of their lives up until that point.
Ideally though, as we're all sheep to some degree - which is exactly what this HN post is stating in a more sophisticated way, and attempting to warn for this - ideally there's a culture of practices that develop oneself, so you're just going along with the "herd" - that path hopefully not corrupted and led by bad actors attempting to send us off a cliff or into their totalitarian pen.
Language itself does, in fact, very much contain views, values and perspectives. As an example, there are population groups that do not have a word for the color blue, and that cannot, in consequence, distinguish between green and blue objects. [0] [1] And that's an example that has been noticed throughout the world.
[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-didn-t-even-see-the-colo...
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2023/how-blue-and-green-appeared-langua...
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"The experiment shown in the documentary was a dramatization; the genuine color experiments done with the Himba, some years before, used a different sort of stimuli and a different experimental method; the stimuli shown in the documentary were modeled on those used by Paul Kay and others in experiments on other groups; but in all of the relevant experiments, the dependent measure was reaction time (in finding a matching color or an oddball color), not success or failure.
The BBC's presentation of the mocked-up experiment — purporting to show that the Himba are completely unable to distinguish blue and green shades that seem quite different to us, but can easily distinguish shades of green that seem identical to us — was apparently a journalistic fabrication, created by the documentary's editors after the fact, and was never asserted by the researchers themselves, much less demonstrated experimentally."
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Whatever the alleged fabrications of the BBC might have been or not been for the Himba experiments, similar observations have been made for other groups as well, from Amazonian tribes, to population groups in Papua New Guinea, to Aborigines in Australia. And the MIT research link is discussing a very similar result.
That languages influence how you perceive and see the world has been well studied and is well documented.
I have personal experience with this, learning Russian. They don't have just blue, but rather a term for dark blue and one for light blue. It's hardly some eye opening thing - it's basically sky blue vs ocean blue. It's obvious and easy, but obviously I will always be slower than a native on a quiz of which is which for reasons that have nothing to do with the colors. Vice versa, compare our speeds in English with 'sky blue' vs 'ocean blue' and I'd be back to winning.
A common trend in the social sciences is creating experiments that aren't designed to challenge one's hypothesis, but confirm it. The publication bias against negative results is probably necessary, but also turning a lot of soft science into a facade.
And the smaller the external input we give to this group of toddler, the more they will resemble a violent pack of chimps in the end. Unlikely to develop their own values and perspectives.
In any case you also have an ancestor issue. The views, values, and so on that we take for granted simply did not exist at some point. Yet, here we are.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2426678-peaceful-male-b...
"However, Gisela Kaplan at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, says she found the paper extremely frustrating and that the word “aggression” is being misused.
Chimpanzee groups are ruled by one dominant male, whereas bonobos are ruled by females. Competitions for dominance and mating rights in bonobos shouldn’t be confused with aggression, says Kaplan. “There’s more pointless violence in chimpanzees and humans than in other species like bonobos,” she says."
Even if you could make the toddlers physically identical, you can't place them all in the same point in space and always see, hear, touch the same things.
Add randomness inherent in the current understanding of (quantum) physics and you'd need a strong convergence mechanism for your experiment to prove what you're saying.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayy_ibn_Yaqdhan
Probably the most important work of Arabic philosophy.
I was kinda impressed with Bergman once the book came out so I took nine copies to Finnish MP's to share. Unfortunately they were not too interested in the humane message the book told
Add in cells merging every once in a while, and you have the abbreviated history of humanity in one paragraph.
aka: tribalism.
Though there's a shocking amount of convergent evolution.
Humans, relatively to most animals, also have an extremely slow generational time, which I think also further emphasizes this divergence. If we assume a low end generational time of just 20 years, even that is as few 2,500 generations, hardly a blink in time on a normal evolutionary scale.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_moder...
Even a brief look out your window will convince you this cannot possibly be true.
How many people have a different religion than their parents? How many Christians from Iowa have kids that decide they're actually Hindu? Just about zero.
Can you tell where someone is from based on how they dress? Heck yes. If they were making up their mind on their own you couldn't.
The likelihood you'll go into the military is far higher if other people in your family are in the military. 1% of Americans serve at all. But 60% of people who serve have an immediate family member (parent or sibling) who serves.
We could go on endlessly.
The idea that we're largely a product of ourselves is absurd. How many top physics were born in Eastern Europe be Africa? Do people in Africa genetically hate physics? No. But you're largely a product of your environment.
We really have little idea how much our character and behavior is formed by experiences and how much by our DNA. Though pretty clearly, early experiences generally have a larger effect than later experiences.
That's only the mental aspect. Physically, you are also what you eat and how often you exercise.
There are plenty of books and other resources that speak to the power of "no". To the phrase I quote above, yes you need to have a good 'diet' of what you put in your mind. Some junkfood is ok, mostly junkfood is not.
A quote that has shaped me is: ""The less time one gives to the newspapers the better," he replied. "Do you like books on travels?"" by Hector Malot on his book En Femille (Nobody's Girl)(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27690/27690-h/27690-h.htm)
Btw, others write about ads. We can only (perhaps) avoid some on the internet (ad-blockers, NoRoot Firewall on Android devices and block certain IPs/URLs) but there are many ads we don't block, in movies (product placement), posters on bus stops, etc.
Fun fact: Apple doesn't allow its devices to be used by "baddies", so if you see an actor holding/using an iPhone, and you are not sure if they are Nice or Evil, chances are there will be a last-minute-twist and that actor will be/become Nice.
Particularly sudden advertising in youtube videos, it really feels like some kind of rape of the mind.
Four factors that are party to this mechanism of not "being what you eat" are: - developing attention and aim, - self-awareness/emotional regulation development [which will clear past trauma and allow you to 1) be processing fully int he present moment or 2) extrapolate and prophesying-predicting into the future more accurately], - developing a dynamic weighting process, and - honing your judgment, compassion, and forgiveness practices - as any logic for judgements you apply to others, that logic is also applied to yourself - whether you realize it or not, and will weigh you down - depress you and can increase your baseline stress and anger levels.
The above will raise your vibratory frequency from the patterns of thoughts and beliefs of yourself or others, which if they are negative then they will knock you and keep you down [and/or require unnecessary and excessive energy to trying to prop yourself up with active motivation]; keeping you at a lower vibration - where like attracts like.
I do however do everything to avoid very low quality content - that we could call candy - like advertisements, however avoid may be the wrong word - I consciously act for high yield outcomes and quickly respond consciously to note when an unavoidable ad is present - and arguably am good at not getting distracted by them or go into a studying mode to analyze them to see what tactics they are deployed; ultimately they are a waste of time and can cause a misdirection of attention, but the consequences are far worse than that.
There are many very effective and efficient practices to help with all of the above - natural medicinal as well as things like yoga as a framework.
And understanding this and factors that help or factors that may make you more prone or fragile, make it more difficult to regulate, is valuable knowledge as well - such as if you're high in conscientiousness and/or negative emotion ["neuroticism"] - and further knowing if that's the case it usually merely means it will simply to take to master than the average, so then to learn to be more patient with yourself.
P.S. Are they still producing new seasons of Silicon Valley?
There is sure an inate part and I don't intend to redo a nature vs nurture debate, but you still need an environment even to express your nature, so I'm not sure what you are really getting at.
What I'm getting at is people need to get exposed to the knowledge and practices, if they are to potentially benefit from the tools and support available.
So that first starts by somehow gaining an adequate level of attention from them, a certain level of interest, and that often occurs due to something occurring that leads to an impetus that causes them to stumble and journey to discover where they otherwise have learned to avoid.
2) Couldn't help but think of this quote from Kamala Harris that has been of recent memery. :P
You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.
To me, the risks are being overwhelmed by internalizing too much at once, and the opportunity cost of having a limited amount of time to take things in to your senses.
Influence is a very nuanced thing so I don't want to sound too black and white here, but I think it's like a brainstorm session. You take what you like best from your senses/inputs/etc
If you read it as the common English phrase "there's no going back", no. It's just a thing people say in place of something more dry like "I will continue doing this for as long as I feel I should which I currently think is a long time or forever but saying that would be a bit ridiculous".
And whom you surround yourself with in both professional and personal life, whom you listen to as an authority on topic XYZ. Work has massive effect on our personality long term. There is no way to separate those 2, so its smart to anticipate things before you realize that decade(s) in some toxic place dragged you nanometer by nanometer into some dark pit.
I'm pretty sure my ADD brain fails to do that on a regular basis.
The thing is when we read, particularly in growing years, the expectation is that we would remember most of things from the book and apply it somewhere else, ex. in a discussion "...agree, the same I gathered from this excellent book that I read couple of years back...".
And frankly, I'm bummed by it still. I read a lot but when certain situation comes I cannot remember things & facts vaguely, even though I had finished 300 pages of that page turner in one night.
I believe this is called subconscious mind
you read something impactful that changes the way you think, your mind will stay changed even if you don't remember the actual reasons or point made, but advertisements, news, etc. will not change the way you think, they are just noise
Be alert, situationally aware.
Process actively, notice and distill patterns.
Try things. Push the environment.
My HS college prep English teacher, who was one of the best teachers I ever had, put it this way: "Garbage in, garbage out." His point was that it simply isn't rational to believe that you can read nothing but National Lampoon, Mad Magazine, or the county newspaper and become a great writer. You have to read, digest, and breathe the air of the great works of fiction and literature and allow it to do its work in influencing your prose style, cadence, and structure.
If we are good readers, a book helps up achieve better generalization (in the machine learning sense). That's its main contribution not the specific facts it contained.
In hindsight, my father and mother-in-law listening to Rush Limbaugh everyday was probably not very good for them. It is a small sample size, but I can remember as a kid how negative and angry the program was and how it certainly didn't put my father into a good mood and how it was kind of like a mind virus. I try to be more aware of advertising and propaganda, but it isn't easy. You have to be vigilant as even the news will use clips out of context. I'm not just saying conservatives are guilty of this either, but am using an example from personal experience.