- economists & businesspeople who can't conceive of a world without growth
- religious people who think God wants them to be fruitful and multiply
- atheists who think we have some kind of evolutionary imperative
- parents who think that being childfree is an affront to their choices
We do this all the time, including with debt, pensions, etc. Once born, the currently unborn have the choice to take care of their parents or not, to decide en masse not to become a doctor or nurse, to emigrate to a different country without a pension system (or to just be jobless forever to avoid paying for that)...
It sounds more like this might be a choice you feel strongly about but are projecting selfishness on to others?
This can be a totally fine choice for someone to make personally (which I support), but also not good for society as a whole. Both things can objectively be true.
I was saying that it didn’t feel like they were arguing in good faith by ascribing only selfish motivations for those who advocate for that point of view.
Parents have natural urges to have kids (literally, evolution!). So it is self-explanatory.
Non-parents will need a younger generation when they grow old for satisfying all the Maslow hierarchies of needs (food, medical care, entertainment, funding social safety nets etc). So the ones who are not producing any kids by choice are consciously offloading their old-age care and hence act selfishly.
People in both categories may not be aware of their own flavor of selfishness.
When my father was dying, I out of all his children was able to help him the most since I don't have children of my own. Clearly I could devote my life to helping old people and do more overall good for that group, then just producing children (who may or may not do so). In fact, I could make the claim that "the ones who *are* producing kids by choice are consciously producing more work for future generations to do hence acting selfishly". That position would be similarly asinine.
But sure if you understand there is no inherent good to parenting and it's basically just people doing what they want to do (well when having the children by choice anyway), then I guess you maybe show a little humility. I may someday have children, but I'm under no illusion that I'd be doing the world a favor.
And aging population means you have more dependents than caretakers for them.
An aging population in some parts of the world means you have fewer men to fight in a conflict (assuming your adversary doesn’t have an aging population).
There’s loss of specialization, loss of skill transfer, younger people do more manual labor like harvesting food.
You need people of a certain age range to basically run society.
Procreation kinda is an evolutionary imperative- atheism or not
I've yet to meet anyone able to do so coherently.
You've also presented no argument for why it is impossible to define. If free will is possible, there should be no reason you can't define what it is.
If we have no free will we are just like candle flames; any argument that says we are more than candle flames is not valid when you assume we are candle flames.
People forget that logic requires axioms.
If I were to ask you to act a certain way and you do, this would neither prove nor disprove free will, because it tells me nothing about whether causality required you to act that way or differently and whether or not you deviated from causality, and so your analogy is meaningless. It is not what we'd ask you to do in order to prove free will.
You're using an assumption about an invalid argument as an argument in favour of free will, and that's no more valid than the original invalid argument.
To prove free will you need to prove that there are decisions in the brain that does not follow a) strict causality, b) randomness, c) any combination of the two. As you've pointed out, experiments where you ask a subject to act in specific ways do not produce evidence for it, as they can just as well just be causality in action. That the strawman hypothesis you presented is not valid does not prove the inverse, nor does it release any obligation of proponents of the idea of free will from providing evidence, or even just a definition to support their idea.
Free will is an absolutely extraordinary claim in that respect, because it implies a third category of events that is not a mix of strict cause-effect chains and random events, but introduces a "will-effect" chain that has no direct causal link but at the same time is not random.
As it stands, without a definition, the notion of free will is not even a fanciful hypothesis - to suggest it is a hypothesis would imply a fully formed idea. But the concept is so woolly and meaningless it tells us nothing.
It's at most a fervent wish or hope of not being an automaton. But a wish is not evidence, nor an argument, or even a hypothesis.
If you want to produce a valid argument for free will, you need to be able to either proffer a hypothesis for how such a "will-effect" chain can exist, or demonstrate physical transitions in a mind that are demonstrably not cause-effect or random byproducts of ordinary physics.
Even just come up with a coherent definition and you will be world famous, as you'd have introduced a new area of logic. If you can prove a physical mechanism for it, you'll have Nobel Prize in physics in the bag.
The main issue is that we approach the topic with a different set of axioms. E.g. your limitation of requiring a proof involving (a-c) is analogous to asking someone to build a steel bridge with three colors of legos.
Free will and consciousness are tautologically joined, so any attempt to create a framework to disprove/prove one or the other will have to be all encompassing.
It has the same issue though that you have to decide that you are conscious to begin using reason, even though no one can prove it scientifically.
If your starting point is that no one is actually conscious, it’s impossible to disprove, and it’s obviously wrong (and any attempt to prove it’s not obviously wrong would knee-cap itself since it’s impossible ‘to logic’ without a reasoning engine).
Well, yes. The alternative is for you to give me a definition of free will that allows for it within the constraints of cause-effect and randomness.
Without such a definition, the option we are left with is inherently "breaking free" of that, and then we need another category of effect.
I don't believe either is possible, but we specifically do not have evidence that such other category of "will-effect" transition is possible, no observed mechanism, no observation of such a category, nor a hypothesis that provides even the starts of a coherent definition of what it would even mean.
So yes, the point is that the problem appear obviously impossible to resolve in favour of free will without either new logic or a definition of free will I don't think possibly can meet expectations.
> Free will and consciousness are tautologically joined, so any attempt to create a framework to disprove/prove one or the other will have to be all encompassing.
Only partially, in the positive case. Consciousness would seem to need to exist for free will to exist, but in the event free will does not, there's no reason to presume that affects the possibility of consciousness.
> It has the same issue though that you have to decide that you are conscious to begin using reason, even though no one can prove it scientifically.
It does not have the same issue. Whether you have free will or not, there's no reason why that need to affect your life at all. Clearly we think we make choices. Whether we make those choices or not, we act as if we do. As it is, we already have solid evidence that our conscious "decision" often is not causally linked to the actual "choice", so we can't rely on our introspection to even give us an accurate description of what "choices" we make, or why, and we know from e.g. split brain experiments that the brain can easily be made to rationalise how it "chose" things it never did. Accordingly, whether the mechanism actually controlling actions exercise free will or not, we'd expect our consciousness to experience it the same way.
“Well, yes. The alternative is for you to give me a definition of free will that allows for it within the constraints of cause-effect and randomness.”
https://youtu.be/itLIM38k2r0?si=1wTeSVdX28UlB2jf
This interview with Nobel prize winning mathematical physicist Roger Penrose describes a framework where quantum mechanical time hopping during a measurement removes this cause-and-effect concern you have. E.g. The nature of reality of time and matter fields is even more complicated than we understand, and our macros scale understanding of cause and effects might be too limiting when considering constraints of consciousness.
But what will the price of that labor be when birth rates collapse and there aren't sufficient people around to do this labor? Retirement savings mean nothing when the people needed to do the work are not available. For wealthy western countries immigration is the only realistic solution address the shortage of working-age people. It's not a silver bullet, though. Immigration scares people and populist politicians will exploit this fear of change.
We should also remember that politicians in rich countries are very old. They care a great deal about anything that affects their own retirement. To young people who don't have high expectations for their quality of life in their last couple of decades on earth this panic about demographic change may seem silly. But baby boomers care and they are the ones making policy.
Mainly though, I wonder - where is all the extra productivity that has supposedly developed over the last half century or so? Shouldn't that be able to cover over a declining population?
I think we can also make a Moore's law analogy here. As CPUs get faster we write slower code.
At some point my generation will have to question the validity of that social contract.
I'm asking because whatever policy you'd like to see applied to the current elderly, is to be applied with twice the intensity to yourself, as the generation behind you is even smaller.
So any fix would involve changing the age structure of representation. The particulars of the fix would depend on the specifics of a particular system, but one idea that could fix things would be absolute limits to the time you can be in office. So for example a rule that states any person may serve only X years in parliament over the course of their life. Those limits might have other benefits.
Maybe even an absolute age limit would make sense, e.g. retirement age + X years. Of course old people should get political representation, but maybe putting a cap on it would work to make it more a government of working people.
Another idea would be a voting multiplier, that gives proportionally more power to representatives that are from age brackets that are underrepresented in the governing body.
All of these might have unanticipated side effects and there are probably even better ideas, but the point is: whatever it is, it has to be something that gives true concessions to the young people, otherwise there can be no true political negotiation between the retired many and the working few.
For myself I don't believe I have the wherewithal for it regardless of my view on the matter of selfishness.
>The recent proliferation of studies examining cross-national variation in the association between parenthood and happiness reveal accumulating evidence of lower levels of happiness among parents than nonparents in most advanced industrialized societies. Conceptualizing parenting as a stressor buffered by institutional support, we hypothesize that parental status differences in happiness are smaller in countries providing more resources and support to families. Our analyses of the European Social Surveys (ESS) and International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) reveal considerable variation in the parenthood gap in happiness across countries, with the U.S. showing the largest disadvantage of parenthood. [0]
Family planning was one of my dad’s specialities in public health, and most of our family friends are in that field. At a party a few years ago, someone jokingly asked if my wife and I planned to have a fourth kid, and someone reflexively interjected “nobody needs four kids.”
Arguably it was a necessary policy at the time, but has probably doomed countries like Korea and Japan to extinction.
The response to the above tends to be something like, it's not so bad, kids don't really need that much anyway. Which always leaves me with the question - how much money do you make? Could it be expressed as "several times the median US household income"?
The point you’re trying to make is contradicted by the demographics of who is having kids. My friends from law school are the ones who disproportionally aren’t having kids. Meanwhile my wife’s step mom’s rural Idaho family is bursting at the seams with kids.
For those without good career prospects, ruin is not such a big deal. I looked it up, and no surprise that medicaid pays for a huge share of births in rural Idaho; if anything, 48% is lower than I'd expect.
> Medicaid coverage is even higher for births in rural Idaho. For instance, 48% of births in Lemhi County involved mothers covered by Medicaid. [0]
[0]https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2023/11/28/idahos-infant...
That’s what I’m calling selfish. These people could have kids. They just choose to prioritize their lifestyle, and the pursuit of their individual career. They forgo the fundamental pillar of the human experience for marginally better odds at a career that makes some giant corporation marginally more money.