Layke1123

Yes it is, because you are defining free will to be the illusion of choice, and that is not the common understanding of what free will means. You are intentionally misleading people who will read your comments about "free will" as a justification to continue believing free will actually exists.

Incorrect. You willingly lock people up for premeditated murder even if the murder did not happen. If I hire a hit man, and they turn out to be an FBI undercover agent, I am now in jail not for committing murder but trying to commit murder.

And you would be wrong then, as most people define free will as the ability to actually control one's own actions rather than participate in a false world view where those "choices" are viewed as the important part of defining free will.

And I do ignore it. Not it of spite, but because it fails to hold up to intense rigor and scrutiny.

"Always get consent" (except here, here, and here)

This if not a simpler rule than to act if the outcome is judged to improve the situation. My rule is that a 90 percent chance is better than an 80 percent chance. It has no exceptions, no caveats.

I could convince you 90 percent of the time to "consent" to brain cancer surgery. If I can fix your brain without you even being aware of the problem 95 percent of the time, I would choose the later not the former, even if you happened to be the 5 percent. It's the same reasoning why we REQUIRE vaccines even though a small percentage of people can die from the vaccine itself. There are no exceptions in my system, it's simply the laws of probability applied precisely rather than some semantic argument you twist and turn at every exception to every case.

Your definition is wrong. It is not what people think making choices are. People feel they are free to make choices. That doesn't mean they actually had a choice if you permit that you are not on control of your brain processes even if you consider that "you". Your subjective experience of those processes is what people associate with choice, not an observation of some part "you" making the decisions that you are unaware of. You indeed are just a chest in the machine according to your owns words just now in these scenarios. It's intellectually dishonest to just redefine making choices however you want. It's a non- starter.

Further more, you claim any your reasoning doesn't fail, and yet you also admit your viewpoint is vulnerable? It is an admission outright that your arguments don't withstand rational scrutiny. However, you have yet to articulate a an argument that does make my position vulnerable to scrutiny.

Because I'm confident the brain is physical, and just like chemicals (alcohol, opoids) and viruses or bacteria (toxoplasmosis) can already brain behavior, so can a person alter than brain through similar methods. It only comes down to knowing how the brain forms new thoughts and making it incapable of exhibiting murderous thoughts.

And I say historical evidence does not lend you credence, but actually the opposite. Nazi Germany believed in capitalism and the doctrine of free will. The is considered the worst of the worst, and that is your society and historical fact you choose to ignore a m ought the rest of atrocities the western philosophy of that has inflicted through war. Or are you trying to tell me every war the US has been involved with was necessary to protect lives and promote less horrendous death and suffering?

If I can't convince you that murder is wrong, I will do my best to force you out of civilized society. I will not tolerate it in my sphere of influence just as you would not either. I simply take it not just in the external sense but the internal sense as well. If you think about murdering someone, I would ask why and if you are at fault for said thoughts and couldn't not provide an answer that justified your position, I would "cancel" you and your contributions to our society. We don't need murderers or violent offenders, whether its internal or external.

As for your inability to conceive of an idea of a real possibility, that's a lack of imagination on your part. I can clearly consider it a possibility but even more so an eventuality. Your world view is limited, not mine.

Lol we didn't agree mate but way to try and take a quick win by "selectively" ignoring the parts you don't want to quote.

So you agree, capitalism has been responsible for slavery and mass murder?

It isn't sophistry, it's showing that your own reasoning fails to hold because a word like choice is meaningless when you really analyze it. If free will doesn't exist, then there are no choices, only the illusion that you made a choice.

So forcing them to do everything else is fine, just as long as no one touches the brain. Removing a foot ok though? What about the death penalty? That can be done without rearranging the brain.

Exactly how redefining what most people take to mean free will and changing the definition of it is poor wording?

The later for both, yes, and the line is when you make a judgment for what is likely to happen as a result of current events. If you have the power to make a better outcome happen 90 percent of the time versus 80 percent of the time, you choose 90 percent even if you are wrong some of the time. No ones has perfect information, yet we still make decisions that alter things despite perfect information. We just do the best we can, and sometimes that means we get ot wrong but should be moving in the better direction whenever possible.

In both scenarios, no free will exists. I didn't trigger my brain processes, only observed them. Neither did you.

You are trying to paint a single scenario in which there is an important distinction and then ignore any other scenario where your reasoning fails.

For instance, if I chose to kill myself, and you stop me, and I later thank you for stopping me from killing myself, is that difference important? Yes or no?

Then if you could change a person and make them incapable of murder, would you not do it? If you could prevent murder, why aren't you morally compelled to? If you chose to let it happen, that means you approve of it.

My position is that reducing murder as much as you can is the correct position, to include making that number zero, just like stopping all rape is better than just reducing the number of rapes.

Is it OK for a parent to have their child circumcised? Or have their ears pierced? If thats OK, I don't see why removing your ability to murder someone is seen as so drastic. Would you not elect to have your ability to murder removed?

I did there. Let's consolidate our discussion to just a back and forth on that thread if you want to continue the discussion, which I thoroughly hope you do.

Theoretically, if I could fix your brain without you even being aware of it so that you don't die from brain cancer, I would.

If I had to physically do it via surgery like our best attempts in science can do today, I would operate if you came to the hospital for the procedure.

When it comes to altering your brain so that you like vanilla instead of chocolate, I would not do that. Some things require consent absolutely. Some things do not, like resuscitating a person if you are an EMT and sworn to do no harm. Consent isn't the end all be all of the debate, not by a long shot.

For example, do you ask the murder to consent to going to jail or do you put the murderer in jail against their will?

You can't redefine what free will means and expect people to take you seriously. Free will means you have the ability to choose, and if you agree with me that the universe is deterministic, then you have to admit that making a choice is only an illusion. I can make choices in the same way that a neutron chooses to move toward more massive objects. I eat vanilla ice cream over dirt because I have taste buds that allow me to taste the difference between the two. Eating dirt instead doesn't prove I had a choice, because now I'm not eating dirt for taste, but to win an imaginary argument about free will. It's not the external world I'm reacting to now, but the internal one.

Your scenario is irrelevant because you admit that those processes, which you don't control happening in your brain, are still you. But if they are you, and you don't have control over them, you only become aware of them after the fact, then you JUST ADMITTED you don't have any choice. The choice was already made by something you have no control over, but only watch as a passenger. Your heart beats without your choice. You will pass out and have to breath because your brain will force you to at some point stop holding your breath. You will remove your hand from an external heat source that you did not expect AUTOMATICALLY, and only then become aware that your body moved milliseconds after the stimulus has already short-circuited through your PNS and not your CNS. If you think that the distinction doesn't matter, then you are still willfully lying about the reality, or intentionally want to deceive people about the physical world and how it works by redefining any word you need to to maintain your hallucinated reality.

So you think it is value added to society for a person to be able to murder someone?

I understand it fine. It's objectively wrong.

Imposing a punishment is PRIMARILY a preventative action. The threat of being thrown in jail or even executed is not to retroactively deal with the situation, but to give people an incentive to not murder. If it didn't discourage murder, then people would find a different way to dissuade people from murdering.

How is it tyranny to curb a person's ability to murder? Or you trying to argue that allowing people to murder others is a net gain for society?

Ha ha I love this comment. So simple and yet illustrates the point exactly. Although if I were starving and you said I could have it for one dollar and I wouldn't be able to eat for the next 72 hours, you'd probably have my dollar.

Exactly! They can't even consider the possibility it seems because they don't want to even consider it. Its almost as entrenched as what some might call faith that the US was superior to the USSR and if you even suggest the idea of anything else you are downvoted because you are the bad guy for even considering it.

It's not moving to goalposts to acknowledge that the USSR beat us to space and that a large part of their collapse was due directly to the influence of the US.

Why did the US have to systemically mass murder Native Americans and enslave Africans Americans and fight over seas wars in Vietnam and North Korea? If you can assert their atrocities, I can so also assert the US's. You are dodging, not me.

Absolutely! Re-education, rehabilitation is exactly THAT! It's altering the synaptic connections in the brain to bring their behavior in line with what we view should be the case in civilized society. You just seem to have a problem with making that process more efficient.

And it is all just particles moving around, but that doesn't mean we have to ignore what is very likely an unpleasant experience from your subjective, internal point of view. I don't dismiss your personal experience of reality, just your rational understanding of what's going on.

And I do, I really do, but you are inconsistent. You say you should be free to make your choices, but then also want to put people in jail fornmaking their free choices. You call it consequences, and yet that doesn't eliminate the fact that you then want to LIMIT THEIR FREEDOM TO CHOOSE to do it again. You are self contradictory. At best, you are picking what choices people are and aren't allowed to make.

We can't fight it unless it happens right in front of us? We can donate to organizations that do have the stated purpose. We can vote for politicians who propose laws and policies that make it extremely difficult for it to happen. How are you powerless to do anything about it unless it happens "right in front of you"?

And I'm pointing out how in my capacity I am doing everything I can to fight it. Part of that is convincing your (or more likely others reading this), that your position is wrong.

No, in your society, the one we live in right now, it is already happening. People have others choices imposed on them. A parent thrusts their choices onto their children often to much detriment as the aforementioned person.

In a society I'm proposing, those kind of choices aren't able to be thrusted on a person because the idea that you can choose for someone is removed. It simply is behavior that is exhibited, and we understand that behavior enough to change it or we need to learn more to understand the behavior. Your reality, the current one we live in, is the nightmare for some people.

The Soviet Union and Communist China, terms you want to use to describe them, do not sound like what I am advocating in the slightest. I'm advocating that we acknowledge the underlying reality that we are not free to make choices. There is only the illusion our brains create. How you interpret that is on you. It has nothing to do with other countries or systems of government. Stop trying to drag in straw mans because your ideas lack substance.

I would rearrange your brain if you had cancer and I was capable of removing it.

One day we will do the same with thought cancers and viruses I am sure.

I am Okay with death not necessarily because of my views on free will being an illusion (which I think it can help people cope with death), but my far more potent though on death is that I see it exactly as before I was born. I do not remember before I was born, and therefor I'm just as likely to not remember my death, but one thing is for sure.

I can enjoy whatever slice of infinitesmially small time I have here on Earth, or I can not exist faster than what nature is trying to do to me. I'll continue to exist for as long as I can simply to spite it all and make my time here as long as possible, even if ultimately I would later realize I would have liked to end it sooner, I simply have made this a resolute position I will not falter on and will strive to find a way to make this existence as pleasant for me and others as I am physically and mentally capable of. Who knows if I will succeed, but I'm gonna try my hardest to be like that.

It is not free will in the sense that you can spontaneously decide it for yourself. I can choose to eat vanilla yogurt or plain yogurt. That is the narrative my brain hallucinates. The reality behind the illusion is that the choice was made before I even am aware of the "story I tell myself" that I chose one or the other.

You can't respect someone's freedom to murder without approving of said murder. You actually do not believe what you are saying or are being intentionally obtuse.

If you could prevent the unlawful murder of someone, you don't give a damn about their choice. You are making the choice for them by saying it is not allowed. Your implementation of that forced choice is currently handled by the law. In the future, it might be before they are even able to generate a murderous impulse.

Not always. Some of the software guys just zone out in meetings and don't pay attention while their managers and PMs do the talking. Can confirm, I wasn't paid nearly enough in that job to care about what my manager or PM said.