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It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

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Re: It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

#131

Post by nyolfen »

matt4077 wrote: post #125
amasad wrote: post #38

The schism between our science and politics is finally getting airtime. Liberal western politics are based on individual liberty and free will. However, mainstream science maintains that we're neither individuals nor have free will. Do we try to reconcile both views? Or do we drop one in favor of the other? This, by the way, is also the subject of Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, by the same author behind Sapi…

Politics are a bit ahead of you, at least in the most advanced countries (Scandinavia etc.): They have almost completely eliminated concepts such as (moral) guilt from law. They may send you to (a rather comfortable) prison, but never as retribution. Only being an actual, ongoing danger to others can justify taking someone's freedom. Same with drug addiction: it's treated as a disease, not personal failure.

> They may send you to (a rather comfortable) prison, but never as retribution.

this was contested in a recent HN thread[1], with regards to norway in particular:

> Only a few prisoners enjoy the freedom of this island, which is equivalent to a trustee camp in a US min security prison. The rest who were given 10+ year sentences are in complete isolation in what the media loves to refer to as hotel prisons. In these cells everything is provided for you including your own shower, therefore there's no reasons for the guards to ever let you out and you stay in there 23hrs per day. Because the media calls them hotels, it prevents any prisoner from being able to complain and be taken seriously, so often these guys will either light their cells on fire and hopefully get transferred to one of the older style jails so they can talk to other inmates, or they just kill themselves.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14430539

Re: It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

#132

Post by robotresearcher »

felipeko wrote: post #41
robotresearcher wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The richest country in the world has been at war overseas almost constantly since the end of WWII.

And it went to war for the following reasons: a) scarcity of resource (oil) / humanitarian reasons (whichever you prefer to believe) b) was provoked into it (because of cold war or terrorists)

Those were the declared reasons, yes. But exactly what would you say are the resource and humanitarian gains and to what degree forgivable-due-to-provocation-in-retrospect is, say, the US-Vietnam War?

Re: It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

#133

Post by unit91 »

dwaltrip wrote: post #66
md224 wrote: post #62

> there is no homunculus (or soul, or separate entity) calling the shots for you, but even if there were a mini-me inside of you making choices, that mini-me would need a mini-mini-me inside of it, ad infinitum. I find it kind of amusing that people think free will is an illusion. It's a great illustration of how you can get people to believe anything, including things that violate their most fundamental perceptions.…

> one of the surest things I know is my own will How do you know you can trust this knowledge you supposedly hold?

And yet, you seem to know he can't.

Re: It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

#134

Post by szemet »

amasad wrote: post #59
TheCowboy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could argue that it has been shown that it isn't so black and white, not all decisions are a result of pure free will in all cases. But there has not been some conclusion that there is no free will by "mainstream science" as it is still an open topic. It's also not necessarily contradictory for it to be a bit of both.

Do you agree with the following: - Mainstream science operates on the assumption of physicalism. - Mainstream science operates on the assumption that mind/consciousness is reducible to the brain organ. - Mainstream science operates on the principle of causation. What follows from that is that libertarian free-will is impossible. What you're left with is determinism (and compatibilism which isn't a scientific view, bu…

Science needs only methodological naturalism not metaphysical naturalism.

There are religious scientists - they personally believe that miracles exist so they oppose the real methaphysical naturalism but they assume naturalism during work (that is the methodolical kind), and that is enough for progress, science doesn't care.

Re: It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

#135

Post by nojvek »

ryanlol wrote: post #102
lxmorj wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5??????

You're right, 7 will work much better. On a more serious note, look into 4-AcO-DMT. Essentially mushrooms without the unpleasantness of actually having to eat mushrooms.

How does one even get access to this?

Re: It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

#137

Post by prmph »

matt4077 wrote: post #124
prmph wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the most insightful comment on HN I have read in a long while. We are limited by the concepts our minds can form. As I commented before, free will could arise from an infinity of antecedents; the fact that we find it difficult to wrap our minds around such a concept does not in any way imply anything about its veracity. I could not agree more; things like consciousness and free will are very likely to…

You don't need to grasp any of the complexity to believe that free will does't exist. In fact the argument is almost a truism: as long as the mind is something created by the brain, and the brain is governed by the laws of nature (both known and unknown), then there's no free will. It's a somewhat tired argument, because it's mostly semantics. But it really doesn't matter how complex the brain is.

> as long as the mind is something created by the brain, and the brain is governed by the laws of nature (both known and unknown), then there's no free will

There are three assumptions here that need a citation.

Re: It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

#138

Post by myrandomcomment »

kleer001 wrote: post #94
ux-app wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've been trying to figure out how to live while minimizing the extent of my personal fabricated narrative. sounds interesting. Do you know of any suggested reading on the topic?

5 dried grams of magic mushrooms. Or listen to 40+ hours of lectures from Alan Watts.

Molly with friends.

Re: It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

#139

Post by MacsHeadroom »

acover wrote: post #93
ak4g wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you clarify what you mean? How are we not left with determinism at a fundamental level? (And if it starts with a Q, then at most one can say is that it's possible that it's not deterministic. It's perfectly compatible with determinism, just not (AIUI) (and IANATP) currently known whether or not it is the case.)

Quantum mechanics? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism#Modern_scientific_... Edit: why downvote this?

It's widely accepted that QM is fully deterministic, even if the future is unpredictable in practice. Broglie–Bohm, being an equivalent and sound interpretation, is poof of this.

Quantum randomness isn't truly random. There's no free lunch for free will to be found in QM.

Re: It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

#140

Post by topmonk »

adjkant wrote: post #73
md224 wrote: post #62

> there is no homunculus (or soul, or separate entity) calling the shots for you, but even if there were a mini-me inside of you making choices, that mini-me would need a mini-mini-me inside of it, ad infinitum. I find it kind of amusing that people think free will is an illusion. It's a great illustration of how you can get people to believe anything, including things that violate their most fundamental perceptions.…

So your belief in free will comes from "It's going to turn out to come from something really weird"? That's not convincing either. I don't believe in free will, but I believe that there will always be the illusion because the computing needed to know anything before it happens is far too much, and if you knew, it would add another layer of things you'd need to compute, meaning you still wouldn't know your choice ahea…

> I don't believe in free will, but I believe that there will always be the illusion because the computing needed to know anything before it happens is far too much, and if you knew, it would add another layer of things you'd need to compute, meaning you still wouldn't know your choice ahead of time.

I think the illusion comes from the desire of a person to have power over their situation, which allows their instincts, especially those hidden from the person themselves, to have an effect which gives them an advantage evolutionally.

With all other things equal, without ascribing free will, having one's mind have control over their life vs being controlled by external factors is one in the same. So there must be a natural built in preference for autonomy or there isn't enough space for hidden instincts to manifest themselves.

One of the biggest examples of what I would call "hidden instincts" would be the fact that children grow up to be like their parents, including developing the very same vices that they hated when they were kids, such as domestic violence, drug abuse, abandonment of a child by a parent, etc. In order for these instincts to manifest, one must have control over oneself. (These instincts are possibly genetic, but a great survival tactic is to imitate your parents, since no matter how miserable their lives turned out, they were genetic winners in the fact they had you)

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