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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

#141

Post by honestoHeminway »

36bydesign wrote: post #108
personomas wrote: post #107

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? The Bible, there's no better. Jesus preaches and teaches truth, truth will erode this false fabricated narrative.

Minimize your personal fabricated narrative by abiding by a 2,000 year old fabricated narrative. Checks out.

Well, lets say, you dont minimize it, you standardize it. Also christianity like all others martyrer religions (shia, judaism) has its benefits, as the usual mad inventor crowd in for some serious suffering before salvation, is part of the cultural accepted background.

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

#142

Post by honestoHeminway »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #130
hyperion2010 wrote: post #10

This is true even at a personal level. If you think you know why you act the way you do but you have never done an experiment to validate it you have a pretty good chance of being wrong. Even for simple things, like how fast you drive, is it the speedometer and you are looking at it, or is it how your engine sounds, and if turn up your music do you drive faster and is that because you are more aroused/excited, or is…

I've been sitting with an Advaita teacher for a while. One of the pointers is to observe one's own choices. I am still looking for this mythical free will thing people keep taking about.

Oh, that was a translation error- if you medidate long enough you dont care about anything- you can do so naked. Thats when the free will... part comes into play.

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

#143

Post by MacsHeadroom »

matt4077 wrote: post #127
amasad wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably shouldn't be replying to people who end sentences with "lol". But ok, I'll bite. >You haven't even bothered trying to give a definition of what free will is I assume you read the article and we're using that as context in our discussion as people do when they're discussing articles on HN. >The definition of which is something for philosophers to debate. Not really, there are three accepted mainstream philo…

> Not sure what this exactly means, but the "universe is deterministic" is part of what mainstream science claims. It doesn't. Quantum physics is as mainstream as they come, and so is chaos theory. But determinism doesn't actually have much to do with "free will". There are many known indeterminate stochastic processes, yet nobody would claim that they possess free will, i. e. radioactive decay.

QM and chaos theory are both fully deterministic, even though future prediction is impossible in practice in some cases. We only call them non-deterministic because we can't ever hope to determine outcomes ahead of time in practice- NOT to say that the outcome isn't ultimately from a natural flow of causality.

In fact, ultimate causal determination is proven for both. Consider Broglie–Bohm.

There is no true randomness. Not in math and certainly not in QM.

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

#145

Post by dwaltrip »

unit91 wrote: post #133
dwaltrip wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Hardly. It just seems a bit presumptuous to claim firm knowledge of the fundamental, low level workings of one's brain.

In general, I find these discussions often go on far too long without even bothering to define the terms. "Free will" itself seems to be an incredibly nebulous concept.

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

#146

Post by assumeaway »

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.

given that quantum physics is expressly not deterministic, i'd back off a bit on the surety of your inadequate opinion

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

#148

Post by cjsthompson »

elihu wrote: post #54
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…

If we assume that free will doesn't exist (which I don't agree with, but for the sake of argument we'll assume it doesn't), one might still expect people to make choices that maximize their own well-being and it isn't too much of a stretch to suppose that such choices are more often than not good for society, or at least more so than a planned society where most choices are made for you by some authority. One can arg…

You can't argue that liberal society produces a more stable, prosperous society because your government is bombing any attempt at finding if this is actually true.

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

#149

Post by peterwwillis »

Bakary wrote: post #35
givan wrote: post #5

Call it anyway you want, lizard brain, flyers (Castaneda), Yaldabaoth (agnostics), this force that pushes evolution on earth at great speed through predatorial behavior like competition and flight or fight. We humans are the most intelligent species and still can't overcome it, as a civilization whatever political system or religion we tried no matter how hard we try we can't seem to overcome it, we still have wars a…

First, I'm not sure how we can anthropomorphize an evolutionary force like that. Second, evolutionary forces have made us value nonviolence in the first place. If they hadn't, we wouldn't have any notion of the reason or means to overcome what we see as a never-ending cycle. If we are able to even conceive of violence as something negative then it means we are already able to "overcome" it to some extent, but then we…

I don't know who thinks that humans value nonviolence but they clearly don't read the news.

Species act to adapt to their environment and provide for their needs. Nature necessitates violence for adaptation and survival. In species with no natural predators, an abundance of natural resources, and no problems with genetic propagation, violence might not be necessary for survival. But in many species, even ones with no natural predators (or very little risk of predation), they may commit violence upon themselves, usually to enforce a social order, or eventually pass on their own genetic material. Or they may commit violence for fun, I believe as a sort of practice for real-life predation.

And violence isn't negative. You're ascribing with morality (a human construct) or are diminishing (it's actually constructive) a natural and productive act that supports virtually all life on the planet. To escape it we would need to escape nature itself.

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

#150

Post by brabel »

skookumchuck wrote: post #92
techbio wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optimism and Hume notwithstanding the outcomes regarding prosperity and stability may be bestowed upon the society as a whole without the choices by individuals having individually assisted their own life outcomes.

Societies where the choices are made by the government, not the individuals, have not bestowed prosperity and stability on the whole.

China seems to be a counter example to that (and the largest example in the history of mankind, with 600 million people having a prosperous life thanks to, arguably, the government making decisions on their behalf, not to mention it has been the most stable civilization on Earth despite a few periods of instability), though on the whole, you might be right. I just wouldn't claim that with nearly as much confidence as you do.
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