151–160 of 190 posts
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The article (and several modern scientists and lots of classical philosophers) confuse free will with some external entity that can take decisions for our life while standing outside it (as some objective spectator). In the end, those decisions, even if they were possible, would not be free will, but either arbitrary (random) or requiring some homunculus doing the thinking somewhere inside us. Rather, I say, our will…
Sure, that's compatibilism. But it's not a scientific view, it's a moral one. However, most people would disagree with you. The lay person's view are actually more of a libertarian view of free-will.
Sure, it's combatible with compatibilism (e.g. similar to Frankfurt's ideas) but it's not one of the classic variants. I find incompatibilistic (sp?) theories hopelessly dualistic.
>But it's not a scientific view, it's a moral one.
I'd say it's fundamentally a philosophical one, on the nature of self, and only derivatively a moral one. I also don't think they are "scientific" views on such matters, as they transcend observation.
(As for the moral part: I don't think morality is about what we "freely chose" to do: rather it's about who we are -- the choosing after all is secondary and stems from that. This reconciles morality with both the influences of a personal history beyond one's control, and the person's "agency").
>However, most people would disagree with you. The lay person's view are actually more of a libertarian view of free-will.
Yeah, but the "most" part shouldn't matter, as reality is not a popularity contest. It's only whether they are right that matters.
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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…
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Over the last couple years, I've been exploring this. I can't provide any answers, but I've found all the usual recommendations useful. CBT, Watts, Stoicism, yoga, mindfulness. Of those, the last -- mindfulness -- has been the most crucial. I cannot usually control my reaction to stimulus, but the hardest part for me (and in others, now that I observe them) is the identification of the event trigger. Once you identif…
Mindfulness, despite the recent buzzword-iness of it, has been an amazing tool for me. When I'm feeling any number of negative emotions (anger, anxiety, stress, etc.), or when my OCD flares up, it helps so much to simply pause, turn and face the emotion, address it, and say to myself "I am feeling this way because..." and calling out the trigger. It almost takes the teeth out of the negative feeling, making it pass a…
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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…
I'm not sure what you thought I wrote but it's the opposite of what I outlined. My whole argument is indeed that morals are indeed a human construct, so that if someone laments the amount of violence, they should realize that to be able to make such a complaint you already need to have arrived to a point where avoiding violence has granted you evolutionary advantages and thus been selected for to some extent, hence making the question a closed loop. Otherwise, the question would not even be conceivable to our minds.
>I don't know who thinks that humans value nonviolence but they clearly don't read the news.
Just because we engage in violence very frequently doesn't mean it is not valued. There are many different evolutionary pressures coexisting together. At the largest end of the scale, having a less violent society is very much an evolutionary advantage, otherwise we would not have an ingrained sense of fairness, the notion of morality, or as you mentioned the desire to inflict normative violence if that standard of fairness is violated by another individual. These emotions and constructs exist because they bring an advantage, and they do ironically bring on a state of lesser violence through the applied threat of violence.
>a natural and productive act that supports virtually all life on the planet. To escape it we would need to escape nature itself.
Violence doesn't have a special status in the sense that it will be productive in any environment. Just like any other trait, if the conditions change to a sufficient extent, it will become obsolete. It's only positive due to the way things are currently working. We're by definition part of nature so we can't escape it, but that doesn't mean nature will necessarily remain the way it has been in the past.
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I call it scarcity of resources. You won't see wars and what not when you have humanity with abundance of resources.
I recall from primatology lectures that a majority of violence is not triggered by a scarcity of resources but by friction in social ranking. I also recall a lecture by Sapolsky where he talk about this successful peace negotiator which focused on mutual respect, understanding and a feeling of kinship rather than negotiating about borders and resources.
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…
The answer is never just there, but it materialises a day, a month or year later.
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…
Everyone is living in fairytale narratives that we spend decades crafting for ourselves. And doing so has some great benefits! But it is also can be very problematic at times. I've been trying to figure out how to live while minimizing the extent of my personal fabricated narrative. It's a bit tricky... As with many things, I think basic awareness of the phenomenon is the first productive step.
> 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.…
> 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…
Interesting. I arrived at the same conclusion for myself, but used it as justification that I, basically, "might as well believe in free will". Sort of like a duck typing approach: If it walks like free will and talks like free will, I can just act as if it's free will.