FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Could you define "free will"?
I want to do things, and I do them. I don't want to do other things, and I don't do them. Neither other people nor other things can directly override either my apparent individual motivation, nor my individual ability to manifest that motivation into action. Every conscious experience of my entire life serves as evidence of this apparent capacity, and every functional system humans build or interact with is based on the assumption that this apparent reality is how things actually work.
I agree with the argument from parsimony that you've presented in that I don't see a need to admit anything beyond physics to explain our experience, including our perceived sentience.
"Don't see a need" is an interesting phrase. I'm pretty sure you don't have an empirically-verifiable explanation for what caused the Big Bang, so there's at least one experience, the physical world around you, that physics as we understand and can test it pretty clearly can't explain. Nor is there empirical evidence that we can see behind the Big Bang even in principle; all the evidence we have indicates that we will never be able to. This does not mean that there might not be some deeper version of physics inaccessible to us that is, in fact, seamlessly complete, only that we have no access to any such deeper physics, and thus appeal to that deeper physics is is strictly unfalsifiable.
To the extent that you are satisfied by appeals to the unfalsifiable, I am as well. The difference is that I assert that what we see is what we get: we see apparent free will, and so I assert that free will exists. Your position is that what we see is an illusion, caused by a completely different process, which only appears to be free will in every single way we can observe or test. Notably, your general position is the end-state of a decades-long retreat into a Determinism-of-the-gaps, as much stronger and more falsifiable Deterministic claims were in fact consistently falsified.
Claims that Free Will is parsimonious are exactly backward; to the extent that Determinism must be true because Free Will breaks Materialism, the strong evidence of Free Will's existence and the consistent falsifications of testable Determinist theories are in fact significant evidence against Materialism.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
"Free will" is an ill-defined concept.
To the extent that this is true, it seems to me that in this context, it's still better-defined as a concept than "computation". That is to say, we can describe free will and its apparent connection to our behavior with considerably more detail, precision and evidence than we can with "computation".
The most parsimonious model of consciousness is that it's just computation.
The usual argument is that physical laws are sufficient to explain all our observations, computation is the physical process that gives rise to the highest-complexity ordered behavior we observe, the apparent existence of free will appears to contradict the physical laws, and so the best explanation compatible with those laws is computation. Would that be the essence of your argument?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Regarding the realm of logical argumentation, what's your view on Determinism and the free-will problem?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
True enough, and doubly so for those who choose to navigate life with their eyes closed...
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
What percentage of politically-aware people share your views on these questions?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
I think it was a strategic blunder not to give the Palestinians a viable state of their own, and that in their greed, the Israeli leadership have deranged their own people.
I don't even disagree, but I don't see how you could argue that the same is not true for the Palestinians. The truth is that humans can create a situation where, to a first approximation, there are no more good guys. Contrary to popular belief, the "least bad" guy doesn't become the good guy by default; sometimes, it's just bad guys all the way around, at least to the extent that we're talking about the people driving events.
I've no doubt that there are numerous innocents remaining on both sides. They should leave.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
I mean, I'm one of them. I find the current world unsatisfactory, for a fairly broad definition of "current world". Lots of people do, on all sides of the political spectrum and from a wide variety of worldviews. Table-flipping is evidently growing more and more attractive to a larger and larger portion of the population. Policy Starvation is everywhere.
I get that you have in mind a narrower selection of misanthropic transhumanist techno-fetishists, but I would argue that the problem generalizes to a much wider set.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
It's possible, and the naked phrase alone is certainly low-effort. On the other hand, I think there's a point there that deserves more than you're given it. If the problem is how that point is expressed, fair enough, it should be expressed better. But if "better" is undefined, then it becomes a fully general counter-argument. Hence why I'm replying, trying to tack away from arguments over the phrasing, and toward what appears to be the underlying issue.
I think that if we go to reddit, we can find an arbitrarily-large number of people who believe that Rittenhouse is clearly a murderer, and that this guy is clearly innocent. These people will be disproportionately likely to care about Rittenhouse's "victims", and they will be disproportionately likely to know little, and to have little interest in learning, about this man's victim, or indeed his previous, non-murder victims. Further, I think these same peoples' views on a lot of other questions of justice will strongly correlate: they will reliably treat people provably guilty of multiple violent felonies as though they are entirely innocent, and they will treat people provably innocent of any crime at all as though they are crazed murderers. Likewise, they will consider moderately questionable uses of lethal force by the authorities as clear murder, and entirely unjustifiable uses of lethal force by the authorities as obviously good and correct, based entirely on tribal logic.
If I'm correct about the existence and general views of the above cohort, "they sympathize with murderers far more than the murdered" seems like a reasonable encapsulation of the problem. Further, if I'm correct, it seems to me that this is a pretty important problem that certainly bears discussion, because it would seem to imply that our justice system isn't going to get better, and in fact is going to get worse, with consequences that flow through to a whole lot of other flashpoints in the culture war.
Japan's a nice place, I hear.
I don't think there's any way to get there from here, though. That is to say, if you implemented their methods here, you would not get even the remotest approximation of their results.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
and my guess is that Rittenhouse hatred would correlate strongly with belief that this guy was innocent.
The comment would make more sense if you interpret it as "they sympathize with actual murderers" rather than "they sympathize with people they believe to be murderers". That is to say, there appears to be a significant population whose assessment of murder and indeed of justice generally is nearly perfectly inverted from what one might, optimistically, describe as "actual reality".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
since these people find the current world unsatisfactory.
There's a lot of that going around.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
However, it also happened more than 25 years ago, when video surveillance was far less ubiquitous than it was now, and forensic technology was less advanced.
Video evidence is indeed quite something.
On the other hand, large branches of forensic science have operated for decades and then been revealed to be fraudulent. Bite mark analysis, burn pattern analysis, psychological profiling; @gattsuru has linked to an article about how the justice system's conception of shaken baby syndrome is based largely on fictions. This, combined with the degree to which jurors and the public generally overestimate the reliability of even valid and well-grounded forensic methods does not inspire confidence.
Justice is not, in fact, a solved problem. I'll certainly concede that it's a whole lot more solved than our decaying system can implement, though.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Reminds me of a pivotal scene from the Rifters books.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Or just that it's awfully unnerving how easily it would be for non idiots to get away with random acts of murder?
That's the one.
The current era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.
Here, we are seeing that there is a significant gap between the perception and the reality of "getting in too much trouble." Awareness of the gap invites arbitrage.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Why write so many questions when you clearly already have intended answers for them?
Because I want to find the points at which people diverge into disagreement. Starting from the obvious and moving to the obscure seems like a better way to achieve that than smacking each other with contradictions endlessly. Sure, we disagree. why do we disagree, exactly?
And that's the thing. It seems to me that the further you get down the list, the less obvious the answers to the questions get.
Why make another post for the same discussion?
Because I'm attempting to approach the discussion from a different angle, and I'm putting enough effort into it that I'd prefer it not be immediately buried deep in a comment tree. Why not do this?
In the end this is meaningless, taste is subjective and I can't do nothing except to say "actually fifth prison cell is good if you give me more shelf space".
I concede that someone who isn't interested in conversation indeed cannot be conversed with. I do not concede that your statement constitutes an actual answer to the questions above.
And I don't see majority of people disagreeing with this gymnasium building being something cool and novel.
I think if you polled people on whether the hallway, stairwell and classroom shots were acceptable for an educational environment, most of them would answer negatively. I think if you posted those pictures on Reddit under a fake headline like "here's the schools Republicans want your kids to attend", you could power New York City for a year off the outrage they'd generate.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Because it implies that the police are incapable of anything beyond security theater. A lot of other evidence is accumulating behind that hypothesis, and it bodes ill if you value a government monopoly on violence.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Look at any given person who has strong opinions about this case, the rights of the accused, and how the criminal justice system railroads the innocent. Then check their assessment of the Rittenhouse case, or whether Kavanaugh is a rapist.
People argue about the light or the dark, but it's the contrast that kills.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Sure. I'd also like a pony, and to rob banks and shoot it out with the police without all the pesky bleeding and screaming and dying. Sadly, reality intrudes.
When I observe unionized workplaces, I see inefficiency, doors closed to good workers, and economic failure. By contrast, the workplaces I've observed that were most efficient, dynamic and productive were, as a rule, not unionized. I like being able to find a job by demonstrating positive value to a prospective employer offering what I consider a reasonable wage, without then having to persuade a second group of people who believe that they have a direct economic interest in keeping me unemployed.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
The actual outcome was achieved years ago, and they were not capable of overturning it. Their efforts to overturn it bode ill for more recent cases, and especially for the cases they'll be initiating going forward. "Justice was served in this case because the people now in power did not have a time machine" is not a terribly reassuring summary.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
But also... Prison is a punishment? And punitive measures can be used to achieve utilitarian and/or moral goals? Not every cell needs to be designed to make its inhabitants sad, but at least some of them probably should.
Which ones, in your view?
I don't think any of them should be. If someone commits unusually egregious crimes, I'm fine with executing them. If they haven't done something deserving execution, I'm fine scaling their sentence up or down as seems appropriate. I'd even be fine with replacing some of the lighter sentences with prompt, extremely painful corporal punishment, on the theory that for some criminals that might actually get the point across better than a long-delayed incarceration. But in no case would I wish to intentionally make their environment worse and more depressing than the physical practicalities of confinement in a cell require. I could be persuaded otherwise with evidence that prisoners in especially ugly or depressing environments had lower rates of recidivism, but lacking such evidence I see no benefit to inflicting unnecessary misery or indignity for its own sake, and certainly don't see the benefit of being so indirect about it as to bake it into their environment.
In any case, if you were to implement ugly cells for prisoners, who would you expect to be most likely to oppose you: admirers of Eisenman, or his critics?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Have you ever ever obtained any sort of credential with a barrier to entry that enabled you to do specialized, abnormally renumerative work?
I got a forklift certification once. Does that count as a "labor monopoly"? I think I'm pretty glad that forklift operators are required to undergo safety training and a comprehension and skills test, but I'm not sure what that has to do with unions.
Other than the forklift certification, no, I've never gained any credential of the sort you describe.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
It's in every worker's interest to become part of a monopoly on labor so they can force pay above market equilibrium.
It's not in my interest now. It wasn't in my interest when I did factory work either. I've never had a job where I perceived it to be in my interest.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
"makes me sad/makes me happy" is a separate axis from "good/evil" and a very separate axis from "ugly/pretty."
...Though I don't begrudge the Sagrada Familias of the world their status, it is no sin to build in styles more dour than rococo.
Do either of these points seem, to you, salient to what I've written above?
Take the six cell images in the OP, and assume that we are specifically designing a prison so that the environment experienced by the prisoner captures the general emotional and psychological feel that each encapsulates. Would it be evil, in your view, to intentionally design a prisoner's environment to maximize "ugly/makes me sad"? If not, do you consider the money and effort we expend making our prisons look more like cells 1-3 rather than 4-6 a needless waste, or perhaps actively counterproductive? Perhaps you believe convicts would also benefit from styles more dour than rococo?
Assuming "function" here means some sort of mechanistic/deterministic process, what direct evidence do you base this claim on?
"Free will" is the data provided by observation. We evidently have it in all senses and in all ways that we can empirically test. That doesn't preclude it being an illusion generated by some hidden process, but if so, all that can be said is that we have no direct evidence of that process.
With the exception of free will, sure. But now we're at two really important things that Materialists predicted their approach would explain, and those explanations failed without apparent recourse. "Materialism answers all our questions, except the questions we ignore because Materialism can't explain them" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
To put it another way, we have two very important phenomena that cannot be explained by empirical materialism. If empirical materialism itself is forced to resort to non-empirical explanations or to "material" that cannot be observed even in principle, then it has no grounds to object when other philosophies do likewise, does it?
We can't explain either consciousness or experience, though. Like, at all. We can tell a story where they're the outcome of vague, undefined processes, and we can insist that these processes must be materialistic even though we can't rigorously define them or explain how they work, but that is not in fact an "explanation".
Demonstrate either mind reading or mind control, and I'll concede that you have explained consciousness and experience. This doesn't seem like an unreasonable request, since many prominent scientists have previously claimed that they could totally do either or both, and no small number of materialists still insist it should be possible, occasionally claiming it's arrival as soon as the next decade.
Sure, but all these things were equally obvious to epiphenomenalists, Marx among them, who concluded that thought was essentially meaningless and the brain was a simple machine to be engineered to our preferences. Likewise Watson and Skinner and the behavioralists, who claimed that they knew how to arbitrarily shape minds as they saw fit. And certainly, in retrospect, it's obvious that all these claims were very stupid, and that the people making them were being absurdly overconfident. But it evidently was not obvious to either those making the claims or to their contemporaries, and that fact should give us pause.
It doesn't seem to me that parsimony can be validly applied in a case where you know that significant data is missing.
Treating the mind as a computational process grounded in the material world will be reasonable when doing so allows us to either make testable predictions or engage in engineering. Right now, it does neither. "Treating the mind as a computational process" enables only speculation and philosophical discussion, and it seems likely to me that this will not change in the near future.
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