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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34134 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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It's not that confusing a concept. Say you meet a hot woman, but want to be faithful to your wife. You're still attracted to the sexy lady, even though you are consciously deciding not to act on that attraction.

Psychiatry has some terms that are great for this kind of problem: egosyntonic and egodystonic.

Example: OCD bothers you. You don't want the impulses and urges. OCPD (Personality Disorder) doesn't bother you as much. You like being meticulous and double checking things.

Lots of pedophiles have egodystonic fixation, they are attracted to children and don't want anything to do with that and then slip up or whatever (or don't).

This exercises is useful in a variety of contexts and is generally a good way to assess the importance of cause of behaviors and can be used in assessing prognosis and so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egosyntonic_and_egodystonic

The fact that you're choosing not to have sex with the hot woman (or choosing not to try to get her into bed with you) doesn't mean you don't want to. Just because a reformed alcoholic is choosing not to drink doesn't mean he doesn't want to: if he didn't, he wouldn't be an alcoholic.

Yes? That's exactly what I understood @MartianNight to be saying about celibate paedophiles.

No, @MartianNight said that (certain) paedophiles are sexually attracted to children, but don't want to fuck them. I'm saying that paedophiles do want to fuck children (duh, that's literally the definition of the word "paedophile"), but are choosing not to, in light of other considerations.

He said "consciously want". I interpret that to be equivalent to the higher-level decision making.

As far as I can tell you're in furious agreement about the underlying reality and just vehemently disagreeing about the words used to describe it.

Sure, maybe I'm misinterpreting. When I hear that someone "consciously wants" something, I take that to mean that they both want it and are consciously aware that they want it. Contrast that to someone who "unconsciously wants" something: they want it, but refuse to admit that they want it, even to themselves, or are in denial about it (a deeply closeted gay man); or aren't even aware that it's a thing that a person can want (a gay boy living in an Islamic theocracy so strict that he has literally never encountered the idea that men can have sex with other men, not even in a context in which such behaviour is condemned - and yet when he sees a shirtless man he feels something he can't explain).

Can someone unconsciously be a paedophile - experience sexual arousal when looking at or thinking about children, but refuse to acknowledge this, even to oneself? Sure, of course (I suspect the number of people meeting this description is very frightening). Can someone consciously be a paedophile, but deliberately choose not to act on one's desire to have sex with children? Again, of course. But can someone unconsciously be a paedophile, but consciously choose not to act on their desire to have sex with children? Well, I don't know about that. How can you choose not to act on a desire that you don't acknowledge that you have, not even to yourself? It just doesn't seem coherent to me.

I think the definition of "want"/"consciously want" @AshLael is using (and which I generally use as "want") is something akin to "weighted positively in decisions about what to do" or "latently intend to do barring external motivators". This is definitely a coherent and useful concept for things like game theory and working out compromises.

An obvious analogy is someone with anorexia nervosa. People with anorexia nervosa get hungry, but they frequently need to be force-fed; they apparently don't "want" to eat.

AshLael's point is that there exist paedophiles who, if you put them alone with a kid and gave them legal immunity (removing the external motivators), would not molest the kid.

Then you're using a highly constrained meaning of "want". I think most people, when asked "do you want to steal food from the counter when you're hungry", say yes even though they more precisely mean "I want the food, but I choose not to steal it in light of other considerations".

I think most people recognise that they have multiple competing desires which cannot all be satisfied, and use the word "want" to refer to whichever of these is strongest or most important to them e.g. "of course I want to have sex with women other than my wife, but I also want to maintain a loving relationship with my wife based on mutual trust, which is incompatible with fucking other women behind her back".

I don't think my definition is "highly constrained" at all: even children understand the idea of desires that cannot or should not be acted upon, and that essentially everyone has such desires.

This topic gets quite contentious and goes back at least to the Scholastics, with different 'levels' of will involved. Even the mere question of time-dependent tastes/desires gets a lot of hackles up. It doesn't help that different people often have different experiences, and we don't have much of a rigorous framework for objectively probing cognitive states. Some alcoholics do actually report that their habits and discipline have resulted in a 'reactionary' will that does not actually desire to consume alcohol, while others instead continue to struggle with desire and must rely on a second-order will to choose not to consume. Some people who have discovered that they have food intolerances say that they used to love such-and-such a food, and they really struggled with desiring it when they first decided to stop eating it, but later have an experience where they will see such a food and not even have a will to consume it. "Oh, that is a beautiful looking piece of food, masterfully crafted, and I'm sure someone will enjoy it, but I don't want it." A time-dependent example is pretty common; many kids don't like vegetables like broccoli, they have no first-order will whatsoever to consume it and must rely on a second-order will to choose to consume it anyway for other purposes. This may start out being a will to please and not anger parents, or to satisfy a rule that then allows them to consume other foods. This may later develop so that they actually have a first-order will to consume broccoli.

It gets complicated, and most people don't have a consistent sense for how it works. No fault of their own; we have very few tools for proper analysis. So, they tend to default to a handful of heuristics to explain how they think it might work.

Sure, I don't dispute that agents' first-order desires can change over time, or that they can have multiple competing and mutually exclusive first-order desires. But I think "John has a first-order desire to fuck kids, but his competing first-order desire not to harm children/not to go to prison/not to bring shame upon his family etc. overrides his desire to fuck kids and he chooses not to act upon it" is a coherent statement; likewise "John has a first-order desire to fuck kids, but after years of exercising control over this first-order desire and choosing not to act upon it, he finds that the desire itself has grown weaker over time, as a direct result of his self-control and discipline". By contrast, "John is sexually attracted to kids, but doesn't want to fuck them" is just a completely incoherent statement.

I think what's missing in this analysis is any role for higher-level will.

I acknowledge the importance of higher-level will. What is willpower if not the power to refuse to indulge in first-order desires which you undoubtedly have? If paedophiles didn't actually want to fuck children, no willpower would be required to refrain from indulging that desire. I just don't understand the conception of the issue as "John is choosing to exercise his higher-level will by refraining to fuck kids - ergo he doesn't actually want to fuck kids". If you don't want to do something, no willpower is required to refrain from doing that thing.

Willpower is not the only type of higher-level will. Indoctrination, for example, is another.

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