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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29532 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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Despite being atheist I do think I hold some anti-materialist views.

The first one is a sort of mind over body or spiritual health outlook. I'm finding it hard to articulate, without dismissing some important things. I just have some sense that material reality is missing something about health, and my best way to point at this phenomenon is to look at the placebo effect.

where every conscious mind's inherent beliefs to affect material reality

This is also something I accept, but only in some of the less controversial instances. The stock market is the main example i can think of. Enough investors believing in a market process can kind of will that process into working by lending the process money and time.

I also think there seems to be some sensitivity from politicians to a collective will. They can overcome the Will, but it takes effort. Otherwise they fall into the game of politics and can only take prescribed actions. People who routinely and easily violate this are rare. Andrew Jackson, Coolidge, and Trump come to mind as flagrant violators of the will.

My main anti materialist viewpoint is that I have a sense that there is free will. No amount of evidence or talking has ever been able to dislodge this belief in the slightest. When I first encountered challenges to the concept of free will I tried to argue against them or find alternatives that preserved it. I mostly gave up on those endeavors. Free will exists, and it's not up for debate with me. In the same way that I think the material world exists and my brain isn't just hooked up to a machine feeding it sensations and nutrients.

I just have some sense that material reality is missing something about health, and my best way to point at this phenomenon is to look at the placebo effect.

I definitely think that our human scientific models are missing a lot of important stuff on this topic, and that a lot of it is so complex and contingent and hard to measure that it will stay beyond our ability to directly model for a very long time, and approaches that draw on intuition and metaphor may do a better job modelling them for now.

But after I admit that, I don't feel like there's any need for a nonmaterial/supernatural factor in addition to that.

Free will exists, and it's not up for debate with me.

I think the interesting debate is less about whether free will exists, and more about what free will is.

There's an intuition that free will is at odds with determinism. But a system that is non-deterministic is just a system that is partially random.

Does it really feel right to say 'the more randomly you act, the more free will you have'? That feels deeply unsatisfying to me, and make me think that a definition of free-will that is defined in opposition to determinism is incoherent.

Compatibilism just says 'you have free will when you are able to act in accordance to your nature and your desires, and you lack free will when outside forces and contingent factors restrain your actions to be other than what you would choose.'

It doesn't matter whether you pursue your goals and act in accordance to your nature in a deterministic fashion or in a stochastic fashion.

As long as your own nature is guiding your actions, you have free will.

As long as your actions are constrained and determined by outside forces making you do things you don't like and wouldn't choose in the absence of those forces, your free will is violated.

That matches my intuitions about what it feels like to exercise my free will vs. have it violated. And it's a definition by which free will definitely exists, but can be abrogated and must be actively defended. Which I like.

It doesn't matter whether you pursue your goals and act in accordance to your nature in a deterministic fashion or in a stochastic fashion.

As long as your own nature is guiding your actions, you have free will.

As long as your actions are constrained and determined by outside forces making you do things you don't like and wouldn't choose in the absence of those forces, your free will is violated.

That matches my intuitions about what it feels like to exercise my free will vs. have it violated. And it's a definition by which free will definitely exists, but can be abrogated and must be actively defended. Which I like.

I think I also generally like that definition, and that most definitions of "free will" focus too much on the deterministic stuff. Whether the universe is deterministic or not seems inconsequential to me. We will almost certainly never know, and it has little bearing on how we treat the world. I'd only add that people or entities with "free will" have responsibility and ownership of the things they choose through their free will as well. If it is in your nature to go murder people, then I think we should treat you like a murderer, even if the universe conspired to create a person with a murderous nature.

I definitely think that our human scientific models are missing a lot of important stuff on this topic, and that a lot of it is so complex and contingent and hard to measure that it will stay beyond our ability to directly model for a very long time, and approaches that draw on intuition and metaphor may do a better job modelling them for now.

But after I admit that, I don't feel like there's any need for a nonmaterial/supernatural factor in addition to that.

"Supernatural" is kind of a strange word and concept. Something that is outside the bounds of the natural world. But we have natural senses, and instruments that only measure the natural world, so these things are by definition unobservable to us.

I guess I am more wondering if there is something "natural" about the universe that we do not understand and have not observed. Like the famous sci-fi saying "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". I think there might be a mysticism corollary "any sufficiently misunderstood phenomenon is indistinguishable from background noise".

A bunch of ESP studies keep turning up something. Dreams that see glimpses of the future (like the Twain example above) seem to abound throughout recorded history (and I've experienced the phenomenon myself a few times). People on hallucinogenic drugs seem to access the same spaces/entities.

I'm a bit of a lifelong skeptic about these things. I lean very heavily towards "its all nothing". But not so heavily that I think its a complete waste of time for people to look into this stuff and try and figure it out.

How could you ever differentiate between the signal and noise, especially with all the hoaxes in the mix? It would be pointless to try. Even if you had all the time in the world. Maybe if simulated minds counted you could do it, but the people who advocate this stuff are like the spiritualists in Stellaris.

I'd only add that people or entities with "free will" have responsibility and ownership of the things they choose through their free will as well. If it is in your nature to go murder people, then I think we should treat you like a murderer, even if the universe conspired to create a person with a murderous nature.

I\m not 100% sure how you ground out things like 'responsibility' and 'ownership' in a metaphysical sense here. But on the object-level of 'what should we actually do in the real world,' it's definitely in my nature to feel that way and do those things, and to want to live in a society where other people do that too. So I agree.

I'm a bit of a lifelong skeptic about these things. I lean very heavily towards "its all nothing". But not so heavily that I think its a complete waste of time for people to look into this stuff and try and figure it out.

Agreed. My only caveat, which I think you would agree with (?) but is worth pointing out in the context of OP's post, is that I'm allergic to people using the sparse/inconclusive evidence of this stuff as a bludgeon in some larger political/cultural/social argument. I definitely want at least a few scientifically-minded folks looking for new evidence in case we suddenly need to go take these things seriously, I just don't want that level of respect paid to the ideas to make people think they can be used in predicates for other arguments about how the world actually is.

Agreed. My only caveat, which I think you would agree with (?) but is worth pointing out in the context of OP's post, is that I'm allergic to people using the sparse/inconclusive evidence of this stuff as a bludgeon in some larger political/cultural/social argument. I definitely want at least a few scientifically-minded folks looking for new evidence in case we suddenly need to go take these things seriously, I just don't want that level of respect paid to the ideas to make people think they can be used in predicates for other arguments about how the world actually is.

Generally agree, but I'm sure we disagree on a lot of specifics. For example, I am generally in favor of letting the market do its thing. But sometimes people have an "eww yuck markets" reaction, and its impossible to get through with any level of arguments or evidence. Prostitution and organ markets are two examples. Maybe I am the hard hearted "scientist" that can't see the spiritual damage from prostitution or from selling your organs.

I also recognize that I might be illogical and not follow the evidence on some things because I have a set of beliefs in "liberty" and "individual freedom". Allowing guns to be sold does seem to make suicide easier and on the margin likely leads to more deaths by suicide. Also screw the government, I have the right to own a gun. The CIA and NSA can probably find terrorists easier if they have unrestricted access to all of our communications. Also screw the government, I have a right to privacy and not being spied on all the time.

I don't really have a solution here. But I think in general I care more about protecting some of my "illogical" beliefs, and I'm willing to let others have theirs too if we can find some mutually agreeable compromises.

I more-or-less agree with all of those. Maybe we disagree in terms of extremity on some, but not obviously so from this post.

Even that I know it's snarky and somewhat dumb, I always wind up returning to the same thought experiment with regard to free will - how do the people that believe in pure determinism (or determinism plus stochastic randomness) react to a physical threat? If someone stands in front of them and says, "if you deny free will, I will punch you in the face", do they behave as though they believe that there is no free will to be exercised on the part of either party, that everything that follows is a mere consequence of the state of the universe with possibly a roll of the dice to determine the outcome? Many will affirm that they do, in fact, believe that, but pretty much no one would be willing to bite the bullet and say that neither individual has a choice in what follows. I am aware of various explanations for this and it's possible that I'm just too slow-witted to fully grasp them, but they really do just seem like pure sophistry to me.

how do the people that believe in pure determinism (or determinism plus stochastic randomness) react to a physical threat? If someone stands in front of them and says, "if you deny free will, I will punch you in the face", do they behave as though they believe that there is no free will to be exercised on the part of either party, that everything that follows is a mere consequence of the state of the universe with possibly a roll of the dice to determine the outcome? Many will affirm that they do, in fact, believe that, but pretty much no one would be willing to bite the bullet and say that neither individual has a choice in what follows.

Your scenario doesn't really seem to prove anything at all? I don't believe I'm writing this comment by some kind of libertarian free will, that is to say I my writing of this comment was always destined to happen from the very moment of the big bang down to the edits and spelling errors. Making it meta and putting the question of determinism into the scenario really just serves to confuse. I would react probably similarly to any other scenario where someone threatens to hit me if I don't lie with maybe some variation because it's a stranger than average lie to demand.

They do have a choice; just their choice flows from their nature, the environment, etc.

I choose the way I do because I'm me, which is based on things, not some product of randomness.

So yes, people will obviously make decisions about what to do in those situations, but the decisions that they make will ultimately be based on factors—what they were worried about, what they found compelling, etc.

I think no one can predict what they'll do perfectly, even if an action is quite possible physically. To build willpower, to the extent to which it's possible, is to increase the chances of following through with the things you feel like doing, and perhaps to increase the chances of wanting to do what you'd be ready to follow through.

Would it really bother me that my actions are deterministic/stochastically deterministic if I don't know what I'm going to want in the next second, let alone do?

Many will affirm that they do, in fact, believe that, but pretty much no one would be willing to bite the bullet and say that neither individual has a choice in what follows

The word ‘choice’ obscures the actual situation, though. So you think you’re about to be punched, so your brain - trained on your experiences and memories - decides to try to dissuade the other guy, so you say ‘man, you punch me now, you know cops are gonna see that on the CCTV over there’, then the other guy’s brain takes that input, runs it through his own predictive language model based on his own experiences, and decides that the most effective course of action is to back down.

‘Choice’ or ‘freedom’ here isn’t about determinism, because all of the above is ultimately deterministic, it’s about parameters for action. Say the other guy has a low opinion of the police’s ability to solve the crime. Say he has extremely high time preference and low inhibition, his language model is a little different. In that case, he decides to punch you anyway. We’re deterministic machines, but that doesn’t mean our behavior is predictable by us, because our multi-modal inputs vary, because our minds are always updating their predictive models with new information, and because our actions are (as such) bounded not just by what is desirable but what is possible, or what we think is possible, and because we don’t have the compute to run the predictions.

That's the counterargument I hear and it just sounds like unfalsifiable bunk to me. I flatly don't buy that whether I hit a guy or not is just stochastically determined by parameters plus randomness, I believe that it's actually a product of me electing to do so or not. My claim is also pretty obviously unfalsifiable bunk, but then we're just stuck at whose sophistry is more compelling.

I flatly don't buy that whether I hit a guy or not is just stochastically determined by parameters plus randomness, I believe that it's actually a product of me electing to do so or not.

There's no contradiction here. You are (some of) the parameters.

It really isn't the case though. Everything was always going to happen the way it did, otherwise it would have happened some other way. You were always going to make the same choice based on everything that came before. Humans can imagine that things went differently in the past. This counterfactual reasoning ability is why we think we have free will when we actually do not. If you were you and all the exact same things happened to you, you would always make the same choice, it can't be otherwise.

There also isn't any mind over matter health effect other than changing some chemicals in your body or controlling your breathing and movement etc... You can't grow a new arm by thinking really hard about it.

Everything was always going to happen the way it did

You are assuming the whole point up for debate.

I don't understand.

GuessWho had a better defense for "free will" and what it means. I mostly consider determinism irrelevant to my belief that "free will" is a thing that matters.

You were always going to say that.

But was "not me" always going to say that?

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