This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Materialism and determinism are orthogonal concepts, although popular proponents of one very often hold the other. See: quantum mechanics. Physicists are probably the single most materialist profession there is, and modern physics decidedly rejects strict determinism. (That said, there's a lingering dislike of that rejection, leading to all kinds of abstruse "interpretations" of scientific theories that try to bring something that looks like determinism, if you squint just right, back to science).
It's not clear how nondeterminism helps accounts of free will, though. Suppose you have two universes, one where quantum effects don't play a significant role in cognition and decision making (the one I would argue we live in) and another where random quantum fluctuations make me decide which coffee shop I'm going to this morning. I don't see myself as having any more free will in the latter world, and probably less.
Even unknown or unknowable things don't undermine materialism. Imagine someone designed an experiment that provided strong evidence that ESP existed, and we had no idea how to explain it. The thing is, there are countless things in the world that are mysterious, and ESP would rapidly get a ton of attention. Experimentalists would test it under different contexts (it only appears under heightened emotional states? Then figure out exactly which states. Does distance play a role in the strength of the ESP-effect? Etc), and theorists would come up with testable explanations (maybe physical models that are near isomorphic to each other somehow share causes and exchange psy-particles). Gradually we'd build a model that approximates what's really happening better than random guessing, under the constraints of economic cost and value of building that model. This is nothing new and is constantly happening.
Doesn't this indicate that materialism itself is vacuous, because it can explain everything? Yes, maybe.
I believe that the standard response to this from the "nondeterminist accounts of free will" crowd is that those random quantum fluctuations are actually the physical mechanism of consciousness/decision-making. You make a decision or will something in consciousness, and then poorly explained magic converts that into a random fluctuation that motivates the determinist parts of you into action in accordance with your will.
A mechanism isn't really necessary, though: I'm happy to accept mysterious forces at work. But I do wonder how you would differentiate it from a "materialist" world.
I think you might be able to if you managed to successfully model a particular individual human being on some substrate where quantum effects played an even smaller role than they do in the human brain. If you could, that seems like quantum-mediated decision-making couldn't be playing a role, unless you somehow accidentally incorporated the causal influence of the soul of the person you're emulating into the model itself.
ETA: thinking about it a bit more, it would be very easy to accidentally incorporate the soul's causal influence, so you'd need to be very careful not to, even if you did a non-quantum-by-construction neuron-by-neuron emulation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link