That is in a different lane from your words are magic spells one.
How? The words have to be tuned to the audience to cause harm? I could plausibly cause harm by
convincing people to drink poison
and yes, it would be easier to convince children to do this. Maybe education takes forever because there is a lot of information to be transferred. Maybe education isn’t about education. Maybe it’s about locking kids up for long enough** that when they do something stupid, no one else is to blame (i.e., legally liable).
This (trying to convince people to do things that will kill them*) is not quite controlling someone’s internal state, but strongly pushing towards bad outcomes (like death).
Do I think this happens often? No—but it does exist. Moderation, voting, etc. exist largely for a different reason, and arguably that is because people are irrational. Maybe, a few words on the internet won’t bring about the end of the world.*** ‘Choosing words with care’ as a practice may be more relevant to communicating efficiently/effectively/at all than to preventing harm.
this post sounds like dogma
I agree with this—the structure is also similar. (I believe in related corners of the internet, the OP’s concerns are more often addressed by sticking a warning label at the top, and then writing the piece anyway. I haven’t seen lots of spreading automated tools for custom content classification on the user end, though, and that would be cool. Maybe someday I’ll be able to open up an article and run things like ‘remove links to dogma/tic articles’, ‘summarize’, ‘cutout the fluff’ or ‘count/skip to the examples’. For now, the user controlled evaluation/recommendation system remains on my to do list (to create, find, or assemble) , and I won’t be getting to it soon.)
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Don’t drink poison, eat spicy food.
**:
Whether that’s age, or ‘we tried. You can see we tried, because we took a long time.’
***”If everyone sells all their stocks at once, will the stock market crash?”
The effects that follow any cause necessarily depend on the conditions in which the cause occurs. Nobody in Jonestown had poison funneled down their throats. They acted on what they were told, each according to the conditions in their own mind and (largely shared but not identical) environment.
Interesting; I noticed that you’re using words like “responsibility” and “consent” and “choice” a lot. Do you take a non-materialist view of the mind? That is, do you think a mind is something more than the physical systems it’s made of?
It’s just that if the mind is limited to the physical systems that compose it, then free-will-cluster concepts (consent, responsibility, &c.) are map-stuff and don’t really signify in a discussion of cause and effect. The state of the mind-system must necessarily evolve according to the laws of physics when it is provided a particular input. That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing it’s like to be the mind (as it’s commonly understood), or that the mind doesn’t partially operate by generating and comparing counterfactual realities; only that from a global view it’s all physics. I agree that while we’re “being in the world” it’s usually not useful to take that angle on things, but it’s important not to just forget it either.
You’ve appealed to free-will-cluster concepts heavily in your argument, and I’m just trying to get a feel for how you think they’re relevant.
You also say you don’t believe in “magic spells” (where just saying a thing has a predictable effect, if I’m reading you correctly), but you claim to be able to predictably make certain changes by incanting “I do not consent”. That doesn’t feel consistent to me.
It’s just that if the mind is limited to the physical systems that compose it, then free-will-cluster concepts (consent, responsibility, &c.) are map-stuff and don’t really signify in a discussion of cause and effect
So physics excludes libertarian freewill and compatibilist freewill?
I don’t think it’s always useful to think of free will as a “capacity to make choices in which the outcome has not been determined by past events” (wikipedia). I’m not even sure that definition makes any sense, actually. To me, at least, it doesn’t feel like I make decisions without referring to my memories, which were laid into my mind by my past experiences. It certainly feels like different memories could easily result in my making different decisions in the same situation. And the fact that we can get more skilled at handling certain situations as we get older and experience those situations more times supports that notion.
Rather, I think it’s (at least sometimes) more useful to reframe free will as how it feels to be inside a system that operates at least partially by constructing counterfactual futures and conditioning its outputs on how it provisionally responds to those simulated futures. Start such a system in a specific state, give it a particular input set, and you can expect a specific output; but from within the system it feels like freely making a choice. We can see exactly this happen in patients experiencing Transient Global Amnesia, and with other conditions that prevent the encoding of new memories (though those with permanent conditions do still show some neuroplasticity, and this leads to some changes in the long term).
But I also don’t think I would say that “physics excludes… freewill”. Rather, I would call trying to reconcile free will with cause and effect a category error. Free will is a way to model how a mind can feel like it works from the inside, while causality is a way to model how information propagates through the universe. They’re just not really related, is all.
I don’t think it’s always useful to think of free will as a “capacity to make choices in which the outcome has not been determined by past events” (wikipedia).
That’s not the only definition. That’s the definition of libertatian free will.
I’m not even sure that definition makes any sense, actually. To me, at least, it doesn’t feel like I make decisions without referring to my memories, which were laid into my mind by my past experiences.
You are reading ”...has not been determined by past events” as though it means “entirely unconnected to previous events”. It doesn’t mean that.
Rather, I think it’s (at least sometimes) more useful to reframe free will as how it feels to be inside a system that …
Free will is a way to model how a mind can feel like it works from the inside
You start off by saying that this approach is “sometimes” “useful” and then switch to treating it as stone cold fact.
Taking a step back ,
1 we are basically always at map level, because ,even in physics, we have to use simplifications. We can’t model things at the quark level.
2 we can’t regard map level features as false just because they are map level features. So claims like “free will is a map level feature” don’t disprove free will.
3 defining free will as an illusory feeling doesn’t prove or disprove it either, since other people use other definitions.
The best argument against a you are nothing more than a clockwork zombie governed by physics set in motion at the beginning of time assertion is that we don’t have a theory of everything
Interesting to see this discussed in a framework about attribution.
If you’re willing to engage in a little thought experiment, what levels of responsibility would you consider in this scenario:
Alice was invited to Bob’s birthday party. Bob’s parents prepared the party and a birthday cake, but they didn’t know Alice has a severe peanut allergy. During the party Alice ate the birthday cake, which contained peanut, and was hospitalized for a couple of months.
In this scenario I don’t think Bob’s parents are responsible—because as you said in a previous post, one person cannot be expected to be responsible for what’s going on in another’s body.
But what about this alternative scenario:
Bob’s parents bought a birthday cake from a bakery—which (if we’re living in a developing country and things like FDA don’t exist) didn’t label its nutrition and allergy-related facts; everything else is still the same.
In this case I’d consider the bakery to be legally and morally responsible: since they’re serving potentially unlimited customers, failure to consider such important facts should not be excused by pleading ignorance.
Like allergies, depression can cause otherwise insignificant remarks/criticisms to be harmful to a patient than otherwise healthy people, since depressed people engage in more negative thinking about themselves than healthy people. I’m not a medical professional so please correct me if I’m wrong, and I’m only extending my personal experience with evidence.
My case is that since internet comments are directed to an unlimited amount of audience, we should use some caution in our words when speaking publicly, even if it’s only potentially harmful to other people, intentional or not.
(Also I downvoted the parent comment since it’s using unnecessary politics and tribalism as a way to avoid conversation, which isn’t something we should encourage as a community)
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How? The words have to be tuned to the audience to cause harm? I could plausibly cause harm by
convincing people to drink poison
and yes, it would be easier to convince children to do this. Maybe education takes forever because there is a lot of information to be transferred. Maybe education isn’t about education. Maybe it’s about locking kids up for long enough** that when they do something stupid, no one else is to blame (i.e., legally liable).
This (trying to convince people to do things that will kill them*) is not quite controlling someone’s internal state, but strongly pushing towards bad outcomes (like death).
Do I think this happens often? No—but it does exist. Moderation, voting, etc. exist largely for a different reason, and arguably that is because people are irrational. Maybe, a few words on the internet won’t bring about the end of the world.*** ‘Choosing words with care’ as a practice may be more relevant to communicating efficiently/effectively/at all than to preventing harm.
I agree with this—the structure is also similar. (I believe in related corners of the internet, the OP’s concerns are more often addressed by sticking a warning label at the top, and then writing the piece anyway. I haven’t seen lots of spreading automated tools for custom content classification on the user end, though, and that would be cool. Maybe someday I’ll be able to open up an article and run things like ‘remove links to dogma/tic articles’, ‘summarize’, ‘cutout the fluff’ or ‘count/skip to the examples’. For now, the user controlled evaluation/recommendation system remains on my to do list (to create, find, or assemble) , and I won’t be getting to it soon.)
*
Don’t drink poison, eat spicy food.
**:
Whether that’s age, or ‘we tried. You can see we tried, because we took a long time.’
***”If everyone sells all their stocks at once, will the stock market crash?”
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The effects that follow any cause necessarily depend on the conditions in which the cause occurs. Nobody in Jonestown had poison funneled down their throats. They acted on what they were told, each according to the conditions in their own mind and (largely shared but not identical) environment.
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Interesting; I noticed that you’re using words like “responsibility” and “consent” and “choice” a lot. Do you take a non-materialist view of the mind? That is, do you think a mind is something more than the physical systems it’s made of?
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It’s just that if the mind is limited to the physical systems that compose it, then free-will-cluster concepts (consent, responsibility, &c.) are map-stuff and don’t really signify in a discussion of cause and effect. The state of the mind-system must necessarily evolve according to the laws of physics when it is provided a particular input. That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing it’s like to be the mind (as it’s commonly understood), or that the mind doesn’t partially operate by generating and comparing counterfactual realities; only that from a global view it’s all physics. I agree that while we’re “being in the world” it’s usually not useful to take that angle on things, but it’s important not to just forget it either.
You’ve appealed to free-will-cluster concepts heavily in your argument, and I’m just trying to get a feel for how you think they’re relevant.
You also say you don’t believe in “magic spells” (where just saying a thing has a predictable effect, if I’m reading you correctly), but you claim to be able to predictably make certain changes by incanting “I do not consent”. That doesn’t feel consistent to me.
So physics excludes libertarian freewill and compatibilist freewill?
I don’t think it’s always useful to think of free will as a “capacity to make choices in which the outcome has not been determined by past events” (wikipedia). I’m not even sure that definition makes any sense, actually. To me, at least, it doesn’t feel like I make decisions without referring to my memories, which were laid into my mind by my past experiences. It certainly feels like different memories could easily result in my making different decisions in the same situation. And the fact that we can get more skilled at handling certain situations as we get older and experience those situations more times supports that notion.
Rather, I think it’s (at least sometimes) more useful to reframe free will as how it feels to be inside a system that operates at least partially by constructing counterfactual futures and conditioning its outputs on how it provisionally responds to those simulated futures. Start such a system in a specific state, give it a particular input set, and you can expect a specific output; but from within the system it feels like freely making a choice. We can see exactly this happen in patients experiencing Transient Global Amnesia, and with other conditions that prevent the encoding of new memories (though those with permanent conditions do still show some neuroplasticity, and this leads to some changes in the long term).
But I also don’t think I would say that “physics excludes… freewill”. Rather, I would call trying to reconcile free will with cause and effect a category error. Free will is a way to model how a mind can feel like it works from the inside, while causality is a way to model how information propagates through the universe. They’re just not really related, is all.
That’s not the only definition. That’s the definition of libertatian free will.
You are reading ”...has not been determined by past events” as though it means “entirely unconnected to previous events”. It doesn’t mean that.
You start off by saying that this approach is “sometimes” “useful” and then switch to treating it as stone cold fact.
Taking a step back ,
1 we are basically always at map level, because ,even in physics, we have to use simplifications. We can’t model things at the quark level.
2 we can’t regard map level features as false just because they are map level features. So claims like “free will is a map level feature” don’t disprove free will.
3 defining free will as an illusory feeling doesn’t prove or disprove it either, since other people use other definitions.
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There’s also compatibilism.
Interesting to see this discussed in a framework about attribution.
If you’re willing to engage in a little thought experiment, what levels of responsibility would you consider in this scenario:
Alice was invited to Bob’s birthday party. Bob’s parents prepared the party and a birthday cake, but they didn’t know Alice has a severe peanut allergy. During the party Alice ate the birthday cake, which contained peanut, and was hospitalized for a couple of months.
In this scenario I don’t think Bob’s parents are responsible—because as you said in a previous post, one person cannot be expected to be responsible for what’s going on in another’s body.
But what about this alternative scenario:
Bob’s parents bought a birthday cake from a bakery—which (if we’re living in a developing country and things like FDA don’t exist) didn’t label its nutrition and allergy-related facts; everything else is still the same.
In this case I’d consider the bakery to be legally and morally responsible: since they’re serving potentially unlimited customers, failure to consider such important facts should not be excused by pleading ignorance.
Like allergies, depression can cause otherwise insignificant remarks/criticisms to be harmful to a patient than otherwise healthy people, since depressed people engage in more negative thinking about themselves than healthy people. I’m not a medical professional so please correct me if I’m wrong, and I’m only extending my personal experience with evidence.
My case is that since internet comments are directed to an unlimited amount of audience, we should use some caution in our words when speaking publicly, even if it’s only potentially harmful to other people, intentional or not.
(Also I downvoted the parent comment since it’s using unnecessary politics and tribalism as a way to avoid conversation, which isn’t something we should encourage as a community)
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