Let's Talk About Population Control

[wufwugy]

Don't get me wrong, I see your point. If they weren't coerced, then they make their own choices, which means they are responsible for their actions.

Even if coerced, making a decision means that your being, at whatever level, felt that decision was in its best interest. At the very least, that's the assumption.

You're going further, though. You're saying people not only choose their own choices, but that they always choose what they believe to be best for them - maybe best in that moment. That's where I don't necessarily see where you're going with it.

Can you think of an instance where a being chose something that it truly did not want? If the being wanted something different, would it not have chosen that thing?

I'm not gonna come up with anything. Have you given it your honest effort to do so, either? I'm somehow certain there are counter-examples which show that this statement is, at the very least, too broad.

It seems there's a decent amount of (3) involved in any good Murcan's consumer week. If you're not buying random sheet, then...
Bad Commie! Go to the mall and at least pretend you're trying to blend in.

How's this:
I propose that people choose rationally, and most of the time, they're focused on self-preservation, and improvement, even... but sometimes they do random stuff at their whimsy, too. Some do things and afterward say, "IDK why I was doing it. I wanted to stop doing it, but I kept doing it." when they describe that time they watched themself slowly lock their keys in their car.
I can prove it's the right description, 'cause look around.
If you try to base your model on anything else, you'll get hairy palms and a severe case of Mycoxafloppin.
So don't even think about that, bro.

It's not intuitive? I can't think of a single instance in which a being with any level of agency could possibly make a random decision. Randomness requires lack of agency.

Ugh. Really?
Look at the history of physics, man. It's a long, sordid tale of raging nerds saying wrong things to prove to the other nerds how wrong they were, thereby climbing the nerd ladder of saying things very slightly less wrong than the poor nerd who was wrong. The upshot is that we have a collection of very clever things to say which haven't been proven wrong, yet.

History tells us that everything we now believe to be true displaced another explanation which was quite similar, but ultimately wrong, but which we believed to be true right up 'till that one raging nerd wouldn't shut up about it. It's only a matter of time until the next raging nerd comes along and shows us how ever so slightly wrong we are, now.

Seriously, though. In science, the things we say are falsifiable predictions. If even one example of the prediction being false is found, then we stop saying that thing. The fact that we say things are consistent is because we limit our topics of discussion very rigidly to things which can be predicted. This necessarily implies consistency. We only talk about things which are consistent. If a thing is shown to be inconsistent, then we stop talking about it.

We don't stop studying it. We just stop claiming we can make falsifiable predictions about it.

FYP

That's literally the opposite of science.

So, you can probably tell I'm a huge fan of internet debates. Well, the time I got obliterated in an internet debate the most was against a guy who had the lockdown on philosophy of science in a way I had never seen before. One of my main takeaways was that at the root of science exists entirely unscientific assumptions. When we're discussing base assumptions, we're not talking science per se; we're talking the things for which we can't get any deeper; hence we have no option but to make assumptions. This is at the root of the most rigorous and established orthodoxy of knowledge.

Evaluating base assumptions with the scientific process doesn't work. The scientific process is itself an assumption. Every field of knowledge has at its base assumptions.