Quote:
Originally Posted by
MadMojoMonkey
The bold seems at odds with both 1 and 2, IMO, with strong mathematical and experimental evidence that there is no "backward propagation" of consciousness affecting the quantum probabilities at all. (Though, 2 has some subtle things that are at odds with 1, as well.)
The 3rd and 4th descriptions are still useful at describing human behavior. Systems on larger scales than a few dozen particles or molecules are mathematically intractable in almost all cases (so far).
We can argue that free will is an illusion, but then what?
For starters, we must abolish laws as a system of punishments and rehabilitations. We can keep laws for other reasons, but the notion that anyone is "responsible" for their actions would be a lie. There's just the random chance that they did the illegal thing and not something else. They had no agency in that, so punishing them is only about giving the victims a false sense of justice being served. BUT, the punishment cannot affect future behavior of the criminal, and the victims will only feel justice was or was not served randomly, so what's the point? Furthermore, whether or not we do anything is just our own randomness in action. We can't "decide" anything.
All of which is no way for humans to behave or treat each other. It's nonsense. It goes against what it feels like to be human. For better or worse, that really matters quite a great deal. The way it feels to be us and what feels right, good, fair, etc. matters in how we act and how we treat each other.
You agreed to give my no-freewill-mobile a try, but then you just intentionally drove it off a cliff. Dafuq? :D
Bold:If there is no real blame, then punishing a perpetrator because they are to blame is a heinous miscarriage of justice. But that doesn't mean there aren't still reasons to punish. A person who is proven to be a serial killer should be isolated from society. They have shown a pattern of behavior that shows that they are not currently (and in this case, possibly ever) able to play nice with the rest of us. Retribution plays no role here.
Underlined:How'd you land here? They don't need free will to be motivated by stimulus. The punishment (reward?) for not playing nice with society is that we'll remove the literal or hypothetical tumor that's pushing on the part of your brain that makes you not play nice. Removing the tumor may be demonstrating that if you don't play nice, you have to sit in a cage for some time. The effectiveness of punishments aren't supporting evidence for free will. Under this paradigm, if free will is indeed an illusion, we're much more likely to find punishments that are much more just, with much greater efficacy.
Quote:
It's hard to put into words concisely, but it's a statement of the conservation of energy and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
It's already getting into sticky business because the 2nd Law of Thermo is saying that Entropy always increases (or stays the same) in any isolated system.
That's akin to saying energy spreads itself out, or that concentrated energy tends to evolve into diffuse energy... but since energy is neither created nor destroyed, we're talking about the "packedness" of the energy. When energy is packed in a "small" volume, we say the entropy is low, and when that same energy is spread out over a "large" volume, we say it has more entropy than the former case.
A simple example would be a brick of metal that we heat one end with something. While we are heating the end, we are inserting energy into the brick. The brick + the heat source is an isolated system. The heat flows from the heat source to the brick because that increases the entropy, I.e. it spreads the energy out the most.
When we remove the heat source, we can now consider the brick an isolated system (assuming it's well insulated from transferring heat to its surroundings). Now the brick is hotter on one end than it is throughout. The temperature doesn't stay concentrated in any single hot spot, but it spreads out uniformly throughout the brick.
The presence of hot spots indicates lower entropy than uniform temperature, as the uniform temperature is the most spread out the energy can be.
Back to the underline in my prior post.
Chemistry happens because things tend to move toward their lowest energy state. I.e. when water gets cold, it takes more energy to stay liquid than to freeze into a solid. So it freezes. When it warms up again, it now takes more energy to hold onto that "frozen" Hydrogen bond than to let it go and move with kinetic energy, so it breaks that bond (melts) and starts moving.
All of this is pretty hard to get on first approach. Entropy is notoriously hard for students to pin down at first.
It's not the worst of its kind, though. I find Enthalpy much harder to wrap my head around.
You lost me a bit here (and now I have a Wikipedia tab opened to Enthalpy which I'm scared to dive into), but I'm pretty confident we're not finding free will here.
Quote:
I'm standing on a position of ignorance and saying it's OK to wing it, so I don't expect a lot of head nodding as I explain my take on this.
I do think my thoughts on jurisprudence seem colorful in the context of this conversation, but it's hard to say that making people feel good is a part of understanding what it means to be ourselves. I think it's relevant the descriptions we use to describe things vary wildly as the scale of those things changes.
QM contains no entropy, but Entropy laws are perfectly valid in chemistry. Neither contains any room for a particle to "decide" anything, but describing conscious minds as lacking agency to decide is not a helpful way to deal with people. The way people behave in isolation is very different to the way people behave in groups, so the societal picture has relevance, too, IMO. Each of those pictures has areas in which it is useful, and areas where it's useless, so it's hard for me to pick one as "better" than the others... even with my bias toward the quantum mechanical picture.
No disagreement here. I just would say that we shouldn't jump to extrapolating this physics paradox and start conflating context with scale.
Quote:
I'm neither a doctor nor a psychologist, and I'm answering your questions 'cause it's fun, not 'cause I'm telling the world I'm an expert on brains and how to deal with one.
I mean... I'm not qualified to even stand by my own musings as facts, so I feel your skepticism over my POV.
Yeah, I'm not an expert in anything-- I just find it gratifying to play with ideas. Thanks for playing.
Quote:
It's just, I can't fathom the mindset to pedo, and I can't fathom that another person would have no sense of the harm they're causing in that victim.
Call it a personal failing on my imagination, but it is what it is.
I'm reluctant (not 'opposed') to excuse terrible behavior based on what a person says, though. They did the thing. They can lie about why. Also, whether they did the thing because of a brain disease or because of conscious intent is kinda beside the point. If they're hurting people for whatever reason, then they need to be put in a situation where they cannot cause further harm. If rehabilitation is possible, then that's best for everyone involved, but even if, that person needs to be isolated from potential victims throughout that rehabilitation.
That could feel like an undeserved punishment to them, but so what? They've given up their right for us to care about how they feel by committing the heinous acts.
You seem to be conflating being a pedo with victimizing children. Presumably not all pedophiles act on their urges.
Re: trying to understand the mindset of a pedo: I know it's controversial, and can cause problems for the advancement of non-normative sexual orientations, but I just view it as another sexual orientation-- one that allows for no moral way to be indulged in. Also, this is a bit of a sidetrack, but I have a hard time understanding the difference between fetishes and sexual orientations. It honestly feels like the distinction between cults and religions to me. One group has just become socially acceptable.
I do agree that someone who sexually abuses children should not be around children, and possibly just not be in society so long as they have the urge to abuse children-- where I strongly disagree is the idea that what caused the urge and them to act on it is besides the point. If we want to keep kids from getting diddled, we need to prevent these urges, be able to intervene when we are unable to prevent these urges, and to do so we need to understand their root cause. Just punishing those who have already abused children is a guarantee that children will continue to be abused.
Quote:
It is, but the arrow you've attached to it points the other way.
Basically, I can hang a belief on my identity, but I refuse to hang my identity on a belief.
Does that make sense?
Interesting, yeah it does. I wasn't putting much weight on that, just was a fun gotcha-- I wasn't using it to negate what you had said. It's almost impossible to not open yourself up to "gotchas" when discussing this sorta thing, free well, etc, because our language is built on the assumption of free will.
Quote:
I didn't mean to say that I'm not the culmination of my beliefs. I meant to say I attach no sense of my identity to that fact.
Hmm. This is interesting. Is this different from attaching your sense of identity to the sum of your beliefs with the knowledge that they're ever changing in all scenarios you'd hope to inhabit?
