When a young male (let's say 14 to 19) is a danger to himself and others, society gives the supporting family two options:1. Watch people die.2. Kill your own son.Those are your only options. I chose #1 and watched my stepson die. I was relieved he took no one else with him.— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) July 6, 2022
Check out his own self-selected Twitter avatar. :galaxy-brain: :farquaad-point: :centrist: :soypoint-2:
'I bought two plants from the garden centre. When I got home I repotted one in the right compost, put it on the windowsill and watered it. The other I bunged in the airing cupbord and it died. Guess the first one just had stronger genes.'
One of the main issues that I have with "hard" determinism as I see it in the contemporary world is that so many of its backers and supporters are complete and utter monstrous assholes like Scott Adams, and their applications of their beliefs tend to involve reductionist and nihilistic takes on people and life itself accordingly.
It also tends to involve giving a free pass to being an asshole because surely everything was predestined in a deterministic way so CPTSD from bad parents don't real something something meat computers something something love is chemicals therefore it is meaningless :morshupls:
This isn't even a hard determinism argument - it's genetic determinism. A hard determinist wouldn't argue that changing an individual's environment to one that has a support network is pointless, they'd just argue that whether you do or don't wasn't really your choice
My point is that in many cases these people are self described determinists. Scott Adams, eugenics enthusiast by any other label, is one of them.
Some may have more "cred" philosophically but in many cases they are still assholes in their presentation, such as Dan Dennett, and some are quacks that still get credited for being a valid academic authority for some reason, like Sam Harris.
Yeah I don't think determinism is the problem. I'm a determinist, and I see it as fundamental to my leftist perspective - like it is the foundation to my conception that people deserve human compassion because they didn't choose their lives.
Also last I checked Dennet isn't a really determinist, he's a compatibilist
I wasn't even really making a case against determinism in this thread as much as expressing frustration with the overall presentation of the opinion leaders that get air time for it, and what they want to do with their beliefs.
I could go into my opinion that determinism, if true, doesn't necessarily have helpful or useful application when it comes to improving society somewhat. We as living beings experience subjective consciousness, "illusion" or whatever any specific determinist wants to call it, and at present there isn't even really a way to exceed or transcend that as it is, to have "true" free will as it may be defined by whatever theoretical parameters don't actually exist yet.
At worst, a lot of the assholes I mention want more of a surveillance state with power fantasies of supercomputers to predict every last possible thought and action of the deterministically driven populace. It sounds like a lot of effort to go through to make people more miserable via the Panopticon Effect, which in their case might even be the point.
Also last I checked Dennet isn’t a really determinist, he’s a compatibilist
You sure about that? He was pretty big on consciousness itself being "an illusion."
Dennett is definitely a compatibilist. When he says that consciousness is an illusion, he means that there's no real pattern that corresponds to our folk psychological notion of qualia (ineffable, incorrigible, private, etc.). Mentality more broadly is real for him in virtue of their being a predictive stance we can take that uses it as an assumption and generates good (in the information theoretic sense) predictions.
I could go into my opinion that determinism, if true, doesn’t necessarily have helpful or useful application when it comes to improving society somewhat.
This is where I land too. I do think the universe is deterministic but like, okay? Then what? I still have to live my life as if it isn’t.
Same goes for the “are we living in a simulation” thing. I’m pretty convinced by the math argument, I think it makes more sense that this reality is a nested one rather than the top level one. But until someone can give me cheat codes to break the simulation it impacts my life exactly not at all.
I feel the same way about pretty much every variant of "simulation theory" too. If we're in some simulation, well, that's what we got. That's all we know. What can be done about it apart from billionaires attempting to destroy such a "simulation" and everyone in it to prove they're too big to play nice?
Similarly, when some :reddit-logo: is smug enough to quote le based Rick Sanchez and say "love is just chemicals," those love chemicals are quite nice and that's the only subjective experience of love that we know of.
like it is the foundation to my conception that people deserve human compassion because they didn’t choose their lives.
While that can seem admirable in some ways, it also has a paralysis aspect because it also implies that :porky-happy: and related people that hurt other people and exploit them "didn't choose their lives." Does choice even truly exist at that point, because if people don't choose, what does? Does the word even have meaning at all if we go that far?
Whether or not choice is real by some abstract definition that exists outside of our lived subjective reality, telling :porky-happy: that they were predestined to act how they did is probably not going to have the same effect, deterministically or not, than telling :porky-happy: that their workers may eventually show them consequences for their actions.
I think it's philosophically paralyzing to go so far as to say that making choices to harm others and destroy things around them isn't really a choice at all. Even the "illusion" of choice can incentivize behavior changes or at least mitigation, such as the fear of punishment tied to making bad choices (which are assumed to be choices, not "illusions" for purposes of crime and punishment) which does tend to deter specific kinds of people prone to harming others even if it isn't universally effective.
Likewise, the "illusion" of having the choice to do good things for other people is self-fulfilling even if it's an "illusion." People tend to enjoy the feeling that they chose to do something to help other people, "illusion" or otherwise. Stripping that supposed illusion away may actually make those people less deterministically prone to acting in such ways.
His genes played the main role. The rest is scenery. You impede solutions by hallucinating they exist.
reminder that genetic determinism is the ideology of worthless nazi failsons, like Donald Trump who have no real accomplishments to demonstrate their virtue.
You're the problem, my friend, not an example of the solution. You were ready and equipped for rehab. I applaud you. But it is cruel to say dad's love was the magic sauce. His genes played the main role. The rest is scenery. You impede solutions by hallucinating they exist.
I swear The Selfish Gene by Dawkins did irreparable harm to a huge cohort of smartdumb psychos.
'I bought two plants from the garden centre. When I got home I repotted one in the right compost, put it on the windowsill and watered it. The other I bunged in the airing cupbord and it died. Guess the first one just had stronger genes.'
A lot of that ideology is just secular Calvinism. And it's fucked.
Calvin and Hobbes and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Not Bill Watterson, though. He's a national treasure.
One of the main issues that I have with "hard" determinism as I see it in the contemporary world is that so many of its backers and supporters are complete and utter monstrous assholes like Scott Adams, and their applications of their beliefs tend to involve reductionist and nihilistic takes on people and life itself accordingly.
It also tends to involve giving a free pass to being an asshole because surely everything was predestined in a deterministic way so CPTSD from bad parents don't real something something meat computers something something love is chemicals therefore it is meaningless :morshupls:
This isn't even a hard determinism argument - it's genetic determinism. A hard determinist wouldn't argue that changing an individual's environment to one that has a support network is pointless, they'd just argue that whether you do or don't wasn't really your choice
My point is that in many cases these people are self described determinists. Scott Adams, eugenics enthusiast by any other label, is one of them.
Some may have more "cred" philosophically but in many cases they are still assholes in their presentation, such as Dan Dennett, and some are quacks that still get credited for being a valid academic authority for some reason, like Sam Harris.
Yeah I don't think determinism is the problem. I'm a determinist, and I see it as fundamental to my leftist perspective - like it is the foundation to my conception that people deserve human compassion because they didn't choose their lives.
Also last I checked Dennet isn't a really determinist, he's a compatibilist
I wasn't even really making a case against determinism in this thread as much as expressing frustration with the overall presentation of the opinion leaders that get air time for it, and what they want to do with their beliefs.
I could go into my opinion that determinism, if true, doesn't necessarily have helpful or useful application when it comes to improving society somewhat. We as living beings experience subjective consciousness, "illusion" or whatever any specific determinist wants to call it, and at present there isn't even really a way to exceed or transcend that as it is, to have "true" free will as it may be defined by whatever theoretical parameters don't actually exist yet.
At worst, a lot of the assholes I mention want more of a surveillance state with power fantasies of supercomputers to predict every last possible thought and action of the deterministically driven populace. It sounds like a lot of effort to go through to make people more miserable via the Panopticon Effect, which in their case might even be the point.
You sure about that? He was pretty big on consciousness itself being "an illusion."
Dennett is definitely a compatibilist. When he says that consciousness is an illusion, he means that there's no real pattern that corresponds to our folk psychological notion of qualia (ineffable, incorrigible, private, etc.). Mentality more broadly is real for him in virtue of their being a predictive stance we can take that uses it as an assumption and generates good (in the information theoretic sense) predictions.
His argument against qualia is dumb though. Hard problem remains uncracked.
I don't exactly think it's dumb, but I do think it's wrong.
This is where I land too. I do think the universe is deterministic but like, okay? Then what? I still have to live my life as if it isn’t.
Same goes for the “are we living in a simulation” thing. I’m pretty convinced by the math argument, I think it makes more sense that this reality is a nested one rather than the top level one. But until someone can give me cheat codes to break the simulation it impacts my life exactly not at all.
I feel the same way about pretty much every variant of "simulation theory" too. If we're in some simulation, well, that's what we got. That's all we know. What can be done about it apart from billionaires attempting to destroy such a "simulation" and everyone in it to prove they're too big to play nice?
There’s functionally no difference to me if my molecules are made up of atoms and quarks or 1s and 0s, I still need to eat and sleep.
Similarly, when some :reddit-logo: is smug enough to quote le based Rick Sanchez and say "love is just chemicals," those love chemicals are quite nice and that's the only subjective experience of love that we know of.
While that can seem admirable in some ways, it also has a paralysis aspect because it also implies that :porky-happy: and related people that hurt other people and exploit them "didn't choose their lives." Does choice even truly exist at that point, because if people don't choose, what does? Does the word even have meaning at all if we go that far?
Whether or not choice is real by some abstract definition that exists outside of our lived subjective reality, telling :porky-happy: that they were predestined to act how they did is probably not going to have the same effect, deterministically or not, than telling :porky-happy: that their workers may eventually show them consequences for their actions.
I think it's philosophically paralyzing to go so far as to say that making choices to harm others and destroy things around them isn't really a choice at all. Even the "illusion" of choice can incentivize behavior changes or at least mitigation, such as the fear of punishment tied to making bad choices (which are assumed to be choices, not "illusions" for purposes of crime and punishment) which does tend to deter specific kinds of people prone to harming others even if it isn't universally effective.
Likewise, the "illusion" of having the choice to do good things for other people is self-fulfilling even if it's an "illusion." People tend to enjoy the feeling that they chose to do something to help other people, "illusion" or otherwise. Stripping that supposed illusion away may actually make those people less deterministically prone to acting in such ways.
reminder that genetic determinism is the ideology of worthless nazi failsons, like Donald Trump who have no real accomplishments to demonstrate their virtue.
deleted by creator
Most of the things you're correcting me on I didn't say