Yeah, I’m sick about hearing people complaining about forcible commitment.
I"M BEING MEDICALLY TREATED against my will!
Shut up dude. Your “will” doesn’t matter. You’re in a padded cell because the rest of society wants you in that cell-- to prevent your filthy lack of mental hygiene from infecting the rest of society.
If one is thinking, then one has free will. The very fact of an entity doing something that has multiple potential outcomes based upon what it does is … free will.
The very fact that we can reflect on free will indicates we have it.
Taking this argument to its strawman conclusion is that all dangers should be forbidden and eliminated.
Obviously no one wants to go that far, so how do we invent a justice system (which will include economic policy, health care services, and regulations on business) for a world with the illusion of choice? Do we regulate people’s diets and exercise for them to prevent obesity and heart disease deaths? Take away alcohol and other voluntary carcinogens? Do we initiate a basic minimum income and provide housing, food and health care to all? How do we enforce these laws? More importantly, how do we get a population that believes in free will to accept this new paradigm without crying fascism?
Because the leading causes of death and injury are also things people don’t seem ready to accept control over. Perhaps we only try to control when a person harms another, not themselves. If we accept that free will doesn’t exist, who gets to decide when to use force to deter harm?
The doctrine of least harm can guide these ideals, but how do you trust those that do the studies to determine the level of harm? How do we decide who gets to make the decisions and enforce the rules?
Men in black robes, delegating their authority to men in white coats.
I don’t think that MUH implies determinism. Honestly, the biggest complaint about it is that it doesn’t imply anything.
If you could choose to reflect on it or not, then I would agree. If the fact that it could be forecast that you would reflect on it today on this BBS, then not so much.
MUH does imply determinism in a way. Tegmark says (or at least used to say) that every outcome that is possible, happens. So if you open the box with the potentially poisoned cat, the cat is alive and dead and different versions of you see each. I have a hard time with this.
That’s just a rehash of the many worlds interpretation of QM and not determinism in the usual sense. The paper of his that I am thinking of ( http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646 ) was about a claim that the universe is a mathematical object. As far as I can tell this is simply the claim that “logic works”. I guess he wrote some book about it as well that got a bit crankish. See http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6551
I assume you mean judges and doctors. Who decides who gets to be a judge? Who polices the judges and oversees their decisions? And most importantly, how do you change form our current system (which assumes free will) to a system of scientific doctrine of least harm?
Keep in mind that most people believe in free will more fervently then most religions.
A government based upon the doctrine of least harm may have human rights, but would be necessarily an authoritarian government.
I’ve long thought that the methods and implication of “public health” make for an interesting contrast with a society based on the primacy of the individual.
Neither is “bad” nor are they wholly incompatible, but the contrast is there. I should probably read The Nazi War on Cancer at some point.
The use of mental institutions to achieve societal ends has a long and troubling history. Perhaps it would be better if the institutions were more effective at treating these sorts of diseases and disorders, but in a sense, these things were tried before with disastrous results.
If you set the philosophical bar high enough, the concept of free will neither exists nor makes sense. Despite this, people can train their responses in reaction to undesired outcomes of habits, so the reaction delay and other test trickery used to “prove” that people act instinctively and perceive otherwise simply highlights the fact that we struggle against habits and the other optimisation methods we use to get through the day.
We are robots, but we can rewrite our own programs!
Two major issues. There is no absolute simultaneity and the informational and computability hypotheses.
Theoretically, information about future events can effect past events, one of the reasons many-worlds is attractive. If you know what it is that you are ‘destined’ to do because of the determined evolution of energy pattern which you are and cannot escape being, then any information concerning inescapable future states you will occupy would be added to the current state and open up the potential to change that outcome. This includes information concerning knowing the outcome and changing course etc.
Secondly, if the universe is informational (mathematical) it is probably therefore also computable. Computing that inescapably determined future state adds information to the current state which allows for a different future state.
Determinism is weak sauce. And you don’t necessarily need to twist space-time into knots or perform very large numbers of calculations to destroy it, I’m just pointing out extreme examples which undermine the strong version at base. You can still have your local, entrained, everyday determinacy if you want until a better understanding of the nature of the emergence of consciousness comes around but I suspect that even then some kind of quantum <something> will have to be taken into account which also undermines strong determinacy.
Werd. Also, it’s Friday night. Why for you so coherent?
I am because not drunk?
Why is not drink?
Am had drunk early, now up sobered.
Free will exists in superposition until you make a decision. Afterwards it’s referred to as fate.[quote=“knappa, post:50, topic:77367”]
As far as I can tell this is simply the claim that “logic works”.
[/quote]
AKA Reason is reasonable.
But it is severely under-determined.
