About as long as it takes to fall into a diabetic coma. I’ve got my express ticket out. The rest of y’all gotta ride out the storm with the other plebs with functioning pancreases.
US, my home state just sent a woman to prison for helping her daughter get an abortion. So, you know, living under a shitty theocracy that believes being poor or a woman is the worst sin imaginable.
My wife had a D&C after a miscarriage earlier this year. Luckily, our state isn’t as shitty as others, but the surgery was still labeled an abortion, and they made her answer a bunch of questions like it was a choice and not that our baby was dead for a month before the 12 week ultrasound. And the shitheel front desk woman lied to us and said that no one could be back there with her (obviously not in surgery, but I wasn’t even able to be back in the waiting area with her pre or post op), because that woman was a religious fruitcake and “didn’t agree with the procedure”
We raised some serious hell after finding that out and took it up through their patient advocate. It went up to the hospitals board and they issued an apology, which meant fuck all, and I think that woman was fired.
I don’t understand why people want to be involved in anyone else’s lives. I get it if you personally don’t agree with abortions, but that’s your choice. You don’t get the right to decide what someone else does with their own fucking body. The kicker is that most people don’t even realize that a D&C after a miscarriage is the same exact procedure and is classified the same. Excuse the fuck out of me if I don’t want my wife to die from sepsis or have to sit around for another 1-2 months with a dead fetus inside of her waiting for it to possibly discharge naturally. That whole experience was awful enough and she wanted it to be over as soon as possible.
Fuck your religious beliefs. Apply them to yourself, no one else should bend over to appease your stupid sky fairy bullshit.
That’s awful. So heartless when your wife is going through physical terrors and both of you through emotional. And thank you for sharing, I can only hope the shitheels pushing these laws finally start listening to them.
I’m a fairly hardcore/radical determinist, and tend to agree that individuals shouldn’t be held morally responsible for actions, any more than a hammer is morally responsible for driving a nail. However, that does not mean people should be free from consequence. There are plenty of reasons - even as a hardcore determinist - to hold people to account for their actions, either as a social corrective mechanism, public safety, deterrent, or personal sanity.
As for getting their actions to align with your morals, that’s a more complicated question that depends on the type of person they are.
What drives the thing that drives the hammer? What drives the thing that drives the thing that drives the hammer? What drives the thing that drives the thing that drives the thing that drives the hammer?
Doesn’t that imply that people have the ability to change their behavior?
My answer changes depending on your meaning but:
Of course. My brain is constantly updating and improving itself. I’m just not ultimately in control of how that process happens. Though that does not mean that I should stop living. I can still experience and enjoy my life, and ‘choose’ to improve it. It’s just that the I that made that choice is a consequence of my brain calculating optimal paths based on a myriad of factors: genetics, culture, circumstance, biological drives, personal history, drugs, etc.
Let’s say you see someone playing in traffic, and tell them they shouldn’t be doing that. They respond, “I can’t not do it, because my brain already made the decision to do it, so I have no choice but to do it.”
Is this person correct? Or do they have the ability to just follow your advice and stop playing? Do they have the ability to ignore your advice and keep playing? If they have the ability to do both, then to what degree can we say that your advice is determining their choice? How can we say that choice is determined if we can also say that they should make a different choice?
We are constantly making and updating our choices in response to new information. Just because the brain decided upon one course of action at one point in time does not preclude it from changing course in the future. That’s just a new choice. All available information is taken into consideration at all points in time.
By determined, I mean it follows a logical set of rules, not that it is set on a specific action. The idea would be that it was determined to make all those choices because everything else is also following the rules of the universe. Just as it was determined that they play in traffic, so was it determined for me to tell them to stop, just as it was determined for them to listen. They didn’t choose to change their mind, they were always going to change their mind.
That’s what raises my question of when we say someone “should” do something. If what you describe is true, there are not any better or worse choices or actions, there are just actions that are consequences of a previous action.
I’m not sure if you’re familiar of Jelle’s Marble Races, but the general conceit is that marbles are sent down a track or through obstacles while a sports commentator analyzes the race as if observing human competitors. The humor arises from the cognitive dissonance of talking about strategy, risky decisions, athleticism, etc. while the audience is fully aware that these are inanimate objects being acted upon by mechanical forces.
Likewise, talking about what decisions should or shouldn’t do with a worldview that these actions are simply things that happen due to more complex interactions of cause and effect that we can’t immediately see causes a similar sense of cognitive dissonance for me. It seems that human minds and language have evolved to experience a world where our actions do have meaning and that we don’t really experience them in a way that feels deterministic to us.
You brought up the brain a vat thought experiment in another reply, and the answer is similar: even if we are brains in a vat, that’s not how we experience the world. And we don’t really experience the world as a deterministic one, either.
I believe consciousness is a result of processes of the brain, and the brain is a very complex machine. It’s hard to say anything too concretely beyond that because I don’t really understand how it works. I live as though the brain and my consciousness are in perfect sync, but I’m unsure how true that is.
Your brain is you, though, just like your hands are you. Whether there’s a lag between the time that imaging detects you made a decision and you say you made one does not change the fact that you’re the one making the decision.
That’s one way of seeing things, and I respect that viewpoint, but I disagree. I primarily view myself as my consciousness; everything else is secondary. How do you know you aren’t a brain in a vat?
I’m a fallibilist: I don’t believe we can know anything for certain. The best we can do is base propositions off contingent statements: “If what I see is reliable, then what I see in the mirror is not a brain in a vat.”
A brain in a vat is not a very useful starting axioms, so I have no reason to give it serious consideration. By contrast, while taking the general accuracy of my own senses as axiomatic eventually leads me to conclude they can be fallible (example: hallucinations,) it is nonetheless a way more useful axiom for deriving a base of contingent knowledge.
The person making the claim has to advance the evidence. The default is the assumption that the way the universe presents itself is the way it is. If you want me to consider this possibility find supporting evidence for it.
The default is the assumption that the way the universe presents itself is the way it is.
Sure, but this is still an assumption I would need to agree to - though obviously a productive one - not necessarily true. The only thing I can know is my experience.
This isn’t particularly useful beyond explaining why I view my consciousness as primary and hands secondary or tertiary or something. The brain is tricky because again, I don’t know where it ends and my consciousness begins.
Incorrect. You can easily be deceived. The primary is physical reality that is the only thing that remains regardless of what you think. I have more evidence that the real world exists than I do that you are a thinking mind.
Descartes ruined philosophy. Reality exists everything else we should question.
If your perception is subject to failure, so to is the evidence, no matter how convincing. So yes, we act upon the assumption that reality exists. We both agree with this.
But that doesn’t mean it is true. And all I’m saying is for this very narrow point of what I care most about, Descartes does have a point. I care more about my mind than my foot. I mean, maybe you can think of a better way to frame the argument because I doubt you even disagree. If you have a gun and you are forced to shoot yourself anywhere on your body, would you choose your foot or your brain?
The better counter to me would be to prove external value. Would I sacrifice myself for someone else? If I believe reality doesn’t exist, the answer should presumably be no. If I believe reality does exist, the answer could be yes. Or alternatively, shooting myself in the foot suggests I believe in a causal relationship within reality towards shooting my brain and losing consciousness, which I shouldn’t necessarily believe.
But even then, it’s not that I disbelieve reality, it’s just that I can’t know for certain what’s real outside my mind, so there’s not really any contradiction between acting as if it is real and being uncertain if it is.
All this is doesn’t matter anyway: the point is less you could be a brain in a vat, but rather if you were a brain in a vat, would you be any less you? I don’t think so.
I have more evidence that the real world exists than I do that you are a thinking mind.
I have more evidence that I am a thinking mind than that I do that the real world exists. There’s no point arguing this point it won’t go anywhere.
I am genuinely and in good faith interested what you think about quantum mechanics and that there seems to be an element of true randomness there.
I was pretty much a determinist until an actual physicist that I know and respect told me that he is totally convinced that there is stuff in quantum mechanics that just cannot be predetermined.
And if anything can be undeterminable then by influencing other things there would exist true randomness and then a fully deterministic world cannot exist in my eyes.
But I am very willing to learn more if you know a good counter-argument since I always thought determinism is quite an elegant view of the world.
I just cannot follow it if I am not convinced it is true.
There are layers to the universe. While you can’t predict everything you don’t usually need to. The object is dropped and therefore it falls. If you zoomed in deep enough you would see the chaos that is going on in the subatomic but the object still falls all the same.
Not being able to predict everything does not mean we can predict nothing.
One interpretation would be Many Worlds; that is, every quantum possibility is real in its own multiversal branch. So, to assign moral agency you would need to show that I chose the world I’m in now, over some other version of my life in which different choices were made. Although, I’m not certain you even need to go that far: I have no idea to what degree quantum randomness can actually affect our choices. But, in any case, that too would be out of our control.
Randomness doesn’t really save traditional free will. A robot that selects its actions by rolling dice is not any more “free to choose” than a robot that selects its actions according to a deterministic program. There isn’t any free-will juice that gets introduced by adding randomness.
Your “free will” is the process by which you select actions. For humans, that’s a bunch of physics and chemistry happening in your brain; it receives influences from your senses, your body, and its own self-awareness (i.e. its model of you, your actions, tendencies, etc.). Whether that process depends closely on QM, or is boringly classical, doesn’t control how “self-determined” it is.
I am not sure you replied to the right comment since I never mentioned free will at all but was more interested in how a person believing in determinism handles the current state of science that at least suggests the existence of true randomness.
In my eyes true randomness contradicts a deterministic world, but I am interested to learn more from anyone who is more educated on this topic.
If I understand you correctly I agree with you though that what might be called free will is what happens in an individuals brain when they make a decision.
The discussion whether this decision making process in the brain can be truly free is a very interesting one, but not the one I wanted to have.
My personal layman’s opinion is that my brain has enough uniqueness to it that the decisions I make are individually mine and there are other unique people that make their own individual choices.
If those choices and decisions are truly free matters less to me as long as they are truly individual.
I’m not the other person, but I think you might be confusing the term “determinism.” I think you might also have a bit of an over-enthusiastic understanding of quantum mechanics, which is a very common problem when people have QM explained in lay person terms I’m not going to get into the QM stuff because I’m a biologist and not a physicist, and I think your world just became more interesting with your new information. I’d just say hold off on the conclusions until you read a bit more, and start sliding towards the actual science books rather than the pop science books as you get your feet under you. You’ll have a different appreciation once you can read an advanced undergraduate textbook on modern physics.
Determinism as used here means behavioral determinism. There is significant evidence that a large number of our actions and reactions aren’t thought through, but rather are “automatic” responses. In fact, some neuroimaging work on decision-making has indicated that we reach a conclusion and then reverse-justify it by thinking we’re thinking about it. My subconscious mind has already decided to buy the bagel, but my conscious mind is still talking itself into it.
Again, people can take that kind of thing to an unjustified extreme. I think free will exists in a limited sense, but that it is highly constrained. In this case (the original question, not the person to whom you’re replying) is using their own misunderstanding of behavioral determinism to excuse their misbehavior. It’s a self-indulgent philosophy that you can probably pick apart if you really wanted to spend the time and effort in making them meticulously explain every step and aspect of their position, but it’s probably easier to just drop the person or to deal with them while remembering they’re possibly clinically psychotic, but almost definitely at least an asshole.
I thought that to be the case for a long time.
If I could control all the variables I could roll a die to a 6 every time or at least tell the outcome as soon as it’s thrown if I know everything else there is to know.
I also recognize that my understanding of modern physics is minimal at best.
But a physicist friend of mine told me that there is stuff that is truly random, so in gross simplification if I throw the exact same die in the exact same way under the exact same conditions it could still show different results making it impossible to predetermine the result.
If that is the case I don’t think this world is a system where it is possible to determine the future even with perfect information.
And maybe you are right that my knowledge is just too superficial to hold a real opinion in the debate between determinism and indeterminism, but I also don’t really have a horse in this race.
Just if you were to ask me as a layman I would think indeterminism to be more plausible given the (grossly simplified) information above.
The OP that I replied to described himself as a determinist, so I was just curious of their response.
But now I got a lot of other input to think about so I am happy either way.
Again, none if this is meant to attack you and I realize to someone more informed this might just seem as random rambling, but I was just honestly interested so thank you again for the response.
I cracked a joke that made a person laugh who is very difficult to make laugh. I’ve known them for nearly a decade and it was the first time I ever heard them laugh out loud.
That’s awesome - well done! Reminded me of something else, story below.
For anyone that watched MythBusters, you’re probably aware the two main hosts, Adam and Jaimie, didn’t like each other because they were two different clashing personalities and tough to work with. There was a pirate myths episode, and Adam went all out dressing as a pirate and using a very heavy faux-pirate accent. Jaimie was laughing so hard during that scene that his whole head was red! One of the most endearing moments of the show, and something I treasure because this show was so influential for me growing up.
Props to anyone like @Vanth that makes the normally serious person laugh!
If you want to talk about hormone levels and time spent transitioning, there’s a conversation to be had, but the right isn’t having it. For example, the movie Lady Ballers was supposed to be a documentary that proved men could dominate women’s sports by pretending to be transgender, but everybody involved eventually backed out after discovering the effort it would take to actually transition, even for the purpose of showing up the so-called woke left.
During a recent episode of The Ben Shapiro Show, cast member and conservative commentator Ben Shapiro — whose previous credits include spending nearly 45 minutes throwing a tantrum over the Barbie movie’s existence — said that they originally intended to make as a documentary. But then they found out that (gasp!) a group of bigoted cis men in bad wigs can’t simply participate in women’s sports.
“As it turns out, most ladies’ leagues don’t allow any actual men, and [the actors] weren’t willing to go the full distance in terms of what it would require, the actual hormone treatments, to actually play in ladies’ leagues,” Shapiro admitted during an interview with Boering about the film
Of course, those conversations about testosterone levels will also unfairly target black women, who have been targeted in the past by the same shrill white women using almost the exact same tactics as we see today.
The amount of people who just mindlessly accepted that certain words were forbidden has ruined any faith I had of us making it out of “this.” I’m not talking about hate speech, but seeing literal baby-speak like “corn” in place of porn, “rake” for rape, or “unalive” for suicide is ridiculous. How anyone can type those out in an otherwise serious context is beyond me
I cant find the video but there was a very serious accident in Australia at a theme park and several people died. The ambulance crews who attended reported that “The patients suffered injuries incompatible with life” and the media had a fucking field day about how paramedics shouldnt be making jokes and how cold and insensitive it was and blah blah blah.
The Ambulance service had a press conference the following day which was one of the absolute best public ass chewings Ive ever seen. The guy tore into the media like a wolverine. Heavily paraphrased but - “Our paramedics are not doctors, legally speaking they cannot pronounce someone dead. They do however know that a man who has been literally torn to pieces by heavy machinery cant be helped. They have to stand there, look at that scene and make a realistic professional assessment that the patient has suffered injuries that nobody could survive and report that. Then they have to look at the next person… and report that professionally too… and then the next one… And without doing any investigation into our procedures and the why of them you decide to report on OUR professionalism!?!”
Sounds like the problem is the platforms and their algorithms, who are bending over for their advertiser overlords, who demand censorship. But nah, let’s get mad at kids just trying to make their bits. /s
The United States has been overthrowing democratically elected governments for a hundred years. The CIA has exported terrorism, trained gorilla soldiers to terrorize and torture civilians, and promoted fascism over democracy. …wikipedia.org/…/United_States_involvement_in_reg…
We have a war on drugs that is really a war on people, an excuse to target people of color. We have a for profit prison system run by private corporations that lobby politicians in what is effectively legal bribery. Our entire economic system, capitalism, allows those with wealth to exploit those without, and to use their power and money to “lobby” politicians. People are never going to get a fair shake.
Edit: The US has amazing people and so much potential to survive and overcome our problems, but there’s a darkness that motivates people in power, maybe it’s fear of communism or fear of powerlessness, idk
Yeah I like it. It reminds me of how Ask Reddit used to be.
Ever since Ask Reddit removed the body section of posts, just leaving people with the title section to work with, I feel like it’s mostly been generic dull questions where everyone says basically the same thing and doesn’t elaborate.
Prime examples:
Q: Men what is something we can all agree on?
A: We’ve all fantasized about being the hero in some daydream scenario.
and
Q: What is the most basic thing you are terrible at?
A: Holding a conversation.
I’d rather hear about someone’s struggles to install Arch Linux
That is the book that is very critical and severe toward the United States. I think the problem is that that book was written as a counterpoint to the history of the United States we learn in secondary school. If you haven’t learned U.S. history from a U.S. high school history textbook, it is going to feel unbalanced, prejudiced, because you are not the target audience, who has grown up with an uncritical, unbalanced, prejudiced but in the other way, curriculum. I would imagine a book by a European scholar of U.S. history would have more potential to give a neutral outside but critical point of view.
Yea same here but in a different way than what people usually mean. Don’t fake being rich until you are. I was and to a certain extent still am socially anxious and bad at talking to people and holding conversations. I started faking being more socially adept than I actually was by copying people I knew who were extroverts and by observing peoples interactions in the wild. Eventually I did get better with both and have no issue with either, although I do need some time to recharge later on after social interactions.
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