Don't forget that you are the result of all the past sensory interactions that you experienced in your whole life, people you interacted with, books you read, advertisements, songs, news headlines, etc. Even if you think you don't remember them, at one point in your life it was processed by your brain and may have changed some posterior decisions you made, thus making you what you are now.
Since I realized this, I am more meticulous when choosing what I do and don't do, there is no going back.
Hmm. The experiences that changed and benefited me most were least predictable. As a result, I try to manage experiences less, and choose the unknown more.
But in the spirit of what you've said, I try to avoid doing dumb, damaging, or boring things twice.
But can you paint with all the colors of the wind?
In all seriousness, I liked that line you quoted in the song. I wonder if there is a literary term for that repetition. It's not alliteration I don't think as the words themselves repeat.
That's a good point. I'm a big reader - and I have lists of thousands of books I want to read. But one reason I semi-on-purpose still pick up random books that I stumble across and look fun, even if they're less "optimally chosen" by me, is exactly so that I sometimes stumble on things I would otherwise miss.
Or maybe just, like many readers, I love buying new books almost as much as reading them, and this is just an excuse to buy more... :)
For many things in life I try to find and loosely follow some ideal ratio of explore vs. exploit. For restaurants I've found 1:3 ratio works well - 3 times eating at restaurants I know I love, then the fourth time eating somewhere I haven't been yet. Usually the new restaurant doesn't live up to my favorites, but sometimes I find a new favorite.
That last bit resonates with me so much! In fact, there’s a word in Japanese for it - ‘tsundoku’! Ever since I stumbled upon it, I feel almost vindicated :)).
>> I try to avoid doing dumb, damaging, or boring things twice.
As a parent I tell my kids: "Make lots of mistakes. Learn from them and don't repeat them; avoid the fatal ones". Then I try to remember my own words before I chastize them for their multitude of dumb decisions (teenage boys)...
If someone is a current smoker and they eventually die of lung cancer, would you say that they avoided the fatal decision up until they died?
I mean, in the long we are all dead, but we have to say that there can be ultimately fatal decisions made in which the person does not immediately die.
We start aging, i.e. heading for death, the moment we are born. And with every breath henceforth. Some faster, some slower. So it is relative, in every sense.
I just got into the habit of saying “yes” to pretty much anything. It has taken me on some wild rides indeed, and I am richer in spirit for it. It forged the bond between my wife and me - “shall we do a road trip across Eurasia?”, she idly asked, expecting at the very most a “maybe” - instead I grasped that nettle and applied for visas that day. Six weeks of utterly madcap adventure ensued. Since, I’ve found myself in an unending series of odd adventures of one variety of another, from fostering rare donkeys to… other stuff I’d be wise to not mention. Some episodes I would call ill-advised in the extreme, but all have been enriching.
There’s always a reason to say no, and it’s probably bullshit.
It also has the added benefit of uplifting others - it transforms their idle thought into something that actually happens.
> > I just got into the habit of saying “yes” to pretty much anything.
> Isn't this also just a form of survivorship bias? You wouldn't be posting this from prison for example.
Note that "pretty much everything" is a proper subset of "everything" and could well be defined as "everything except the obviously stupid stuff that's highly likely to lead to bad outcomes", and this from a sample that's already biased in your favour -- e.g. the vast majority of places you can go in the universe would kill you instantly, but the vast majority of places someone might suggest going to, or offer to go to with you, won't.
If you filter out the "let's go see the Titanic in my home-made submarine" ideas, your odds are actually quite good.
Yeah, I have my limits - and while I have agreed to stuff that was in hindsight Quite A Bad Idea, the majority of my “sure, why not” moments have lead to the fantastic.
> not repeating the same stuff while hoping for change
That infamous quote typically attributed to Einstein notwithstanding, really most of learning and progress is done by doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different outcomes.
The two go hand in hand - when I started agreeing to outlandish stuff, I was miserably running my business, commitments oozing from my ears, with barely two bob to run together.
Thing is, when you start saying yes to stuff, and start finding yourself in new places with new people, new opportunities present themselves. I am much materially wealthier now than I ever was when I worked for a living, partly due to income through new connections, partly due to a vastly decreased cost of day to day living by emigrating, and travel has become considerably cheaper as friends I made along the way make for happy hosts, or travel companions to split the cost of something outlandish with.
For example, I invested in an Australian I found wading in the mud at Aralsk, I befriended and helped out a PMC owner I met in Antarctica, and I robbed a Russian oligarch I met on a megayacht, in that order. All were lucrative. One of those falls into the “probably shouldn’t have” category (no prizes guessing which), but is still a “wait, I actually did that?”, and taught me more about myself and this strange world than I anticipated.
Time remains a luxury, but life is short, and easily squandered, so I spend it thoughtfully.
This is it, combined with the points brought forth by the parent. Like all things, a healthy balance seems to be the optimal strategy. Life’s a journey; good idea to plan but the people and places you find off the beaten path are often the most rich and rewarding.
I don't think he is saying, don't be surprised, or have unique experiences. But don't sit and watch YouTube all day. You can curate your inputs to some degree, and limit just sitting and soaking in social media.
There was a thread yesterday about closing public libraries, and this sentiment ties into that; open and free access to information is important, because a lack thereof causes people to become blinkered and close-minded, which in turn makes them more susceptible for populist talking points (that is, a populist politician or propaganda telling you there is a Problem; when people don't have factual information to the contrary, or even a mindset of curiosity ("is that actually true?") they are more likely to accept it).
Hence, book burnings, censorship, and suppression of free speech are problematic.
(That said, I also believe that free speech should be curtailed on platforms with large audiences)
I have a great appreciation for public libraries. I consider them to be one of the best examples of a public institution. They provide much more than just information. Everyone has the same access and privileges. They are just about the only warm, quiet, and comfortable space that isn't somehow exclusive or privately controlled. For someone without access to their own space (i.e. a stable home) they provide a place to find respite from an often hostile environment.
Libraries are a treasure that represent the best of humanity.
Having lived in quite a few different cities and towns, I've come to the conclusion that the quality of the library (i.e. of the space, atmosphere, and resources provided) correlates with the quality of the community.
Expressions like "eat your vegetables" and "life is short" are also trite. But the purpose of folk wisdom isn't to shock and awe with fresh insights. The purpose is to remind people of what they already know to be true. That way we steer our behavior more towards the kind of life we want to live.
Your reply is simple, yet profound. Answers to the question of "why" must be understood.
Before retiring, I trained new hires, the age gaps were sometimes very interesting. The younger they were, the more they wanted to know. (obviously their experience level was pretty low.) I used adages to bring a point home when explaining a difficult concept. It worked every time.
Firstly, I'd argue it's only a tautology when you phrase it in a particular way (and take some knowledge about how the brain works as "given"). The point isn't that the effect happens at all, it's about the degree to which even small instances influence who we are.
But more importantly, we are creatures of habit before we are creatures of intellect. Stating things like "you are the sum of your experiences" isn't necessarily to reveal new and profound information, it is to emphasize a fact of existence that can easily become overlooked or underappreciated. Especially as we get on in the years and more and more of our behavior is on autopilot. There is value in reminding people to look for potential blindspots and providing some motivation a more careful consideration of the aspects of your life that have become unconscious even if the message comes in a trite or tautological package.
It's like people who have been stuck for the past 5 years spending 2+ hours every day scrolling a social media feeds littered with bad news, snapshots of arguments, and fake representations of the world but can't make a connection between this maladaptive behavior and the growing sense of cynicism and existential malaise that's impacting their happiness. Sometimes it is helpful to hear this kind of stuff (assuming it actually gets through) even though it should be obvious.
>We all exist in the world, not apart from it, and no amount of exclusion or creation of “sterile spaces” will change that.
The surrounding reality in the world doesn't change but the gp was talking about deliberate curation of that reality.
Maybe another example using advertising to help highlight the difference:
- block ads during web surfing with PiHole and uBlock. <-- the curation perspective of gp y04nn's, "I am more meticulous when choosing what I do and don't do, there is no going back.
- no amount of blocking ads will change the fact that ads exist in the world <-- your perspective
Yes, you're correct that "ads still exist" but browsing the web without it is still a nicer experience.
I just don’t think it’s a good life strategy to obsess over every single piece of media that you may inadvertently consume. Use an ad blocker and avoid outright garbage, sure, but that wasn’t the vibe I got from the parent comment. Constructing this sort of sterile world always ends badly when you’re forced to deal with things from outside it.
As a general life strategy, I think it’s always better to “filter” rather than “block.”
I don't think it is trite: you need to remind yourself that the information you ingest will have an effect on you. If you're deeply informed about an ongoing violent conflict it will have a negative effect on your mental health as you'll watch a lot of violence.
I've been practising information hygiene for a while - if I can't change anything about problem X and it does not affect me or my family, should I be deeply informed about it? - and it has done wonders for my mental health.
Indeed. Although as with anything, moderation is key. Not too much, or too little. Listening to 4 hours a day of Tiktok or Youtube boneheads, probably isn't all that good for the average person.
(I'm not referring to intellectual videos, but instead just "some random person" that has amassed 10M followers because they .. well I don't know what they do, except market themselves well. Then start blathering on about literally the dumbest blather ever.
For example, taking medical advice from some guy living in a van, or taking scientific advice from some dude who doesn't even understand ... anything.
Populism to the extreme. Lookit me, I'm purdy, ergo my opinion on everything supersedes everyone.)
Having watched a lot of educational and scientific videos, I'm beginning to think there are diminishing returns, and they can be just as addictive and non-valuable.
Filling the day with any video's seems to have downsides.
Hard agree. I have really tried to make sure I spend most of my time reading high quality material these days. I realised my brain being saturated with a lot of drivel was actually having a notable impact on me. Much more than I expected.
Free will hasn’t been proven. It’s up in the air how much is predetermined, and how to even define “free” in the context of free will. Even if we do have free will it’s still influenced to some degree by our biology.
My Diogenes answer would be to walk across the room and slap you: “if I didn’t chose to do it you cannot be angry at me.” That’s tongue and cheek sure, but the point I feel stands.
Free will is certainly constrained, and our material and biological conditions do matter - there’s no amount I can will to make myself fly, but they are not necessarily as rigid of constraints as many would have you believe. We can overcome our biology, our predilections, and many of our shortcomings. We have to consciously choose to do so though.
I disagree. But we’re not going to solve free will in HN comments. Personally I don’t think “free will” means anything or makes sense any more than “god” makes sense. It’s just a bundle of feelings that means something different to everyone.
> We can overcome our biology, our predilections, and many of our shortcomings. We have to consciously choose to do so though.
Hmm, no we can't. And the few people who seemingly can do that, it's because their biology/environment allowed that. So kind of circling back to determinism. Free will is a myth that's used to lock people up.
If you slap someone in the face, we'll lock you up somewhere because we don't know if you'll do it again. It doesn't matter if there is free will or not. Society has decided to put annoying elements in a huge bastille and call it a day.
I'm going to nominally disagree with you, my genes are in total control and I must.
Free will is a matter of definition, and certain definitions, no matter how hard we try, can't be formulated as easily as one does in, say, Euclidean geometry.
So you can come up with a definition of the free will you don't have, let's call it "absolute determinism", and it has all sort of interesting criminal applications, beyond slapping people on the face (yes, who does that anyway?).
For example, you could use your[^1] absolute determinism to build a very advanced AI that relies on a pseudo-random generator with a fixed seed. Fallibility is the result of using stochastic search methods, and your AI shows it. In that respect and many others, your AI acts exactly as a human would because you programmed it that way. Yet, you have the strongest argument possible to affirm that the AI you created has no free-will. One day, the AI leaves a bunch of children mentally dysfunctional[^2]. But it has no free-will, all it is emanates from you. So you must be charged for the AI's crime.
Your lawyers come to court and state that you in turn have no free-will, that you are God's creature. The prosecutor brings a priest to say that God gave you free will. The judge says that precedent demands you be thrown from a high mountain, but it's feeling like a good day for a crucifixion. Of course, the trial is a shamble, a racket run by Sapiens' genes to ensure that they are passed down. And from that point of view, you committed the ultimate sin.
The way out? Submit to your genes, do what they tell you to. Believe in free-will.
That is not true. Your gene expression is influenced by experiences, and not just yours, but your grand-grand parents' experiences, too. See: epigenetics and transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.
> Your lawyers come to court and state that you in turn have no free-will, that you are God's creature.
Some say that lack of free will, i.e. determinism undermines moral responsibility, which in turns means that it conflicts with punishment and so forth. I believe that it ultimately does not matter; you can punish for the behavior alone.
If you believe in determinism, then it is likely you also believe in physicalist monism (“there is only the matter and consciousness arises/derives fully from it or is an illusion”).
Normally there is not much I can say to change your mind on that, but just note—there are other views, like idealistic monism, which unlock other possibilities wrt. free will, and which cannot be disproven or proven compared to physicalist monism (which cannot be proven or disproven either).
I'll just echo this, in that monistic idealism (especially, as a personal preference, in the declination of analytical idealism) is a worldview able to supersede the incongruous, untenable and for the most part, epistemically moot physicalism/materialism, which is sadly still considered the default mainstream worldview.
As parent said, many open questions and interpretations become relatively trivial under idealism, while preserving 100% of our scientific understanding and method.
The problem with any form of physicalism is that if consciousness arises from physical principles, then the vast majority of the universe consists of unobserved physical interactions. Does the universe really exist at that point? If it doesn't, how come I am here to experience it? If it does, it would be more likely that I am a disembodied boltzman brain than a human that evolved on earth, since there is no reason for the unobserved portion of the universe to not be infinitely large. You simply wouldn't know it.
That is true, whether or not you believe in free will at a specific point in time is a result of your previous history (internal and external influences).
Who's this "society" and how has it managed to have free will?
If someone can't "decide" to slap their neighbor in the face and is determined to do that, why can't the same reasoning be applied to society? Society didn't freely choose to lock someone up, it was determined to do so.
> walk across the room and slap you: “if I didn’t chose to do it you cannot be angry at me.”
Of course they could. Anger is a way for the body to react without choosing as a defense mechanism against the next slap. Either your biology would recognise the anger and step back, or the other person would punch you back, making you afraid to repeat what you did.
I’m not siding with or against free will, I just don’t think your example works to prove the point.
There's free will in the sense that the system is so chaotic and complex that it's impossible to predict for us now at current technology levels, maybe never possible to predict, but I don't see anything in science that would allow free will to be a thing. We're complex automata in the end.
I think this is a failure in imagination not a failure in science.
Still, all these free will deniers are basing their worldview on the (radical) assumption that.
1. Everything has a cause
2. Everything is explainable
3. physical matter is all there is
4. Science can describe literally everything about the universe
4a. Corollary - things that aren’t describable by science don’t exist
All of those claims are unfalsifiable at best and demonstrably false at worst (depending on how hard you squint). Science is effective for repeatable experiments, but that’s not a guarantee that there aren’t events that are one-and-done.
I agree, but I have to admit that once we have to invoke mysterious one-off miracles and unknowable states of existence to explain something so radically basic like “free will” we have IMO gone off track.
This feels like a God of the gaps type argument and those give off a particular smell.
Free will hasn't been disproven either. It's up in the air how much is undetermined, and how to define being "schakled" in the context of no free will. Even if we are affected by ourself and others, that does not prove a lack of free will.
Free will is something that we experience which provides extremely compelling evidence that it is true. Things don't have to be empirically proven in order to be true, if that were the case then empiricism itself would fail the test as it has never been established to be true empirically.
Existence of mental illness or troubles makes me doubt that.
What is free will when you are suffering from pathological procrastination, depression or addiction ?
If you accept the fact that, like in addictions, your brain chemistry makes you smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol even when you know you’ll die from it and know it makes you miserable then how can you be convinced that you really control your normal behaviors ?
Why does anxiety makes me stay in my couch and antidepressants makes me want to go outside ?
I understand free will as a moral concept but at a biological level, i feel like it adds a lot of shaming and suffering to people who struggle to modify their behavior because science now knows that changing behavior is hard and impossible without physical modification of the brain structure.
> If you accept the fact that, like in addictions, your brain chemistry makes you smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol even when you know you’ll die from it and know it makes you miserable then how can you be convinced that you really control your normal behaviors ?
Your brain chemistry is part of this will, though.
> science now knows that changing behavior is hard
I don't think science knows things. And while changing behaviour is hard, and much harder for some than others, it still doesn't mean that the total system that makes up your mind, including biological predispositions, is not your will.
>Your brain chemistry is part of this will, though.
But here's the thing, given enough knowledge that chemistry is deterministic.
Will seems to be one of those words we've created from deep ignorance, much like consciousness, and the more we learn about the world and ourselves the less our old views make sense.
I think you've just invented Victorian-era determinism.
What causes someone to suppress doing something they want to do, but have decided is wrong, even if they will never be caught? Or to do something they don't want to do, but have decided is right, even if no-one will ever know?
> Could depression, or other mental illnesses, be the outcome of one's bad decisions (or failure to make decisions)?
Sometimes, the outcome of one's decisions (bad is an unnecessary value statement here. Was it a "bad" idea to start a restaurant that failed and made you sad? Cmon).
However, a huge swath of mental illness, including depression, is the result of environmental and genetic factors utterly outside your control. Your mom smoked crack when you were in her womb and somehow that's "the outcome of your bad decision?"
If you have an emotionally abusive partner, and don't do something about it, perhaps depression is acting as a prompt for you to take action. Some part of you (your soul, say) knows better, and via pain (depression) is trying to shift you towards a better, more joyful, result. I believe we have an innate guiding system, and that this is how it works - move away from pain, towards joy.
You can fail to take action, you can take drugs to manage the negative situation more comfortably, but, if abuse is the underlying issue, a genuine change of circumstances is required.
It is important to listen to your body and mind, and for sure - make changes when things are bad. Staying with abusive partners is not worth it.
However it can take a while to realize the problems and manage to get out. This may have effects that last for a good while.
People do not deserve abuse or the negative effects of such abuse, just because they technically could have made a change, or made it earlier.
How do you know you experience it beyond a reasonable doubt? Thoughts and intentions just seemingly appear in consciousness, without any explanation as to how they arose. Feelings are like this too; we don’t determine how we feel, we are simply served them.
When experiencing a negative emotion, some people seem to believe they can ‘free will’ their way out of it by thinking positively or something there over, but that intention too is also just a thought that appears in consciousness. To decide what to think in a manner compatible with what most people think free will is would require you to decide what to think or feel before actually thinking or feeling it, which is not possible.
And when you think about the causality of feelings or thoughts, which are just neuronal signaling patterns/chains in the brain, it begins to appear much more mechanical than free will intention.
> How do you know you experience it beyond a reasonable doubt?
I have no reason to doubt my common sense experience.
> we don’t determine how we feel, we are simply served it.
No definition of free will that I have encountered considers it an absolute freedom from any form of determinism. We’re obviously influenced by our nature and external influences. For instance my emotional predispositions are largely determined and my thoughts are not entirely under my control but I do have scope to shape both my emotions and my thoughts over time by what I choose to focus on. I can choose to do what is necessary to change my behavior and to treat people differently than what comes naturally. I know all of this because I have done it, I have experienced it. No materialist philosophy of mind has produced any compelling evidence to contradict my experience of free will in this capacity.
I sort of responded to this idea in another comment, but again. How can you take ‘personal credit’ (as if you could have acted otherwise) for choosing to change your behavior? Isn’t that an idea that also just appears in consciousness that is, for inexplicable reasons, more compelling than other ideas at the time so that is the choice that your brain reasons to follow?
> an idea that also just appears in consciousness that is, for inexplicable reasons, more compelling than other ideas at the time so that is the choice that your brain reasons to follow
This seems to be an idiosyncratic definition of free will.
On the other hand, I think it's simplistic to equate picking options from a mental list as "free will". I think the point you are replying to is valid because if there's free will, it's not just "choosing from a list". The list itself (the options you present yourself) has way more impact on your behavior than what you choose, even. So the matter of the question is, do you have free will in forming a list.
This seems like a separate question. Having the power to choose doesn't mean you have every conceivable option in mind, nor that you have the power to exercise every choice, nor even that you like any of the choices.
There's a few things you can choose to do at any time. You can almost always choose to for example close your eyes and keep them closed. Why don't you do it? You have the free will to stop blinking but your brain doesn't pose you this question so you don't even consider it. But now it's considering it. I'm just trying to reduce your argument to the absurd, and probably doing a bad job, but I don't think you can separate the list of options that appear to you from the question of free will, to me it's paramount to what happens after, so if what happens after is what defines free will or not, the list has to be part of it.
Did the first particles that ejected from the big bang have free will?
Whatever happens you'll end up crossing the road right now.
In one example, you absent-mindedly cross the road.
In another example a thought comes to you to get coffee, and you cross the road to get it.
In another example you consider not getting coffee, and going to the park instead, but end up choosing coffee because you feel sluggish.
If there's no free will, any amount of thinking before the decision doesn't prove there's free will. It's just more stuff that was also predetermined. You having an illusion of choice doesn't prove anything.
> You having an illusion of choice doesn't prove anything.
It's not reasonable to assume one's experience is an illusion without sufficient evidence which is a bar you haven't crossed. Therefore your argument begs the question.
I didn't say so. I said that having choices to make presented to you, if there were no free will, would be a valid state of affairs. Since it's possible that choices are illusions, you need to address how the choices appear to prove there's free will, it's not enough to say you consider different choices before acting.
>I have no reason to doubt my common sense experience.
That's why people thought the Sun moved around the Earth. I mean, it's just "common sense" -- you see the Sun in the East in the morning, and then it's in the West in the evening. It turns out "common sense" is not useful for understanding how things work.
Hrm? When I think of things I tend to see multiple possibilities at once, and then decide which I think is the most reasonable, and go from there. Similar for emotions. I'm well aware of my emotions but can control them. And I think not doing so would be quite a poor way to behave.
Perhaps it's that we all think in somewhat different ways, yet because our own mind is the only one that we will ever know - we simply posit that everybody else must think the same way, or at least quite similarly. For instance there's that weird datum that supposedly some huge percent of people don't have an inner monologue, at all. I find it extremely difficult to believe, but if it were true then it would certainly be much easier to understand how somebody else might not believe in free will.
> Hrm? When I think of things I tend to see multiple possibilities at once, and then decide which I think is the most reasonable, and go from there.
And based on what do you decide ? Probably your past experience, your knowledge, your education and your moral values. Which are all somehow environmental factors.
Of course. I'm not saying environment has no impact at all - that would be plainly absurd. I am saying that, in the end, the choice of what you do is up to you. Your experiences will influence, but they will not dictate you. I assume you'll appeal to physicalism here, but at that point we just end up getting into an unanswerable philosophical debate. So I would simply say that while what I'm assuming is not falsifiable, neither is physicalism.
I'm largely swayed by the 'conscious experience.' Presumably neither of us believe that if you make a program to add 2+2, that some entity suddenly pops into existence and imagines itself to be adding 2+2 only to then zip out out of existence. Where we may differ is that I don't think that changes if we go from adding 2+2, to instead sequentially carrying out arbitrarily more simple instruction.
Yet here we are - 'passenger' or 'driver' in a body feeling as though we have complete control over our own actions. I tend to believe what lay before my eyes. And so in this case, I am obligated to reject this as being an emergent property of complexity, or as a facade. Which, in turn, obligates me to reject physicalism.
Are you positing that you have free will but that those around you with less emotional control don’t? I don’t think your example is serving your argument; your brain is structured in such a way that you reason in a way that is unique to you, and others reason otherwise based on the structure of their brains. I don’t see how this grants you free will. You’re talking about feelings and reasoning as part of conscious experience and that’s, in my opinion, the end state of all of the neurological activity that pointed us to feel or think a certain way in the present moment.
The chain of causality that leads to thoughts and emotions in consciousness is completely determined by the structure and action potentials that propagate through our brain and nothing else, and this doesn’t leave room for some conscious agent in our brain also pulling levers and further modifying causality.
No, I am stating that we can control and change how we behave, which is largely the definition of free will. This is why even identical twins growing up in a practically identical environment will not end up identical. To continue with claims of no free will you end up needing to start appealing to some sort of a butterfly effect of environment. And while that claim is not falsifiable and probably never will be, I think such diverge is vastly more easily explained by simply people having agency and, in identical circumstance and even near identical genetics, being free to make different decisions.
> To continue with claims of no free will you end up needing to start appealing to some sort of a butterfly effect of environment.
The differences between the lives of even identical twins in the same environment are a lot more than a flap of a butterfly's wings. They don't spend every second of their lives together, so their experiences will differ quite a bit.
You already said it. "practically identical" is not the same as identical, which alrady explains the (butterfly?) differences. Miniscule differences actually add up...
The amount of possibilities you see might be influenced by your emotional state, and what you call "reasonable" might not be the same thing as other people consider it.
A lot of our reasoning are applications of observations and best practices rules that we are sometimes not really aware of unless challenged by circumstances or outsiders.
This is to some degree necessary - the outside world is too complex to fully model inside our minds. The most important things that we can only build approximate models about are other people.
How are you experiencing free will? You have no idea what your next thought will be, nor can you control it.
You have the opinion that you have free will, but that doesn't mean it's true.
You can’t choose what you will think about? How do you get through the day? Are you just frequently blindsided by random non-sequiturs that derail you for hours? I routinely chose things to think about or things to concentrate on.
It’s not like all thoughts leap into my mind fully formed either. Hell, I edited this message before hitting reply.
You choose based on your past experience. If you know doing A is better than B, you didn’t choose A, it’s just that your brain already knows that A is the best option based on past experience or knowledge or beliefs.
Even if you choose the seemingly "worst" option B, it’s just that you know that new experiences can be rewarding so your brain is ok to try it.
And there is the extreme example : given you are in good mental health, you are totally, physically, unable to chose to kill someone (or even yourself) without a very important reason (to you).
Also, if the absence of free will at biological levels don’t make the concept useless at the society level. Accepting that environment, culture, knowledge and society have such an influence on us just shows the importance of shaping a good society.
Accepting absence of free will at a biological level can just makes us more empathetic towards others.
It doesn’t means society have to accept any wrong behavior from humans but rather something way more positive : society is ultimately responsible for individuals behaviors and have the power to change them for the benefit of everyone.
> Typing out such a long rambling reply was itself a choice.
First sentence GP wrote is: "Choosing is not free will.". Did you choose to ignore what GP wrote when writing your reply?
Free will isn't about making choices, at least not according to any definition I've heard. After all, it is obvious that in some way we do make choices. As far as my understanding goes free will is, depending on the definition, either about choosing differently when all else is equal or not having a gun pointed at your head when making a choice.
Free will is absolutely largely about making choices. That’s not all of it, but denying that is silly, it’s goal post shifting from the ones who don’t believe in it.
> Free will is absolutely largely about making choices.
Free will largely isn't about making choices or having choices. It is largely about how/why we make choices.
Bacteria can move, thus bacteria have a choice of direction in which to move. Bacteria move, so it is making a choice.
If GP has free will just because they made a choice to write a reply to you, as you claim, then it must follow that bacteria also have free will. Am I wrong or do you think that bacteria have free will?
Simply think about what you want to concentrate on, then concentrate on that until you get tired or physically can’t concentrate on it any more?
I would be shocked if I was the only one on HN who ever thought, “I don’t want to think about this right now, I want to think about <whatever>” and then stopped thinking about the first thing. In aviation there’s even actually training on division of attention and learning to prioritize and concentrate selectively. You evaluate the situation and classify things as “important” or “not important” then focus in the important stuff. Literally choosing what to think about in the moment.
You’ve never said “gotta concentrate on this now,” and then concentrated on it very hard? Everyone on here is going overly reductive and going into infinite regress as though that proves their point, but it’s Sorites Paradox. “Oh where did the decision about its importance come from? Well that’s entirely the product of your environment! Checkmate free will!” But it’s a lot simpler than that, in the heat of the moment if you don’t have time you tend to fall back to your training, but in other decisions - even when making a choice about what to think about - you can even hold a bit of a discussion with yourself, or lay out the pros and cons to decide what to do, evaluate them all and then choose.
You can absolutely choose to think about one thing or think about another. That’s its own sort of free will. As I read a lot of these comments I really pity the people who don’t believe they’re imbued with free will. It really makes me wonder about their lives and upbringing.
You are glossing over very fundamental issues here. If you want to be pragmatic about it, sure. Don’t worry about it. At the macroscopic scale this discussion does not matter and of course I can choose what to focus on, I hope we all can.
But then again, the addict also says he willingly chooses to drink another beer.. I’m sorry, I can’t let go. But I get your point and TBH I don’t really care either way. I just like to introspect and get at the bottom of things and then let go.
> You can’t choose what you will think about? How do you get through the day? Are you just frequently blindsided by random non-sequiturs that derail you for hours?
My tongue-in-cheek answer here is: Correct, badly, and it looks like the obsessive-compulsive desire to check social media and/or the news.
Choose to stop then? I mean social media that is - but seriously. Choose to say, “I’m not driven by my pleasure sensors” and do something hard for the sake of doing it - not for glory, not for nothing. Nihilism and predestination lead to some orettt dark places.
Sometimes I feel like a lot of the folks I hear advocating against free will (which is really a stance against choice and even our own consciousness at its core) have never had to make any real “no-shit” choices in their life with serious consequences. I don’t mean to sound like an ass, but I both pity and envy these folks. Obviously you don’t have control over a lot of things, but the idea that this is all on rails screams “I’ve never had to do anything that had any real risk to it.”
"""Addiction is a neuropsychological disorder characterized by a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behaviour that produces natural reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences. Repetitive drug use often alters brain function in ways that perpetuate craving, and weakens (but does not completely negate) self-control.[1] This phenomenon – drugs reshaping brain function – has led to an understanding of addiction as a brain disorder with a complex variety of psychosocial as well as neurobiological (and thus involuntary)[a] factors that are implicated in addiction's development.[2][3][4] Classic signs of addiction include compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli, preoccupation with substances or behavior, and continued use despite negative consequences. Habits and patterns associated with addiction are typically characterized by immediate gratification (short-term reward),[5][6] coupled with delayed deleterious effects (long-term costs).[3][7]""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction
I block some social media entirely, and I have to block rather than simply "choose to stop", due to the "compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli" and habituation to patterns "characterized by immediate gratification (short-term reward)".
I can easily recognise the long term deleterious effects social media, especially when it comes to just being horizontal in bed, either needing to go to sleep or to get up in the morning, and wanting to open up a browser on my phone to check for replies rather than either of those.
> which is really a stance against choice and even our own consciousness at its core
The me of the id is not the same as the me of the ego, or the superego.
The me of tomorrow can curse the expanding waistline caused by the cake eaten by the me of today.
There is only one thing any of us can choose to do in any given moment while remaining true to ourselves; but which of the selves is truly "our"?
I know what addiction is, of course I’m aware that there’s a biological component. I quit smoking, I have many friends who quit drinking or doing drugs. It was incredibly hard, but I did it. Some of them did it.
I met a young guy while I was backpacking last year who was quitting heroin cold turkey. He was back packing to quit - he’d simply chosen to walk out of his home and go without heroin for thousands of km from the trail system by his home in France.
He was a nice guy - I wonder what became of him, but still, he chose to simply stop. I think you have a lot more agency than you think. Yeah, things cannot be undone, but you can definitely will yourself to change a great many things. It’s just hard and our body resists doing hard things.
I think another part is that materialism, determinism and science have (seemingly) given us great understanding and control of our environment and overturned lots of superstitious and erroneous ideas that society has. So if you accept materialism and determinism as the base of the universe and nature of things you naturally arrive at the conclusion that there is no free will.
I have a hunch that the universe is more complicated than that and might likely be beyond human understanding, but maybe that's just another superstitious belief. Regardless, we should keep using Science to explore because it is the best model we have so far and continue to use Philosophy to question things.
Personally I feel that I have free will and understanding of my emotions gives me more free will. Even if I am wrong, I prefer living in a non-free will universe and believing in free will than living in a free will universe and not believing in free will. In the former case that would just be my destiny, haha.
> Nihilism and predestination lead to some orettt dark places.
I think it's the other way around. Because as a society we believe in free will, we easily ignore the effect of environment on our choices. We let social media companies make their products addictive, because we believe that it's a choice to use them. If we ackwnoledged the fact that our choices are the result of our genetics and experiences, we could start creating a society that avoids such practices and would be a better place to live in.
Let's say you were addicted to social media and you never in your life have heard or read anything bad about it. No one has ever mentioned quitting social media to you. Do you think the thought to do so would come to your mind? Or is the "choice" to quit social media just a path carved into your brain by all the negative experiences you have had or heard about?
This is all just word salad though - you don’t have to ignore the effect of environmental conditions to believe in free will. Just because I was born to who I was or grew up where I did doesn’t mean that I cannot change things in my life. Seriously - it’ll be hard, but just try to change. I bet you’ll be surprised.
> Just because I was born to who I was or grew up where I did doesn’t mean that I cannot change things in my life.
False dichotomy.
What you can change, you can change. What you can't, you can't. Both exist, but not only those.
People can also want and seek help to change parts of yourself beyond your own control — to put the cookies beyond reach; to ensconce yourself in a monastery or nunnery to avoid being around those you're ashamed to fancy; to block the websites you can't resist typing in the URL for when half asleep.
And beyond that even; "thinking outside the box" isn't just a business cliché, there can be ways to change that were already possible, yet the mere thought had not formed and could not spontaneously emerge within a mind, yet when heard it is easy.
> Seriously - it’ll be hard, but just try to change. I bet you’ll be surprised.
If you made the bet to me, you would lose.
My main surprise in this life has been expecting to be able to change more, to resist more temptations, to have more self control.
At university, first year, we had a challenge. With appropriate safety gear, climb a telegraph pole, jump from the top to a trapeze. The teacher framed it in advance: "You'll think you can't, but you can. Remember that going forward, remember the voice saying you can't is wrong."
I climbed without fear. They had to tell me to slow down to keep the safety role taught. I expected it to be fine. I got my torso above the top… and my limbs froze. I still felt no fear, but my limbs were no more responsive to my desire to climb further and stand on the top, than when I have sleep paralysis. This was annoying, frustrating, but not scary. I came down by jumping sideways off the tower, and amused those on the ground by flapping my arms as if they were wings.
The lesson for me was the exact opposite of what had been intended by the teacher: I thought I could, but even without fear I could not.
Why are my expectations wrong in the opposite direction than you expect? Unclear even to me; perhaps because, by the standards I was raised in, so little even tempted me in the first place.
Let me introduce you to a little dopamine imbalance I like to call "focus control disorder", better known as Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder.
Think of it like having a preemptive multitasking scheduler that is unable to keep track of the state of the previous task.
The whole debate around the existence of free will seems almost tautological to me.
I've heard it said that the concept doesn't even exist in many cultures and that its importance in western culture can be largely attributed to the need to justify the concept of 'original sin'.
For me at least, free will is a concept with no value.
Free will is more ideological dogma than a factual claim. From materialist standpoint it's untenable. And empirically we see that environment dominates thinking and behavior.
Free will is the foundation of most judeo-christian moral systems, which were inherited by liberalism. It's the justification for punishshing and rewading individuals.
It seems to work relatively well, but I find it very cruel.
We already do this. "Re-education" (yikes at the word, but I see what you mean) is an attempt to get people to make better choices. E.g. to use their will to override their impulses.
My criticism is that they all seem to make the same error, in treating the existence of free will as some sort of binary decision.
My view is that the more one's model is coherent with the underlying reality, the more options are available to the individual. The greater the selection, the more free will you have.
Eg, if someone pulls a gun on you, you may think you have no free will. However, if you have a gun of your own, you have a different set of options. Similarly, if you are a trained martial artist or hostage negotiator, you will evaluate your options differently - you have more options.
Put simply one doesn't know what one doesn't know. Most likely this will occur in the case where one is certain of one's 'knowledge' of something that is actually false, ie one is operating within a lie/fantasy and has been tricked. Here, one will have a constrained set of options and therefore less free will.
Maybe you have a different definition of free will.
But to me those examples are just knowledge.
Regardless of how many possible options, the process of making the choice would be free will, if it existed.
My one is that one is more free if one is aware of the full scope of one's options. This is not an ephemeral idea, it is not related to the 'what might have been' aka the 'opportunity cost' of choosing. One's present awareness (and potential expansion of that awareness) has an impact on how free one is.
I mean, no one has a well defined definition of free will, much like the worlds intelligence and consciousness.
With this said having more knowledge expands your ability to explore the problem space of existence. Lets imagine that you are a single bit, you have the 'choice' of being one or zero. From an outside observer the problem space of the outcome is very predictable in the sense we know it's going to be a 1 or 0. Now, keep adding random bits and our ability to predict the outcome of any state drops dramatically very quickly. But that's choosing at random, what if most bit states are bit random at all? For example this digital creature we're talking about now is millions of bit states long set by a learning algorithm, it so advanced it has an internal Turing machine that can simulate potential outcome states far into the future when executing code. You would look at this and say "well, it doesn't have free will, it just has an incomputably large set of potential bit states" But an outside observer unaware of the programs nature and it's starting state (for example it's performing a Turing test against the machine) would probably think the entity has free will.
You are a very large set of states, because of this you cannot prove free will. You've reversed causality in your summary.
> Eg, if someone pulls a gun on you, you may think you have no free will. However, if you have a gun of your own, you have a different set of options. Similarly, if you are a trained martial artist or hostage negotiator, you will evaluate your options differently - you have more options.
In movies. In real life, 99% of the time if someone pulls a gun on you in close range with the intent of harming you before you have your gun pointing at them, then you are going to be harmed and your martial arts or gun is going to be useless.
You have free will, but isn't there still such a thing as an information hazard? For example, you may have free will, but you still just lost The Game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)
I don't know to reconcile the idea that Free Will as a concept obviously cannot exist (because the omnipresent Laws of Physics govern the movement of the particles inside my skull as they do all other particles), with the fact that it just feels so real...
Monkeys are determined to argue, so they will argue about free-will, and wonder if they could have chosen not to argue, and then argue about that also.
Because our belief in it may influence our actions...
Free will is the experience of making a decision. If we define free will as the ability to make a decision independently of our current state (sensory input, memory, emotions), that's utterly asinine. Neither are you an unfeeling, unthinking slave to entropy, simply printing outputs. You are an introspective machine, which can ask itself why it made decisions and update its own internal state to make different decisions in the future. That's what "free will" is.
Do your past experiences lead you to do the next thing? If you could perfectly know my past, could you predict my next decision? Do I have free will in that case?
I never understand what people are asking when they debate free will. It's a brain's process. Everybody's got one. Your brain's process isn't necessarily lovely to you, and doesn't necessarily do what you (the brain process) admire, like, or prefer. It's subject to outside influence and isn't perfectly under it's own control, because it's a cranky machine and goes wrong a lot. Some parts of it conflict with other parts. It's slow, and bad at monitoring itself. What do expect, magic? It's still yours, however unfair it may be to be stuck with it. So you have free will, whoopee.
If consciousness (and choices, the output of consciousness) is completely determined by the brain's physical process, then there is no such thing as "libertarian free will" which is what people typically mean when they say "free will".
Metaphysical libertarianism. Yeah, by definition, that's not compatible with the view that everything is determined by physical processes. This is just people freaking out over determinism. I kind of see why. "I am a physical process" sounds like "I am controlled by fate and my choices are pointless". But a person is a process that can't see the future, and a process that experiments and discovers things. Choices are the deterministic process: the person determines things. I could repeat this several times in different words but I'd just be trying to placate a kind of paranoia that happens when people realise they're physical.
Why are you framing this in terms of placating my paranoia? I have no objection to my lack of free will, it does not bother me. It makes me more empathetic to recognize that others lack it as well.
I'd challenge this with a thought experiment. Imagine we put a group of toddlers on an island and somehow give them knowledge of language (and enough sustenance to survive), but absolutely 0 external input otherwise. These people, as they grow, would gradually develop their own views, values, and perspectives. Do the exact same thing on another island and you'd get entirely different results! One can see this very thing with the various isolated/uncontacted tribes.
Obviously our environment influences us, but we are largely a product of ourselves. And that aspect is what drives us to seek out the things we do. Which can then, in turn, make it seem that the things we seek out have turned us into who we are.
This thought experiment is deeply flawed as it assumes that what you propose is possible and the outcome would be as you suggest. I am not convinced that people can bootstrap themselves like this and that language itself does not contain views, values and perspectives.
Step one with someone locked or frozen-stuck in such belief-logic is that improvement is possible - which is part of developing psychological flexibility.
You'd have to pay attention and find any step forward possible for them to begin to enter the discomfort that is holding them back - which may be the biggest challenge of their lives up until that point.
Ideally though, as we're all sheep to some degree - which is exactly what this HN post is stating in a more sophisticated way, and attempting to warn for this - ideally there's a culture of practices that develop oneself, so you're just going along with the "herd" - that path hopefully not corrupted and led by bad actors attempting to send us off a cliff or into their totalitarian pen.
> that language itself does not contain views, values and perspectives.
Language itself does, in fact, very much contain views, values and perspectives. As an example, there are population groups that do not have a word for the color blue, and that cannot, in consequence, distinguish between green and blue objects. [0] [1] And that's an example that has been noticed throughout the world.
The claims in the first link, at least, should set off your BS detector. The colors they claim the group could trivially identify are very near identical in terms of 3d distance. By contrast, the colors they claim they could not determine the difference between are extremely far in 3d distance. It's objectively illogical. A quick search turns up that the claims are indeed false, and were fabricated by the BBC for a documentary. Here's [1] an email chain involving various researchers that worked on these experiments. The conclusion is that:
---
"The experiment shown in the documentary was a dramatization; the genuine color experiments done with the Himba, some years before, used a different sort of stimuli and a different experimental method; the stimuli shown in the documentary were modeled on those used by Paul Kay and others in experiments on other groups; but in all of the relevant experiments, the dependent measure was reaction time (in finding a matching color or an oddball color), not success or failure.
The BBC's presentation of the mocked-up experiment — purporting to show that the Himba are completely unable to distinguish blue and green shades that seem quite different to us, but can easily distinguish shades of green that seem identical to us — was apparently a journalistic fabrication, created by the documentary's editors after the fact, and was never asserted by the researchers themselves, much less demonstrated experimentally."
I did not do a full literature study of the claims of the article, as that was meant as an illustration of the point, and it was the first relevant link that popped up.
Whatever the alleged fabrications of the BBC might have been or not been for the Himba experiments, similar observations have been made for other groups as well, from Amazonian tribes, to population groups in Papua New Guinea, to Aborigines in Australia. And the MIT research link is discussing a very similar result.
That languages influence how you perceive and see the world has been well studied and is well documented.
I do not think the actual experiments demonstrate this. The experiment the BBC demoed probably would, but it was fabricated. The actual experiments just demonstrate a pretty obvious aspect of learning. If you tell somebody who doesn't play chess all the names of the pieces, and ask him to tell you which is the rook, he's going to be slower and less accurate at it than somebody who plays chess. But there's not some huge epiphany like you can show him a collection of 5 bishops, 1 rook, and him be unable to tell which is different. It's no different with colors, or any new term.
I have personal experience with this, learning Russian. They don't have just blue, but rather a term for dark blue and one for light blue. It's hardly some eye opening thing - it's basically sky blue vs ocean blue. It's obvious and easy, but obviously I will always be slower than a native on a quiz of which is which for reasons that have nothing to do with the colors. Vice versa, compare our speeds in English with 'sky blue' vs 'ocean blue' and I'd be back to winning.
A common trend in the social sciences is creating experiments that aren't designed to challenge one's hypothesis, but confirm it. The publication bias against negative results is probably necessary, but also turning a lot of soft science into a facade.
Giving a knowledge of a language is a _huge_ external input, intertwined with culture and life experience of the language teacher.
And the smaller the external input we give to this group of toddler, the more they will resemble a violent pack of chimps in the end. Unlikely to develop their own values and perspectives.
"However, Gisela Kaplan at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, says she found the paper extremely frustrating and that the word “aggression” is being misused.
Chimpanzee groups are ruled by one dominant male, whereas bonobos are ruled by females. Competitions for dominance and mating rights in bonobos shouldn’t be confused with aggression, says Kaplan. “There’s more pointless violence in chimpanzees and humans than in other species like bonobos,” she says."
Well, again - I think the isolated tribes are a good example. Two different examples are the Sentinelese and the Nukak. The former are actively hostile and violent to any outsiders, with very few exceptions, while the Nukak were completely peaceful and receptive since their first contact. These isolated tribes are largely a mirror into the past that give us a view of what humanity, in all of its diverse forms, might have looked like long ago.
In any case you also have an ancestor issue. The views, values, and so on that we take for granted simply did not exist at some point. Yet, here we are.
These tribes aren't isolated in true. Over 1000s of years, they have interacted with world outside and formed a generational wisdom and values. If 100 years back British/French came and enslaved some members, the behavior is expected.
No true Scotsman, eh? There's no reason to think these groups have had any contact with the outside world, beyond the fact that at some point they obviously diverged from whatever common ancestor we all share. Both are extremely small groups living in similarly extremely isolated locations - Sentinelese in an isolated island, Nukak deep in the Amazonian interior, far from rivers. And the Nukak's population has been decimated by common disease since they made contact, further suggesting 0 exposure to even other local peoples.
I am not a historian. Andaman and Nicobar (neighbor of Sentinelese) is occupied / use as naval base by outsiders for >1000 years. None of the Cholas, Europeans, Japan ever contacted/impacted them seems highly unlikely.
Contacts tended to be recorded. You can read ships logs now going back hundreds of years, often with illustrations. There's not a whole lot that happens in most ship voyages, so things like running into a weird group on an isolated island would absolutely have been recorded in immense detail. Of course I can't prove, beyond any question, that they weren't contacted, but there's 0 evidence to suggest they were, and immense evidence to suggest they were not. For the Nukak this is at least as true as well.
Where do you see this convergence? From my perspective, the 'Out of Africa' hypothesis [1] suggests that the current breadth of humanity started from a migration from around 50,000-70,000 years ago. To get from a group that would have probably been quite homogeneous, to the extreme diversity of basically every single thing we see today - physical, ideological, cultural, etc - in such an incredibly short time frame, would suggest to me that even the briefest of moments apart sets us all on radically different courses.
Humans, relatively to most animals, also have an extremely slow generational time, which I think also further emphasizes this divergence. If we assume a low end generational time of just 20 years, even that is as few 2,500 generations, hardly a blink in time on a normal evolutionary scale.
The books I've read have a say in this. Rutger Bregman concluded in his Humankind - a Hopeful History that deep down human is pretty decent. So I'm thinking the turnout would be rather similar in different communities.
I was kinda impressed with Bergman once the book came out so I took nine copies to Finnish MP's to share. Unfortunately they were not too interested in the humane message the book told
I would agree that humans are pretty decent in tiny communities. Scaling beyond that they are absolutely unquestionably horrific monsters. Without any doubt. And those communities are not ready to punish their own community for those horrific deeds they comitted.
I take a slightly different perspective (while sharing a similar final perspective) on the community issue. Rather I think individual choice drives people to communities that they, at least broadly, align with. So you end up with communities that are not only overly permissive towards their own, but also overly critical of those outside of it. But then as those communities grow large enough divisions start to form even within the like-minded community itself, and eventually you get a division there (that often ends in an internal conflict), and that community divides again, almost like a cell splitting into two new cells. And then the process starts to repeat once again in these new cells.
Add in cells merging every once in a while, and you have the abbreviated history of humanity in one paragraph.
Even if you could make the toddlers physically identical, you can't place them all in the same point in space and always see, hear, touch the same things.
Add randomness inherent in the current understanding of (quantum) physics and you'd need a strong convergence mechanism for your experiment to prove what you're saying.
> Obviously our environment influences us, but we are largely a product of ourselves
Even a brief look out your window will convince you this cannot possibly be true.
How many people have a different religion than their parents? How many Christians from Iowa have kids that decide they're actually Hindu? Just about zero.
Can you tell where someone is from based on how they dress? Heck yes. If they were making up their mind on their own you couldn't.
The likelihood you'll go into the military is far higher if other people in your family are in the military. 1% of Americans serve at all. But 60% of people who serve have an immediate family member (parent or sibling) who serves.
We could go on endlessly.
The idea that we're largely a product of ourselves is absurd. How many top physics were born in Eastern Europe be Africa? Do people in Africa genetically hate physics? No. But you're largely a product of your environment.
The same will happen if you take two identical double pendulums and give them an as identical push as possible. Minute differences in initial conditions and in the environment can lead to arbitrarily large differences in outcome, while everything still being wholly deterministic.
We really have little idea how much our character and behavior is formed by experiences and how much by our DNA. Though pretty clearly, early experiences generally have a larger effect than later experiences.
> ..am more meticulous when choosing what I do and don't do..
There are plenty of books and other resources that speak to the power of "no". To the phrase I quote above, yes you need to have a good 'diet' of what you put in your mind. Some junkfood is ok, mostly junkfood is not.
A quote that has shaped me is: ""The less time one gives to the newspapers the better," he replied. "Do you like books on travels?""
by Hector Malot on his book En Femille (Nobody's Girl)(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27690/27690-h/27690-h.htm)
Btw, others write about ads. We can only (perhaps) avoid some on the internet (ad-blockers, NoRoot Firewall on Android devices and block certain IPs/URLs) but there are many ads we don't block, in movies (product placement), posters on bus stops, etc.
Fun fact: Apple doesn't allow its devices to be used by "baddies", so if you see an actor holding/using an iPhone, and you are not sure if they are Nice or Evil, chances are there will be a last-minute-twist and that actor will be/become Nice.
This is missing the understanding that there is a lever to mitigate what you describe above that I believe likely everyone, or close to everyone, is able to develop through practice.
Four factors that are party to this mechanism of not "being what you eat" are:
- developing attention and aim,
- self-awareness/emotional regulation development [which will clear past trauma and allow you to 1) be processing fully int he present moment or 2) extrapolate and prophesying-predicting into the future more accurately],
- developing a dynamic weighting process, and
- honing your judgment, compassion, and forgiveness practices - as any logic for judgements you apply to others, that logic is also applied to yourself - whether you realize it or not, and will weigh you down - depress you and can increase your baseline stress and anger levels.
The above will raise your vibratory frequency from the patterns of thoughts and beliefs of yourself or others, which if they are negative then they will knock you and keep you down [and/or require unnecessary and excessive energy to trying to prop yourself up with active motivation]; keeping you at a lower vibration - where like attracts like.
I do however do everything to avoid very low quality content - that we could call candy - like advertisements, however avoid may be the wrong word - I consciously act for high yield outcomes and quickly respond consciously to note when an unavoidable ad is present - and arguably am good at not getting distracted by them or go into a studying mode to analyze them to see what tactics they are deployed; ultimately they are a waste of time and can cause a misdirection of attention, but the consequences are far worse than that.
There are many very effective and efficient practices to help with all of the above - natural medicinal as well as things like yoga as a framework.
The TL;DR would be that you can regulate-manage how, how much, or if you are shaped by an experience.
And understanding this and factors that help or factors that may make you more prone or fragile, make it more difficult to regulate, is valuable knowledge as well - such as if you're high in conscientiousness and/or negative emotion ["neuroticism"] - and further knowing if that's the case it usually merely means it will simply to take to master than the average, so then to learn to be more patient with yourself.
P.S. Are they still producing new seasons of Silicon Valley?
The tools you're using to regulate and manage your experences also come from your experiences. How you understand them comes from past interactions and comparison with other positive and negative experiences.
There is sure an inate part and I don't intend to redo a nature vs nurture debate, but you still need an environment even to express your nature, so I'm not sure what you are really getting at.
What I'm getting at is people need to get exposed to the knowledge and practices, if they are to potentially benefit from the tools and support available.
So that first starts by somehow gaining an adequate level of attention from them, a certain level of interest, and that often occurs due to something occurring that leads to an impetus that causes them to stumble and journey to discover where they otherwise have learned to avoid.
Plus of doing them in that sequence and in their particular context. No wonder there is nobody in the world alive today or from the past or future who understands the world in the same way as you do.
I think everything is ultimately net positive if you strengthen and condition the way you internalize all the sensory exposure.
To me, the risks are being overwhelmed by internalizing too much at once, and the opportunity cost of having a limited amount of time to take things in to your senses.
Influence is a very nuanced thing so I don't want to sound too black and white here, but I think it's like a brainstorm session. You take what you like best from your senses/inputs/etc
That’s a nice sentiment, but I don’t think it can reasonably be applied to most people. Consider the kids brought up around gang culture and taught to sling dope in middle school. Is that experience a net positive for them?
Yes, it can be net positive. Ill clarify a bit, because text is easily misunderstood. I would not assume someone is a "bad" person just because they grew up around gang culture and drugs. I am talking "positive" in terms of understanding the world and determining the type of person you are proud of being. I'm not saying everything is enjoyable. I think our brains are capable of recognizing good things regardless of how much bad exposure we've had. That's more what I mean by net positive, not that everything we do is net pleasant
If you want to read it literally, no. They can't "go back" without deciding to do so, which would be continuing to choose what to do.
If you read it as the common English phrase "there's no going back", no. It's just a thing people say in place of something more dry like "I will continue doing this for as long as I feel I should which I currently think is a long time or forever but saying that would be a bit ridiculous".
Even more important might be the realization that most of it is not within your power to control. You didn't come up with the vast majority of what's shaped you.
> I am more meticulous when choosing what I do and don't do, there is no going back
And whom you surround yourself with in both professional and personal life, whom you listen to as an authority on topic XYZ. Work has massive effect on our personality long term. There is no way to separate those 2, so its smart to anticipate things before you realize that decade(s) in some toxic place dragged you nanometer by nanometer into some dark pit.
There is a subtle difference to that than what the author was trying to say in his blog.
The thing is when we read, particularly in growing years, the expectation is that we would remember most of things from the book and apply it somewhere else, ex. in a discussion "...agree, the same I gathered from this excellent book that I read couple of years back...".
And frankly, I'm bummed by it still. I read a lot but when certain situation comes I cannot remember things & facts vaguely, even though I had finished 300 pages of that page turner in one night.
The idea that you can understand what experiences produce what behaviours is as much crazier than the idea you can manually tune the weights of gpt4 and get better results.
Exactly. That poignant realization that (you == void). It's a hollow existence, I mean, a single pointed one, it feels like a dimension of dimensionless, am I zero or everything? Both? Ugh, compare me not to other for I am in all things as other. Oi vei, turn the damn thing off, it's spewing nonsense again.
you read something impactful that changes the way you think, your mind will stay changed even if you don't remember the actual reasons or point made, but advertisements, news, etc. will not change the way you think, they are just noise
I don't think it's quite that close. There is still a distinction between being a product of your environment and being influenced by your environment.
My HS college prep English teacher, who was one of the best teachers I ever had, put it this way: "Garbage in, garbage out." His point was that it simply isn't rational to believe that you can read nothing but National Lampoon, Mad Magazine, or the county newspaper and become a great writer. You have to read, digest, and breathe the air of the great works of fiction and literature and allow it to do its work in influencing your prose style, cadence, and structure.
I'm going to add "Can AIbros survive 5 seconds without mentioning LLMs in irrelevant conversations?" to my list of unanswered existential questions, alongside "Is time travel possible?" and "Why did Bodhidharma come to China?".
Exactly. That's what I also thought the last time someone brought this up in these forums (couple of years ago). It's a hint to the structure of the brain and also the mind (we can observe it at the consciousness level in ourselves and others, too). Algorithmic (von Neumann) computers/programs do not usually exhibit this; but neural networks do.
If we are good readers, a book helps up achieve better generalization (in the machine learning sense). That's its main contribution not the specific facts it contained.
Yes, humans are entirely predictable; that's why i deliberately act random sometimes, to prove I am aware of this predictability, albeit this is still predictable.
Agreed. It is a profound realization once you grasp it. There are genetic factors and then the overall sum of your experiences. What you read, what you watch, what you listen to on the radio, who you hang out with, what you do for a living, what organizations you belong to, what family life was like as a kid...etc. It all adds up in little ways. I try to keep this in mind when raising kids.
In hindsight, my father and mother-in-law listening to Rush Limbaugh everyday was probably not very good for them. It is a small sample size, but I can remember as a kid how negative and angry the program was and how it certainly didn't put my father into a good mood and how it was kind of like a mind virus. I try to be more aware of advertising and propaganda, but it isn't easy. You have to be vigilant as even the news will use clips out of context. I'm not just saying conservatives are guilty of this either, but am using an example from personal experience.
I actually realized recently that this is probably the underlying phenomenon behind "how is my phone listening to my conversations to show me ads/articles?"
The other day I was thinking about LLM aggregation and in my internal dialogue used the example of "aliens built the pyramids" as a fringe theory that would be picked up on if tuning for other associated fringe positions by LLMs at places like Gab.
Later in the day I saw in my news feed an article on "how were the pyramids built?" (One of my interests is Egyptian and LBA Mediterranean archeology, so on topic.)
At first I thought "how the heck did it read my mind?"
But then as I thought about it more I remembered that usually my go to example of a fringe position is flat earth. So why was I suddenly using pyramids as the example in my internal dialogue.
What must have happened was that I initially saw the article headline in my feed in passing and didn't consciously register it, but when I was reaching for a fringe position example had been primed for that, and then only after having consciously been reflecting on the topic actually noticed the article in my feed.
Which IMO is a much more alarming explanation for the phenomenon - that my thinking was being written to a degree by my feed - than that my phone was somehow listening in on things or reading my mind.
It reminds me of a graffiti artist in NYC who used to write graffiti about how in reading it he had effectively graffitied your mind.
This is why your attention is so insanely valuable. Everyone thinks they're immune to advertising, yet people keep paying billions and billions of dollars to show something on your screen for a few seconds... because like it or not, it works.
I've been using ad blockers and not watching TV for so long that I have very little ad resistance. Whenever I use someone else's computer that doesn't an ad blocker, it makes me wonder how people live like this.
I'm so bad at handling distractions that I have to turn the radio or music off to make a left hand turn.
I often wonder how friends back home in Texas can believe the things they do, say the things they say... and then when I visit and we sit around to watch a game and I see how many ads many people are exposed to every day, I start to get it.
There's some version of it anywhere you go, for every social and political leaning. I tend to be somewhere between liberal and leftist, but I used to be a lot more extreme and absolutist in my views, and I can pin it directly to mindlessly taking in memes and messages targeted straight at my biases and preconceptions. Even having "good praxis" is no vaccine: someone somewhere is looking for a way to radicalize or profit from your perspective.
You probably get this, but every so often I meet someone who thinks they're a good person because they live in the right state or follow the right media. And that could be Fox News and Texas as easily as it could be MSNBC and New York.
Words are literally spell(ings), you see, we've trivialized casting spells. In the past being enchanted was a negative semantic relation, now, everyone wants to be enchanted. What type of world is the world where everyone is a magic user casting spells without their awareness of such? Our world.
Without advertising in the world, it'd be a much poorer place. Advertising exists for more than a thousand years and it's the only way for other people to know what you can do for them in exchange for something.
Except the advertising industry of today is akin to mental manipulation. It's less about letting you know what the product can do for you and more about getting you to buy/pay for it.
It's easy to make a strong argument when it's also woefully incomplete. :P
If all advertising were just abstract economic information that a service or product existed with certain features at a certain price-point, then we're left with a whole bunch of inexplicable mysteries, including-but-not-limited-to:
* Why would there be some expensive messages that lack any of that economic information, such as those which show a succession of nice things (that aren't being sold) closing with a brand-name the viewer is already aware of?
* Why would senders deliberately seek to ensure that the same person sees the same repeated message multiple times, even after they declined to purchase the first time and their situation wouldn't have changed?
* Why would any info-packets be crafted to make previously-neutral viewers experience fresh fear and dissatisfaction?
* Why would someone spend unnecessary money on funny mascots or catchy music?
* Why would (where not illegal) the product have a time-limited discount that wasn't actually time limited nor discounted?
You can answer all the questions with the same answer (quoted from my comment above):
> Advertising exists (..) for other people to know what you can do for them in exchange for something.
Your questions are just requiring more sophisticated answers that will all boil down to that. What you say is "unnecessary funny mascots or catchy music" is brand awareness which is still "letting other people know I exist and I can sell them stuff - I hope they look me up later or remember me when they are at the shop". The others are similar. One might have distaste for the manipulation but then your problem is with people, not advertising. A slimey sales guy does as much or more manipulation without needing to buy ads.
I agree that a good salesperson manipulates people too. Instead of trying to compare how much manipulation is done by salespeople vs in ads, I think it's worthwhile to consider how the manipulation is performed.
Both ad and salesperson will probably attempt to make us feel some emotion - best case without our conscious awareness of it. The tools an expensive ad has at its disposal seem to me much more effective in evoking emotion; visual stimuli, carefully crafted music, decades of psychology research, etc.
And while we've had a chance to evolve strategies against human to human manipulation (doors, perhaps, and various subtle triggers of distrust), the ad environment is a very recent development.
I agree investigation is worthwhile. As an adult, being aware of techniques like fake sense of urgency or scarcity, playing on your maslow needs for belonging and self-actualisation etc are things you should be aware, to develop a better sense of "smell" for bullshit.
I don't think any of this is new though, I'm pretty sure the local Roman seller of beads and nice dresses did the same things to their customers on the posters they put on buildings and the cries they shouted in the square, or olive oil salespeople using gladiators to have spectators buy that specific kind of olive oil. You can look these examples up because they are real.
The technology and mediums change, but human emotions and our reactions to them change on a scale of many more years than only a few thousands.
Thats an interesting point about the age of manipulative sales strategies! I didn't consider it.
And I agree with your position that emotions change over a rather long timescale.
In fact that's exactly why I'm concerned about the speed of technological development in psychology and data science. I fear that it's no longer salesperson vs consumer. Now it's salesalgorithm and a large chunk of the behavioral science academic efforts vs consumer. The power that the producer wields is increasing at a much faster rate than the emotional awareness of the consumer.
My perpective is influenced by the Center of Humane Tech's positon. The people behind 'The social dillema' documentary and the 'Your undivided attention' podcast. Manipulative capabilities are increasing FAST. And I believe that this speed of change is unprecedented.
I call what you are describing "informational" advertisement, and indeed it is totally fine. However most modern advertisement is not trying to inform but rather to convince, using a variety of psychological tricks to manipulate viewers into a specific position. This is totally not okay.
I'm sorry but that's bullshit. Advertising is carte blanche mind control.
Markets and products can easily exist without advertising. In fact, they're better. You go to markets, and you have curators. Advertising outside of a market should be not only illegal but culturally frowned upon as a root ethic.
> Markets and products can easily exist without advertising
Source needed - seeing I don't know any company that doesn't advertise in some shape or form. The ones that I found that claim they don't, actually do advertise and use the "we don't advertise" as further advertisements. By definition I think it'd be hard to find companies that truly don't advertise, so maybe you know of some that are successful but don't do it?
I'm not a fan of Tesla but to give credit where it's due, I have never seen an advertisement from them. The closest thing I have seen is branded chargers, which is also a functional display of their brand (you need to know if you can use the charger or not).
There are also tons of small companies that have no advertising. Think one or few man shows that operate on word of mouth, and are not looking to grow.
Sometimes I play Rocket League, where I'm intensely focused on the playing field and not paying attention to anything else. I'll have some random song or phrase in my head the whole match, just there in the background. And then there will be a pause in the action, and I'll for (what I thought was) the first time, look at the names of the other players long enough to actually read them, and there it is: one of them has a name that prompted that song or that thought in my head. I had no idea. I thought I was 100% focused on the action in the game, but those names influenced me anyway.
Since I realized this, I am more meticulous when choosing what I do and don't do, there is no going back.
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