PrinceWith999Enemies @ PrinceWith999Enemies @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

That’s the entire point, you walnut.

The US deifies its presidents, making them the temporary personality of the country. Since Bush II, there’s been a massive push to implement unitary executive theory. Other countries tend view their prime ministers as, at best, managers of the country who can and will be replaced. For fucks sake, the US can’t even decide whether the president should be subject to the same laws as “regular” citizens, but they’re always leaning towards “if the president did it, it’s not illegal.”

What that means, walnut, is that the US sees the president as having something approaching the divine right of kings (very literally in the view of many republicans, as long as the president is Republican). The “will of the people,” by which we mean they won an election by winning 49.1% instead of 48.3%, is considered to Trump (pun intended) anything the courts can say, or that has been historically established or really just about anything else.

So putting any limitations around who can be president is seen as interfering with the will of the people, unless it was already written down in the constitution for things like being a natural citizen and having a minimum age. Those are legitimate restrictions because the constitution cannot be wrong.

I’d have a couple of options:

Most Serene Federal Republic of Montmartre

This republic, retroactively dated to 1636, encompasses the Theater District in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City. In the late 1970s, a dispute between Montmartre's founder and New York Telephone, over whether the micronation could be listed in the government pages of the phone book, ended up in front of the New York Public Service Commission. The commission vacillated, alternately issuing rulings in favour of each party, and listings for the republic did appear in at least a few editions of the New York Telephone book.

All of life is basically a series of interlocking musicals, and I’d aim for some ministerial position. I’d like to work for the Idina Menzel administration.

Nation of Pacifica/Cascadia

This one isn’t on the Wikipedia page for some reason, but it’s a pretty active concept.

It’s basically the west coast states and territories, ranging from British Columbia to Baja California, with the idea of being some contiguous subset of those areas. I’d just want to make sure it includes the Bay Area and LA.

Every argument against determinism comes from the perspective that the conclusions of the argument are intolerable. This is not a slight to you. This is the argument put forth by people like Daniel Dennett. I think the field is primed for someone who can back up the argument using the physical sciences, but so far there’s not a lot there.

Let’s do a thought experiment that I call the Reverse Ship of Theseus. The Ship of Theseus is a philosophical demonstration of the origin of identity - if Theseus’ ship were to have, in the course of his voyages, every board, mast, sail, and nail replaced - one by one - does he return in the same ship he left with? In the Reverse version, we replace every neuron in your head (and if you take a more holistic view, every cell in your body) with one from Charles Manson. Every state of every neuron and all of those interconnections are replicated. All of the hormones, neurotransmitters, excitatory and inhibitory chemical reactions are perfectly replicated. Every bit of Manson’s history, from before he was born or even conceived, through his childhood and adulthood, is deterministically encoded in your cells.

At what point do you become Charles Manson? Christian philosopher CS Lewis famously wrote

“You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”

In a materialist worldview, of course, that’s nonsense. The thing to which I’m referring when I say “me” is an emergent phenomenon of a host of physical properties and dynamics on a scale that is, still today, incomprehensible. There’s no “self.” The self is a convenient psychological illusion that allows me to say “This is my hand,” or “That self over there, approaching me with a machete, is a danger to my self.” Even here, we’re not talking a radical point of view. This is where a lot of Buddhist schools have come to similar conclusions, for instance.

I am not a murderer. Is it because I choose not to murder, or is it because I did not receive a traumatic brain injury on top of having an abusive childhood in a violent environment where murder was something I encountered regularly, and would even be considered a rite of passage and garner social approval?

I can think that I choose not to murder because I am compassionate and empathic. But those attributes, were you to swap my brain for Manson’s, would turn Manson into a largely well-behaved pro-social academic with an aptitude for mathematics and a desire to create safe spaces for people.

I do agree with you, though, that you cannot rescue the free will concept by retreating into areas like complexity theory (which I do know a bit about) or quantum theory and physical indeterminacy (which is not my field).

I think that you are under informed and miseducated as to both the dynamics of complex adaptive social systems - particularly human ones but also as a theoretical concept. You’re also under formed about the diversity of actual human societies.

David Graeber was arguably the most gifted anthropologist of our generation, and both explicitly and repeatedly disproved your assertions as being native to humanity through rigorous investigation of actual human cultures spanning the globe and the past 10,000 years. I strongly encourage you to look into some of his books.

These kinds of posts always come off like when Trump complains that the people prosecuting him and judges are just anti-Trump.

From the articles I’ve read, Trump’s behaviors in court were bad enough that the judge asked his attorneys to restrain their client, or else the court would. I have not seen anything approaching a perjury charge as yet, but he did breach contempt laws multiple times.

I’m sure perjury charges are going to come up sooner rather than later, and I suspect that similar potential charges (among others) have been behind flipping his lawyers and staffers as well as the co-conspirators.

That’s certainly a valid opinion, but I think you run into a problem when the word “tyrannical” is supposed to apply to taking measures to limit the flavors being added to a highly addictive and health damaging substance, and the government of North Korea.

Edit: Also, the government does not currently have the regulatory authority to ban tobacco. It can set limits on additives and regulate nicotine content, and it has the ability to regulate the format and forums of advertising campaigns, and can set restrictions on purchase age or require health warnings, but each one of those things is fought tooth and nail by the tobacco industry in the courts.

There! Are! Four! Flashing! Lights!

If you actually talk to them, you’ll see It’s pronounced Bri’ish. They’ve been hiding their T since that unfortunate incident in Boston Harbor.

Starlink is the world's largest satellite company and boasts a network of about 5,000 low-Earth orbit satellites.

So I see two things here right off the bat. First, a loss of >= 20% seems really high. Aside from the financial implications and service impacts, we have environmental concerns of atmospheric pollution caused by launches and satellite debris. And of course, SoaceX will be permitted to externalize those costs by not having to pay for any of the effects caused or for cleanup. That will be on the taxpayers and the global population to absorb, so that SpaceX can continue to print money with no responsibility.

It is an argument with a strong foundation in neuroimaging, neurobiology, developmental biology, and the experimental philosophy of the basis of the ego and ego-identity.

Did I have a choice to reply to your message? Let’s put on our statistician’s hat and take a look at that. Let’s build a probability function R that we’ll use to predict the probability of a reply. Lets define the probability of replying using some basic measure of number of replies based on number of users.

First, I am a cis male in what is still a largely patriarchal society. I’m more likely to speak up because I’m allocated a higher social value and feel I have the right and authority to speak in group settings, even if I have a contrary opinion. I am less likely (holding other factors constant) to just go along. Similarly, I’m the eldest child in my family, which has similar kinds of effects and compounds the male thing.

Second, I am an academic type whose position and career has been driven by research and presentation of results. That creates both a physical alteration in my brain that combines both a dopamine-driven preferential pathway for arguing (because I get the neurochemical rewards for doing so) and also has a survivorship bias - people without certain dispositions tend to drop out of academia or never try in the first place. This will also increase R over baseline.

I’m entering a week that will be applying minor social stressors, priming my amygdala and limbic system to respond with either confrontation or withdrawal. I just delivered a major project but now need to catch up on other work, which has a similar effect. My prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for pushback on that kind of thing, is primed by my active intellectual engagement in this area, and its role in future-projection is moderated by both knowing that I know about this area and that I have a bit of breathing room regarding my actual work.

I have a crappy lemmy client, which reduces my R because of the level of effort associated with the response, but not so much as if it needed to be done using the web client on an iPhone.

If we were having this discussion in a bar, my tendency to reply would be driven positively by the effects of disinhibition by alcohol. It would be further increased if there were others at our table for whom I felt some level of attraction and wanted to create an impression.

I was born with a brain that is predisposed to systemic and synthetic thinking, and raised in an environment that encouraged it. My mother was an educator who worked with young children, and thus had an educational and experiential background that created reward mechanisms for reading and learning. At the same time it was confrontational, which conditions fight/flight/freeze from the physical requiring of the limbic system.

None of these influences are conscious. For my conscious self, I think I am choosing to reply. But even that image of “self” is questionable based on current research. If you were to have stuck me into a neuroimaging machine, you could see that my brain decided to reply somewhere around 1s before I thought I decided to reply. The delta between making a decision and realizing you made a decision ranges from about 700ms to a few minutes, depending on context and complexity, but it has been demonstrated that much of what we consider reasoning is a backwards projection based on decisions that were made by neural processes not under conscious control.

So if you do want to argue that it was my “choice” to reply, you would need to identify the neurological/physiological basis of some kind of phenomena that do not follow from these kinds of causal relationships. Without retreating into a non-materialistic dimension (eg, god told me to respond the same way he told Rep. Mike Johnson that he had been chosen to be the Moses of America and become the speaker of the house), I think that’s a pretty tough climb.

I entirely agree with the idea that there are persons that society needs to defend itself from. It’s the same as a physical body needing to defend itself against disease. But if we take an evidence-based approach, our way of addressing the problems would shift. If we know that maternal malnutrition and severe social stresses causes hypertrophy of the amygdala of the fetus, we could cut the crime rate by fixing that part of the problem. The concentration would be on prevention first and treatment second. The treatment would probably include things like psychotherapy or medication.

Again, I think that the example of a person who has their first epileptic seizure while driving. They will lose their ability to control the vehicle, and muscle spasms may cause them to floor the accelerator. If that person were to then plow onto the sidewalk and kill a child, we would not consider that to be a murder. We wouldn’t think it was a deliberate, and we wouldn’t treat them by exorcism because they’re possessed by a demon. We also wouldn’t treat them by locking them alone in a room for five years and then let them go. We would put them on medication, we would teach them coping mechanisms and give them training and therapy for mitigation, and we would pull their driver’s license until we could determine that their medical condition no longer was likely to produce a similar harmful event.

We know that punishment based models do not work. The US has a stunningly high incarceration rate and a level of barbarism in prisons that’s pretty unique among developed countries, but nevertheless has higher recidivism and crime rates than, say, the Scandinavian countries.

Out in Silicon Valley people were pitching these all the time. They’re also popular with medical doctors from what I hear. I got pitched by a guy driving a top of the line Tesla Model S as an Uber driver years ago - he said he was driving for Uber just to meet potential investors.

I think your stats aren’t really comparable, but the gist of it is correct. However, that’s where the problem lies.

Facebook claims it cannot moderate to the necessary levels because it has too many users. Turned around though, it has so many users because it is not being forced to bear the costs of content moderation. It’s externalizing the cost (distribution of child pornography) while keeping the profits. Society has to decide whether having a rich Facebook is worth everyone else bearing the costs for it.

Yaccarino did not elaborate on how many of those were paying users and how the number compared with an average month.

This is the important bit.

What was the net number of users gained? What’s the count of monetizable daily average users? What was the growth year over year and what’s the trend?

Twitter is using every weasel word possible rather than giving industry standard KPIs.

Starfleet is expanding its number of departments.

I will welcome any input that has a basis in biology, physics, or neuroscience. I think you’re taking the position that the conclusions you see as implied by a statement of physical and physiological fact as backed from every field from neuroimaging to developmental biology leaves us in a position that’s philosophically incompatible with the world as envisioned by the way we’ve currently constructed the law. Honestly, I would consider that to be the intellectually lazy position as it’s a rote defense of the status quo without making an attempt to address the actual argument.

The law already recognizes that there are circumstances that are outside the control of the individual, and that our concept of justice demands that those conditions are exculpatory. I’m arguing that our present day understanding means that we need to increase the scope of that interpretation, and that criminal problems should be reimagined as medical problems with evidence-based treatment regimes.

No, I do understand. What I am saying is that the concept of “wanted” does not apply in a framework that’s grounded in modern neuroscience and biology. There’s teleological behaviors, yes, but there no will involved.

Let’s break it down to something simpler. A protozoan (a single cellular animal) will swim towards food and away from poison. It has receptors on its cell surface that, when activated by a series of molecules indicating an increasing gradient of food, there is a cascade from activated cell surface molecules to internal chemical cascades that has a direct causal link that’s as deterministic as what your accelerator does to your car. Cell surface molecules undergo a conformational change which causes the phosphorylation of molecules inside the cell, which ultimately drive the motors that make the protozoan swim in that direction. It’s deterministic.

We no longer think of people with leprosy as being cursed by god because of their sins. This is the same thing.

I can get into more detail, but the line of thinking is not only compatible with neuroscience, it is as far as I am concerned a necessary conclusion from everything we know about neurobiology (and biology in general). I am a theoretical biologist myself and can get into detail, but Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky has written extensively on the subject, and the conclusions of that school of thought are fully compatible with the conclusions of philosophers of consciousness and the self such as Thomas Metzinger.

So no, I do not think that “the person wanted and intended to do that” is a statement that is compatible with what we know about how brains work. But let’s take a closer look at that. Let’s say you have a person who had his daughter kidnapped, and the kidnappers told him that they would execute his daughter unless he robbed a bank for them. The person believes them. He knows robbing the bank is wrong, he put a plan together to do so anyway, and he carried it out. He gets caught, and the kidnappers get caught as well. Assume for the sake of argument that these are undisputed facts. Would that person be guilty of armed robbery? Or would the prosecutor not even bother to bring charges, because the person was compelled to do so via what we’d call a forced move in chess? That’s just a philosophical illustration and still builds on the idea of choice, but it illustrates that even what we consider “choice” isn’t always a free choice and that the justice system accounts for that.

Let me illustrate what I’m actually talking about though. I’m going to make up some values to show what I mean. These are not the actual values, but the relationship holds. Let’s say that for any randomly chosen American, there’s a 1% chance that they will commit a murder in their lifetime. Now let’s start tweaking some of the dials. Our random person, P, grew up in a community where they experienced strong degrees of racism and violence. This physically alters brain structures like increasing the size and influence of the amygdala, which has influenced over fear and threat reactions. It reduces the size and influence of the prefrontal cortex, which is charged with deliberation and predicting consequences. As a result, person P now belongs to a population where they have a 5% probability of committing a murder, because their brain is going to be far more sensitive to threat perception and having a response less regulated by their PFC. Let’s throw in malnutrition, which also affects both brain development and (if the mother was also having such problems) epigenetic developmental factors, which again make changes to both the physical brain and to the genetic processing at the cellular level. Throw in drug addiction. A highly population disproportionate of people in jail for committing violent crimes also have a medical history of traumatic brain injury.

None of those factors were even theoretically able to be affected by the choices made by P, but they heavily biased the probability function. The relationships between all of these factors and a given action are highly characterized. We can look at causal factors from seconds before the physical event (pulling the trigger happened) seconds ago - there were a chain of neural activations in which a specific area of P’s brain caused the muscle contraction in the finger. We can look at what happened hours to days ago that biased those neurons to be triggerable by that level of stimulus. P did not make a conscious decision to have the threat-response associated neurons building to a state of high excitability - that came from the way the brain was wired up in the first place, which happened months to years ago.

What it boils down to is that there is no neuronal argument for free will that can identify a specific chain of causality that identifies and isolates free will as a phenomenon.

Far from being lazy, my position is based on a career in the study and teaching of biology and complex systems analysis, and I can come up with a lengthy bibliography including experimental and philosophical research to defend my position.

The takeaway is that we need to address these as issues that have causal explanations, rather than failures of individual morality. This has been a process that we’ve been performing throughout history, as concepts like demonic possession and trafficking with the devil turned out to be caused by psychological and neurobiological conditions, such as epilepsy. Eventually, should we make it long enough, I think that’s where we will end up.

Newsom’s role in providing marriage licenses for same sex couples in defiance of his political advisors, conventional wisdom, and the completely predictable government reaction demonstrates for me a person willing to make challenging decisions on the basis of what is right.

No politician will ever line up 100% with what we want, and politics is a messy business. But I think that Newsom took positions that a more political politician like Clinton (defense of marriage act, don’t ask don’t tell) wouldn’t touch.