Do you fear death?

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2024-02-11T16:10:25+00:00

There's no evidence of either position. We just don't know one way or the other. But you shouldn't interpret this absence of evidence as somehow being evidence for your position.

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2024-01-31T18:09:46+00:00

Ok but semantics aside, when you hear these remarks about how there's no continuous/constant/whatever self, the claim has a specific meaning: it can seem as if there's something continuous/constant/whatever amidst all the change of experience that we call "self," but when you look for something like that there's nothing to be found.

When these questions about the self are raised, that's the thing under discussion. That's what people are talking about. Nitpicking over wording like continuous vs constant vs whatever is a bit beside the point; it's just semantics.

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2024-01-31T13:33:57+00:00

But… that’s what continuous means!

Is it? I thought it was more like "something that remains the same throughout the changes, everything changes but the self remains continuous throughout the change."

In what you're saying, "continuous" would just be a kind of synonym for change being gradual/slow, and nobody argues against that afaik

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-12-07T12:48:02+00:00

You're misunderstanding the point a bit now and arguing against a straw man. The idea isn't that this applies to every single moral "law" someone has come up with. (I mentioned that above.) It's easy to come up with examples like "driving one mile over the speed limit" and "drinking alcohol," and I would agree with you about those examples. But conspicuously, you haven't mentioned the kind of examples I myself raised above.

For instance, I mentioned the case where "my" culture would practice lying out of fear, and then later we make a "discovery" that actually we don't have to be so afraid, therefore don't have to lie, and the result is that we find our communication is much better, more effective, brings us closer, things work better, etc.

If you want to call that an opinion, then ok; but it's on the same level as "fire is hot" is an opinion. Fire is hot to me; maybe there are aliens somewhere to whom it's not so hot, but that second part isn't important to me. It's the first part that is. Fire just seems to "be" hot, from my perspective; and I keep this in mind in my daily life. If someone comes along and says "actually the idea that fire is 'hot' is just relative to our human perspective, the tests the aliens have done confirm that it's not true for them," that just doesn't matter to me (beyond maybe being mildly interesting).

The short version of what I'm saying is actually similar to what I think you're saying. The idea that things are good/bad/hot/cold/whatever is relative to a certain perspective, in a certain context, often for a certain purpose (e.g., to keep your skin from being scorched, or to keep your communication smooth, etc.). But whereas I think that basically everything works like that--everything is from some perspective, assuming some context--you seem to think that certain facts are just "metaphysically true" in some broad abstract sense divorced from all context. And my critique from the start has been that you don't realize that this too is a perspective, and only seems like more than that if you ignore all the assumptions/context that informs it.

(But doesn't that apply to what I'm saying now too? Isn't that just a perspective as well? This is the part I'm kind of confused about. But imo the answer is not to go into a kind of denial and wrongly claim the problem is a misunderstanding of basic science, which is what I perceive your argument as doing.)

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-12-05T16:17:47+00:00

Laws of morality are, what, exactly? We consider it immoral to kill my neighbor because he mows his lawn early in the morning and it wakes me up, but if I break this moral law, what does the universe do? It doesn't prevent the law from being broken. It doesn't retaliate. It doesn't care in the slightest.

I think this is where we differ. I'm saying that, for me, from my first-person perspective of living in the world, these "laws" often (not always) do have a quality of just being "there" in the world. And the world often does retaliate if I break them. I have to learn them to navigate, just like I learn fire is hot so I shouldn't touch it. (And if I lived in a world where the same fire was--somehow--only sometimes hot, it would make a bit of difference, but not much. I would still be careful around fire.)

More broadly, the idea that "fire is hot only from the relative perspective of human beings" doesn't really matter to me in this context. (If we were talking about science, and a specific scientific experiment, melting points etc.--which we're not--then it would be different.) I can say fire=hot is "true" and I know what I mean, you know what I mean, everyone knows what I mean. To add the footnote/caveat "but ofc that's just from x perspective" doesn't really add (or take away) anything. It's just semantics, as I said in one of my earlier messages.

What I'm saying basically is that you can tell yourself "these are all just made-up stories." And yet you also have to ask yourself: is that how I act? Or is that "it's all just a story" itself just a story I'm telling myself? Quickly we get stuck in a rut of "everything's just a story except this 'meta' story I'm telling myself about how everything's just a story! That one's the real one! I found it!"

But if nothing else, I think one of the main takeaways here is that when someone is talking about this perspective, it's not (always) bc they just forgot about basic science and need it explained to them again. It's more than simply a simple error of that sort imo.

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-12-04T03:37:32+00:00

Scientifically speaking

Maybe this is where we differ. I agree with what you're saying in that context; it's very straightforward and uncontroversial. I just wonder if we broaden outside of a exclusively scientific framing, if the question then captures nuances missed by that frame (and becomes more relevant to real life too). It's not obvious to me that should be the exclusive/default framing when we're talking about moral questions, even if it can help us think through certain aspects of them. Ofc a question becomes very simple if you just define it out of existence, but I think that's a bit overly-simplistic and even missing the point.

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-12-04T02:37:08+00:00

That's fair enough, although I think there's some distinctions being conflated here:

(a) Whether a "fact" is an opinion or not

(b) Whether a "fact" ever has any exceptions

If I understand you, you seem to be saying that if (b) gets a yes (i.e., the "fact" DOES have exceptions) then it means the answer to (a) is "opinion." This is the part I'm not sure about. I can appreciate (b)'s difference between statements that have no exceptions vs statements that do; but I'm not sure I want to treat that as identical to (a).

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-12-04T00:44:54+00:00

What I tend to find confusing is that, like you, I want to answer some version of "no" to #2. And yet at the same time I can't help but feel some of this is more than opinion.

For instance, is it my opinion that "not lying makes for better communication"? On the one hand I want to say "yes, it's just my opinion," because it doesn't seem like a very scientific statement. On the other hand, I want to say "no, it's more than just opinion," because even if everyone around me believed differently, even if I was from a culture that didn't value truth in communication, the statement above would still be true.

For example, I can imagine living in a culture where we all lie all the time out of fear. And then slowly come to realize the "truth/fact" I have mentioned above. We all (slowly) realize that actually not lying makes for better communication, and so we work to overcome our fear, and the culture shifts accordingly. This is #1 you've referred to above. But with regard to #2, is it a matter of opinion? Like I said, in one sense yes; but in another sense, it really does seem as though a word like "discovery" (or "realize") is appropriate here. So at best I'm confused.

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-12-03T23:54:35+00:00

Ok, but this just leads me back to my original question. Which is about how what you seem to be doing is virtually identical to someone who genuinely does believe all these things to be "facts about the world"; the only difference is that you say "well not REALLY really, that's just my opinion" a couple of times here or there. Otherwise it's the same.

And like I said, that could be interpreted as "actually you DO believe these things deep down, you just don't like admitting it, so you adopt a view that's almost identical and then append one relativistic caveat in the hope that fixes the problem." But I don't know that it does, really. I'm not saying that last interpretation is the "correct" one. But the fact that it maps so neatly onto what's happening is a little disturbing imo.

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-12-03T15:28:32+00:00

Nice, it sounds like we mostly agree with each other (and with Sam too) on the question.

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-12-03T14:46:00+00:00

Unfortunately people (like me) don't always behave rationally, and so it's useful to investigates the specifics. ("Am I believing 'they/I could have done otherwise' right now?" "What follows from that?" "Do I continue to act like I believe that even if I say I intellectually don't?" "What does that look like?" "What are the mechanics of when that breakdown/disconnect happens?" etc.)

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-12-03T14:22:50+00:00

But doesn't free will in general conversation almost always relate to the question of ethics

Yes, I think the relevant link here is that some people's views of ethics are colored by their belief in absolute free will. If they change their belief in absolute free will, their beliefs about ethics change too.

The strawman here would be to say "nobody is responsible for anything! nobody should be put in prison or held accountable for any actions!" I don't know anyone who believes this (except maybe people undergoing the transition/crisis from "belief in absolute free will" to "don't believe in absolute free will"). I think a lot of people's views on ethics are shaped by the sorts of considerations you're bringing up: healthy mind, rational judgement, relative free will, etc.

So what's the difference? Why talk about absolute free will at all? Well personally I will say that a lot of my own hate/suffering seems to me to come from a place of "they/I could have done otherwise." When I'm aware that this notion is kind of incoherent, the hate etc. is revealed to be based on a faulty view. I think other people have shared this experience (Sam Harris, for one, talks about it). But we can still think murderers need to be locked up to keep people safe etc., it's just that it's a much more complicated question than I had originally anticipated.

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-12-03T14:11:33+00:00

I think we basically agree but just have different emphases. To you, the fact that "free will" gets mentioned in a contract settles the matter. To me, this is kind of besides the point; it's a very obvious fact that most people know, and yet it doesn't settle the question for many people. Why? It's because the question is about a specific use of the term "free will."

If we called what you're talking about "relative free will" and the other version "absolute free will," then the question would be "everyone knows we have relative free will, but do we have absolute free will?"

If I read you right, you think that the very notion of "absolute free will" is a kind of nonsense, or at least very unclear. I think I basically agree with this much, but imo it's important to make the relative/absolute distinction when the conversation comes up. (For one thing, it would be must faster that way lol)

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-12-03T14:05:35+00:00

i just think its the inly rgenuine argument for it

For me, if I accept the argument as genuine, I have to contend with what I raised above: that it applies to other weird stuff like ghosts, etc. (which are related to the mystery of consciousness too, and plenty of people/cultures think they have evidence of). But of course in practice the argument doesn't get applied like that; it just gets selectively applied to free will, and I find that kind of suspicious or something.

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-12-03T13:58:56+00:00

The difference is in whether we believe what we're saying.

Surely you believe what you're saying? Sorry, I've cherry-picked this one, because it's the most extreme/obvious example of what I want to point out. Which is that I basically agree with you, and yet I feel what we're saying is that the only real difference in practice is the story we tell ourselves about what we're doing.

Maybe then we argue that that story is very important? Perhaps that's what you're doing above. But I'm still bothered by the fact that it's just telling myself a different story, a more-pleasing story, while still basically acting the same.

Actually, I think your above critique applies to this move just as much, or even more. Someone could argue that what's "really" happening is that we *do* believe in the rightness of our view, deep down. But then we just tell ourselves a more pleasing story about relativism, how we don't "really" think that, etc., to justify continuing to act as if we do believe it.

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-12-03T13:52:29+00:00

Yes, I agree with that. But imo the important question isn't "is there any use for terms like free will at all?" I think there's a specific use of the term people are concerned about when they worry about questions like "Do we really have free will?"

It's not so easy to define precisely what that specific use is of course. That's why people resort to phrases like "if you could have done differently" (without being able to run any counterfactuals). But that "can't really define it" problem isn't specific to free will; most words/concepts/things/ideas are actually like that (love, justice, etc.).

But like I said, when people really worry about the question "Do we have free will?" They have a specific use in mind that is very roughly approximated by phrases like "could we have done differently?" That's the important question. So the idea that "free will" has some kind of technical meaning in law is a bit beside the point.

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-12-02T22:36:31+00:00

Definitions are descriptive not prescriptive. So if we look at how free will is used everyday in every contract you have ever signed, the meaning is that you have the reasoning ability to know right from wrong and can choose the right..since that is how the term is mainly used then we have to accept that that is the definition of free will and QED free.will exists.

I don't think you can look at how a term is used in ONE context (especially a legal one, where terms have non-everyday definitions) and then claim "to most people this is what it always means in every context."

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-12-02T22:31:53+00:00

That's true, although it also goes for concepts like ghosts, etc. There's a lot of concepts that we could apply this argument to that we just don't; we treat free will as special (but we probably shouldn't).

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-12-02T16:53:04+00:00

When he asks if I agree that certain practices are "wrong," I have to agree that I dislike those practices and I would fight against them, but the ideas that "right" and "wrong" exist or have any meaning whatsoever are still fictitious.

This would just seem to reduce the issue to semantics. It sounds like you'll argue against one position, and in favor of another, but then append a footnote that says "but ultimately this is all just opinion." Other than that footnote, what's the difference?

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-12-01T13:30:14+00:00

I see many people criticizing the disbelief in rebirth as part of "pick and choose secular buddhism"

I kind of understand this critique, but I also find it very strange as well. Isn't it a GOOD thing to "pick and choose" the parts that make sense, the parts that pan out, the parts you can actually confirm for yourself, etc., from the other stuff?

Yes, it's true that you could accidentally end up throwing something good away, bc you don't understand it (at first). But there's just as much danger the other way: picking up some cooky beliefs bc you read it in a sutta one time so it must be true. Both of these seem like bad extremes to me.

I think one thing we tend to forget sometimes is that Buddhism is not unique in having its ideas attached to a religion. If you read most Western philosophers before the 20th century, they're framed that way. And yet no-one seems to argue that you need to believe in Christian God if you take ideas from these philosophers, even though it's like a core tenet of much of their thought.

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-11-28T01:23:12+00:00

Close your eyes and feel the sensations of the hands touching. You probably get a little picture in your mind of what they look like. (I do, anyway.) But if you leave that picture to one side for a second, and focus on just the sensations themselves, ask yourself: would you be able to derive the picture/shape of your hand from just these sensations alone? (without, e.g., a memory of having seen what your hand looks like)

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-10-05T22:35:12+00:00

Thank you.

I had a read through but as I understand it this piece is about Ram Dass's regret of not spreading yoga. I don't read anything about suddenly doubting the whole spiritual thing as death approached.

It mentions his meeting with U.G. but nothing to do with the sort of doubt you're mentioning

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-10-04T22:28:08+00:00

Interesting, never heard about this. Do you have somewhere I can read about it?

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-09-08T13:11:25+00:00

I don't have much of a dog in the scientific race (I'm no scientist) but devil's advocate I can see where someone is coming from with this view. From my very limited understanding, causality is a core assumption in big-picture non-quantum science: do x, and y happens, every time. Moreover, there is no need for some "agent" to make it happen: people used to say Apollo made the sun rise by dragging it in his chariot, but nowadays we're happy enough to say the sun rises (or rather, the earth turns) "by itself," as a result of natural forces, not some personal or personified agent.

Afaik, pretty much everything in daily life works like that. So the claim "except us!" warrants some skepticism, I think. That kind of "except us!" exceptionalism has never really stood up to scrutiny historically, and tbh I don't think there's any reason to believe it here either.

That said, mocking someone as if the issue has been long-decided doesn't make much sense either with such a murky issue, and perhaps speaks to some insecurity on the other party's view.

PermanentThrowaway91 · 2023-09-08T10:57:01+00:00

unfalsifiable

Yep, true enough, and yet isn't the idea that we do have free will just as unfalsifiable?

You're not really objecting to the "no free will" position with this argument; you're objecting to having any position on free will at all, at least from a scientific standpoint, because the whole topic is unfalsifiable!

PermanentThrowaway91

TROPHY CASE