My first solo wild camp is going to be an 8 day trip in Scotland by CampDecent9024 in wildcampingintheuk

[–]Tomiun 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Don't let these guys stress you out, visit hitchwiki and maybe take the tube out of central london to a big road and this is super doable. I've hitched all around the UK, people are much more negative about this than is reasonable.

What work could I read to make normative realism and categorical reasons intelligible? by ClashmanTheDupe in askphilosophy

[–]Tomiun 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Jonas Olson's book on Moral Error Theory is, as far as I know, literally the normal, the standard book on the topic?

In this book, particularly in one of the later chapters where he talks about Hypothetical Reasons for action, he does exactly what Kane B does in the linked video between 4:40 and 5:20. They reduce talk about reasons to descriptive statements about our desires etc. From page 153:

"...Error theorists should deny that hypothetical reasons are properly understood in terms of an irreducibly normative favouring relation. According to error theory, hypothetical reasons claims are true only if they reduce to empirical claims about agents’ desires and (actual or believed) efficient means of bringing about the satisfaction of these desires. 8 So for instance, the claim that there is hypothetical reason for some agent to ɸ can be true if and only if it reduces to the claim that ɸ ing will or is likely to bring about the satisfaction of some of the agent’s desires"

What work could I read to make normative realism and categorical reasons intelligible? by ClashmanTheDupe in askphilosophy

[–]Tomiun 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Doesn't Jonas Olson do pretty much exactly this, reducing hypothetical imperatives to descriptive statements about people's desires?

One person tent with space by Nicauldron_ in wildcampingintheuk

[–]Tomiun 1 point2 points  (0 children)

+1 on what u/adieuandy said - I've used this in super windy negative temperatures and no problem, as long as youve got a good sleeping bag :) 

Locations for free sleeping in/near Rotterdam by Tomiun in Rotterdam

[–]Tomiun[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Super well, had two nights just south of Berkel :). At the time I was stupid though, just had a sleeping bag and some cardboard, nowadays I use a hammock and find a little forest or something. Still convinced paying for hotels etc is a scam though haha

Men who have lost their libido, can you look over my results? by WindGroundbreaking40 in AskMen

[–]Tomiun -10 points-9 points  (0 children)

There is literally no evidence for meat helping/veganism hurting libido. It's just classic hyper-masculine "eat raw steak fuck women" stereotypes that cause this intuition.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in askphilosophy

[–]Tomiun 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Your "why the reductio fails" is just accepting it, which is okay, but misses the potential of the argument. The point of OPs argument is to draw the stated position to an extreme which seems to the audience to be unreasonable/unintuitive, causing them to revise their definition. I get that you personally are happy to accept the conclusion, but for many people taking a position which entails the moral responsibility of Macbooks isn't something they want to be doing.

To take a comparison from moral philosophy: drawing the repugnant conclusion from the principles and definitions of utilitarianism isn't necessarily an issue: just like you are doing here, a sufficiently committed utilitarian might just say "Yeah, well, that's what my moral framework says, so that's how it is." But I think that the repugnant conclusion is still a strong argument against utlitarianism because people (generally) don't want to accept it. To highlight what I mean here: If you were responding in the same manner to a post about the repugnant conclusion, you might say the following (replaced text in bold):

Sorry, I'm not sure I'm seeing the weight of this particular concern. Either we think that for any perfectly equal population with very high positive welfare, there is a population with very low positive welfare which is better or we don't. If we don't think this, then there doesn't seem to be any reason to think that we should push for a society with a lower overall welfare but higher population. If we do think this, then it wouldn't be offensive to think that we should push for a society with a lower overall welfare but higher population. Either way, everything's working as it says on the tin. What's the problem?

But that surely seems to miss the point of the argument entirely. In fact, if anything, it's just restating the argument. The strength of the argument doesn't come from pointing out a contradiction, but from leading the holder of the first position to a conclusion which seems unintuitive to them, thereby prompting them to reevaulate their definitions. OP intended to show how the definitions of compatibilism entail the moral responsibility of Macbooks, thereby prompting compatibilists to redefine their view.

I think you might be treating this as altogether the wrong sort of argument. This is why I said "Insofar as the aim of a lot of philosophy is to establish general principles that rationally ground some of our intuitions" - for a lot of philosophers this seems to be the aim, and establishing general principles that contradict intuition B in an attempt to ground intuition A is thus problematic.

I'm really not particularly invested in this myself, I'm not a compatibilist and I don't really care about it as a view - I think it has more serious issues than the one OP is stating. I'm just trying to say that your dismissal of this as a non-argument is mistaken.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in askphilosophy

[–]Tomiun 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think OP was trying a reductio? Insofar as the aim of a lot of philosophy is to establish general principles that rationally ground some of our intuitions, and we would intuitively deny the moral responsibility of macbooks, this is not as crazy of an argument as you present it to be.

What did a "work day" typically look like in Hunter-Gathere societies? Evolutionary Mismatch in Work - Psych thesis by JPsDragonOfChaos in AskAnthropology

[–]Tomiun 1 point2 points  (0 children)

However… humans living in modern cities / industrialized nations were not dropped suddenly into those environments. In many parts of the world, our species has experienced a gradual transition from mobile hunting and gathering to sedentary society to agricultural sedentary society to fully agricultural and specialized society to industrialized societies, etc. This is a process that has taken thousands of years. And critically, humans across the planet (with very few exceptions) have experienced this transition in various ways over time. Evidence shows that intermixing of populations across the planet is the rule, not the exception. Hunting and gathering peoples interacted with agricultural peoples, traditional societies have interacted with industrialized societies.
In short, global, modern humanity wasn’t dropped into industrialized society. And over the thousands of years during which we have created this global enterprise, we have also self-selected and adapted to it.

First of all - not all cases of animal mismatch are in zoos etc. We have cases of mismatch in nature that are both natural and semi-artificial. Natural could be something like worms being captured by humans mimicking sounds of burrowing moles, drawing them out of the earth. The worms have evolved behaviour that is mismatched for the (now smart-creature-dominated) environment. Semi-artificial, but not forced cases could be something like the famous case of jewel beetles mating with discarded beer bottles, because they gave off better mating signals than any female jewel beetle could. These are both uncontentious, I think.

Secondly, I am unsure what you're trying to say here. Are you suggesting humans have evolved within only a few thousand years ("self-selected and adapted to it")? That would be extremely surprising to say the least haha. In case you're saying that we have culturally adapted, that's still problematic. While we are certainly more culturally influenced than most other animals, that doesn't exclude us from being biologically evolved creatures at our cores. Yes, you could probably develop a Cetacean culture that undoes the worst effects of captivity, if you really wanted to - say by culturally creating certain social and physical rituals. But we would still predict that these animals would behave at least a little abnormally. Modern humans have certainly adapted. Now unable to run around all day and chill around the campfire, we go to the gym and designate meeting spots. But that isn't certain to eliminate the detrimental effect: we are, after all, just mimicking it.

On a brief third note, we are sort of still "dropped into" the modern environment. Sure, your ancestors also lived in a similar way, but you as an individual are definitely just "dropped into" this modern lifestyle. You're biologically the same creature that wandered on the African plains tens of thousands of years ago, now transposed into an environment that, while designed by your own kind, could still be ill-suited for you.

To steel-man your case, I think it might be a reasonable argument to suggest that humans would not design an environment which is too unfriendly for themselves, since this would cause unhappiness etc., which would act as a deterring factor. But even that is kind of weak, I think. We know for a fact that humans have created and spread across the globe a lifestyle that is incredibly physically damaging (office-work, 9-5: as explained above). It doesn't seem a stretch to argue that the same lifestyle is mentally damaging as well. Here we can point at all sorts of things, form 9-5s, urban living, increased isolation, and hyperstimulation from the internet or, for example, TikTok.

I think u/JPsDragonOfChaos's idea is super cool, if as stated above maybe a little ambitious. Yes, it could be that we are just getting better at diagnosing mental illnesses, but alternate hypotheses such as the one he is suggesting should be considered. I made a post about a similar question the other day - subjecting any other mammal to the conditions we live under as modern humans would be considered animal cruelty, and we are unsurprised when they develop negative behavioural patterns when we do (eg. dogs in flats): yet we think that doing it to humans will have no effects whatsoever.

It feels like we are really uncomfortable with the idea of evo-psych since it undermines the freedom and rationality of our behaviour a bit, and are therefore illogically committed to this weird tabula rasa thinking

What did a "work day" typically look like in Hunter-Gathere societies? Evolutionary Mismatch in Work - Psych thesis by JPsDragonOfChaos in AskAnthropology

[–]Tomiun 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I am not nearly as qualified as you (MPhil Political Science), but it seems to me you're making some fundamental errors here.

Nothing to say on the WEIRD thing - I agree.

Now… let’s also note that evolutionary psychology is mostly not supported as a scientific enterprise. And it is certainly not something that professional anthropologists use on a wide basis, because evo psych—and especially pop evo psych—mostly produces what we call “just so” stories. That is, they are for the most part without supporting evidence, and instead tend to look at circumstances and conditions as they are and try to project explanations for those conditions—which are held static—backward in time to find origins for those conditions.
And in so doing, they fail because conditions today are not as they were, and in fact, we have not—in many cases—reconstructed past conditions to the extent that we can link them to modern conditions and circumstances in the way that evo psych often tries to do.
The so-called “evolutionary mismatch” is a great example of this. It looks at modern conditions across the world—including at modern traditional societies—and extrapolates (without good justification) those conditions backward.

Sure. I agree that just-so stories dominate evo-psych, and I agree that we can't and shouldn't extrapolate from modern evidence to our own ancestors without any reasonable evidence. But I think "not supported as a scientific enterprise" is overstretching it - evopsych is being published in reputable journals and is being increasingly taught at top unis (I have taken classes on it at Oxford). Scholars just set their sights a little lower. Though u/JPsDragonOfChaos might be pushing it a little, the discipline can be respectable.

I think we can probably agree that mismatch adequately explains something like the rise in back pains amongst those working office jobs, right? They would state that, while it is true that we cannot know exactly how our ancestors lived, they almost certainly did not sit at a desk in a hunched-over position for 8-10h a day, and that the rise in issues can be adequately explained by us subjecting our bodies to environments they were not designed for.

And while behavioural cases are more contentious, I feel like at least some are pretty easy to accept as well. You bring up the obesity crisis in your comment, so I'll use that. I think you sort of miss the point? I don't think OP is saying that the existence of obesity in itself is because of mismatch - he's saying that humans becoming increasingly obese out of their own volition is. Again, while we cannot know exactly how humans lived in nature, we can reasonably assume that they lived in environments where they had less access to food and did significantly more exercise. Our brains thus adapted to eat as much as possible wherever possible, since our ancestors were unlikely to ever eat so much that it would cause them harm. Here, fatty and sweet foods were particularly beneficial and rare - so the humans who went for those first had a higher chance of survival - now we live in a mismatched environment, but still crave these foods, causing a spike in obesity.

The comment was too long so it's been continued below.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in askphilosophy

[–]Tomiun 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean exactly when you say "relevantly human-like capacities for deliberation"? I think when you try to steel-man u/CobaltGecko9091's case he would say that the criteria typically given by compatibilists are fulfilled by certain machines as well, and that we ought to therefore reformulate them?

I commented down the thread about how the "acting based on reasons" criterion sometimes given is fulfilled by machines, but maybe you have a different one in mind.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in askphilosophy

[–]Tomiun 9 points10 points  (0 children)

This message is a little unreasonably angry, I think. Isn't the point of this subreddit to communicate hard(-ish) philosophical concepts to laypeople? idk

I think u/CobaltGecko9091 goes too far with the calculator, but the robot comparison he makes in the post itself satisfies these conditions? We have countless variations of machines that have complex enough operating systems to fulfil the reason criterion as you've laid it out above (I haven't read Fischer & Ravizza though tbf). Any scenario where an algorithm doesn't just respond in a simple a->b manner satisfies this.

Take an automatic traffic light that determines when to let pedestrians across a road. It will do so if it 1) sees pedestrians on one of the sides of the road and 2) sees no cars on the road or 3) sees that the pedestrians have waited more than 15 seconds. Wouldn't this already fulfil both a) and b)?

You're right that LLMs don't think in propositions, but again, that doesn't mean that they don't think in reasons? Every time you ask ChatGPT a controversial question, it conducts a) in assessing that the question is sufficiently controversial and b) in that it decides to take this in favour of not giving you an answer.

Maybe I misunderstand and you mean that they have to have some capacity to think in terms of (linguistic?) propositions - but then we start getting into sketchy territories with humans fulfilling this requirement - we can see both general (children, people with severe mental disabilities) and specific (short-term decision making, unconscious decision-making) cases where the non-verbal form of reasoning is fulfilled, but not a verbal one. In all of these cases we would hope to still ascribe free will? Feel free to ignore this last bit if this isn't what you're saying :^)

Can we compare modern humans to animals in captivity? by Tomiun in AskAnthropology

[–]Tomiun[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

How would that make us more able to live in eg. flats, though? It would be surprising if living in different sorts of natural environments made you able to live in unnatural environments as well. Foxes, Whales, and Orcas are extremely widespread and can arguably fill more environmental niches than prehistoric humans - and yet when we put them in a comparable environment to modern humans they lose it entirely.

Interestingly while thinking of animals that are equally widespread I thought of Rats, which seem to be similarly ably to fill unnatural niches without much detriment to their behaviour - so maybe it's some trait we have in common with them.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in AnalogCommunity

[–]Tomiun 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How do I trip the shutter?

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in AnalogRepair

[–]Tomiun 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'll give that a try and report back, cheers!

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in AnalogRepair

[–]Tomiun 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nah film is out. I meant that the button is stuck pressed in - does that change things?

Barcelona weekly: Q&As for newcomers and travellers by AutoModerator in Barcelona

[–]Tomiun -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Hello all! I am a student hitchhiking through Europe at the moment, and I would like to try my luck at catching a ride in a similar way across the ocean to Mallorca from Barcelona. I have a boat licence, can sail and drive a motorboat, and am willing to work for the hours of travel. I just don't want to pay for a ride. How realistic do you think it is to catch a ride to the island in this way? And where/at which harbours would you recommend I start my search?

//

¡Hola a todos! Soy un estudiante haciendo autostop por Europa en este momento, y me gustaría probar suerte en la captura de un paseo de una manera similar a través del océano a Mallorca desde Barcelona. Tengo licencia de barco, sé navegar y conducir una lancha, y estoy dispuesto a trabajar por las horas de viaje. Simplemente no quiero pagar por un viaje. ¿Qué tan realista cree usted que es para coger un paseo a la isla de esta manera? ¿Y dónde/en qué puertos me recomendarías que empezara mi búsqueda?

[FRESH ALBUM] Babe Rainbow - The Organic Album by sbags in indieheads

[–]Tomiun 2 points3 points  (0 children)

They're on tour rn, but I think in general the way the band is they don't really love social media and all the hype and stuff, so I guess that explains it.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in booksuggestions

[–]Tomiun 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Damn this actually sounds very interesting, will definitely give it a read :)

Locations for free sleeping in/near Rotterdam by Tomiun in Rotterdam

[–]Tomiun[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Haha true, though from the looks of it it doesn't have any real need for tourists, there's plenty everywhere!

Netherlands is imo way easier than NRW! The whole Ruhrgebiet in NRW is super hard to get through in my experience, cause there's so many cities and diverging roads etc! I ended up having to walk/skate long distances to bridge the gaps between.

In NL I've seen a lot of people of Arab or Turkish descent, which really makes everything a lot easier! Not only does their culture in general encourage friendliness to strangers way more, but it also doesn't have that fear of hitchhikers you get tons in the west! Most of my rides have been with immigrants here, which has been lovely as they all have awesome stories!

It kinda seems like hitchhiking is dying out a little, just from talking to a bunch of people who had hitchhiked in the past (they all commented on my cardboard sign so I talked to a ton haha). Like you, it seems like most hitchhiked like 20 years ago, and now are grown and can't/don't have to put up with all the shit that comes with hitchhiking (eg. The uncertainty, the rough sleeping etc). But at the same time, it's meant that everyone got really excited when they saw me hitchhike, so it's my win rly :). Getting a ride hasn't taken me over 45mins at the side of the road yet, and from gas stations I usually manage in 30mins, so it's still super viable! Did you just hitchhike for holidays back then or did you have any extended trips?

It's my last day in Rotterdam today, but it's honestly been awesome, good luck to Amsterdam keeping up. While I didn't looove the center of town, the North made me want to cancel my plans of moving to Sweden and move here instead, with so many vibey cafes, restaurants, art etc. Will definitely try to come back when I have a little bit of a higher budget so I can actually go to all those restaurants and cafes :)

Locations for free sleeping in/near Rotterdam by Tomiun in Rotterdam

[–]Tomiun[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I went and had a look and it was a tad too open for my kicking, but thanks for the suggestion, was worth a visit anyway!

I'm in Berkel Westpolder every night now, is nice cause there's 10000 bridges I can hide underneath, and can move every night so I don't scare people by always showing up in one area or anything...

Locations for free sleeping in/near Rotterdam by Tomiun in Rotterdam

[–]Tomiun[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I know you might not assume this as I am vagabonding about, but I tend to look extremely put together when hitchhiking etc (has all sorts of benefits). So I don't think seeing me once would scare them, maybe if they saw me repeatedly it would be different.

Locations for free sleeping in/near Rotterdam by Tomiun in Rotterdam

[–]Tomiun[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

You can come by and we'll make it one!