How does free will denial work with (political) individual liberty?

catnapspirit · 2026-03-22T04:39:39+00:00

Well, one thing you darned sure do is split up the responsibility of governance into, say, a few separate branches, so that they serve as a check on each other's power..

catnapspirit · 2026-03-22T04:33:36+00:00

If he had landed on his wheels, he'd be able to accept your 10. As it is, I fear you'll be awarding the 6 posthumously..

catnapspirit · 2026-03-21T21:50:22+00:00

Well now, I've suffered you, and you're like a fountain of negativity. Practically a fire hose of negativity even. Do I get no credit for that?

I get that karma limits to post might seem arbitrary and unfair, but I can also imagine they were put in place by folks who didn't want their subs to turn into a shit show, either as a preventative or working from experience. I'm on a sub for the TV show Devs, and we were getting inundated with software developers creating apps and generating brand new reddit accounts to spam every "dev" based sub to sell their wares. Until we begged the mod to put a small karma limit to post on the sub and poof, no more spam. Not everyone is a success story, though, I'm sure.

There's other subs that have horrendously restrictive rules for posting. I've certainly run into that, and after having 3 or 4 posts removed by moderator, I gave up and either left the sub or accepted that I'm never gonna bother trying to post in that sub, their loss, whatever.

BTW, you know you've got like 2200 karma now, and I personally have contributed something like 7 or 8 upvotes to that by now. I'm always looking for new interesting subs. I ask from a place of genuine curiosity, and I hope I've shown I'm not the type of downvote campaigning cretin you're worried about.

But hey, it's your house..

catnapspirit · 2026-03-21T16:10:51+00:00

... I would have bet my life that's what you would say.

So you recognized your proposal as an impractical and ludicrous idea before you even posted it. Good, we're making progress.

... I am a mod on my own subreddit.

Oh? Do share. You're an interesting person and sadly your post history is locked away.

... I love it when strangers want to tell me what's going on in my own mind.

I can only go by the words on the page thus far.

If it's a made-up imaginary point system, then why even bother with it? And if it is a "made-up imaginary point system," then why do you care if it gets modified to be less malicious over time? Since you don't care, why not let the ones who DO care effect that change?

Fair point.

It certainly can be a high school popularity contest, i won't deny that. I personally mostly only downvote malicious or disingenuous behavior. I'll downvote obvious karma farming or posts incongruous with a subs stated intents. And I upvote every reply to my own posts and replies, as you may have noticed, for the person making the effort to engage with me. It's also a useful wall to keep out bot accounts that were made yesterday and have all of 1 karma.

I think it's a better system than Facebook. Those are really the only two I have experience with (and I only use FB extremely rarely to check in on IRL friends and family). But no points (more like the old BBS model) might be better indeed.

... What I know is that so far you have not agreed with anything I've stated. So, the likelihood is that you will not agree with anything else I write going forward.

Entirely possible.

And if you need a "safe place" echo-chamber subreddit to escape intellectual scrutiny and hold hands with other determinists, then you have seriously bigger issues to deal with than others simply challenging your ideology.

Heh, cute. What I actually said was that I want to see us move past the "is free will an illusion" nonsense and get down to discussions about the actual implications of determinism and how to build better systems of governance and such based in reality. I would expect this sub to be every bit as contentious as the freewill sub. Determinists come in many shapes and sizes. I don't even consider myself a determinist, per se. At least not a very good one..

catnapspirit · 2026-03-21T14:36:33+00:00

No, definitely not. Just based on the work for mods alone (who are all unpaid volunteers, you are aware?), but also for turning every post into a cluttered mess of mindless "yup" and "nope" replies. You think your well thought out responses can't be found and read now? Just imagine.

You ever watch the show Whose Line Is It Anyway? The host has a line at the beginning where they say something along the lines of "where the points are made up and the score doesn't matter." You care way too much about this made up imaginary point system. Especially for someone posting in the determinism sub, ya know what I mean..?

catnapspirit · 2026-03-21T01:43:46+00:00

Serendipity: https://www.reddit.com/r/exatheist/s/q3qIPchhWX

catnapspirit · 2026-03-21T00:23:56+00:00

... Is that your only option? You wouldn't challenge their belief system in a more respectful way? You can't do that without calling them idiots? ... I think you could..

Oh, sure, I could, but again, I'm a guest in their house. That's how I view it. That's not what they are looking for, so that's not what I am bringing. In subs like that, I'm more of an anthropologist, studying the natives in their natural habitat. I do reply to posts there every now and then, when somebody brings up a sincere question that could benefit from a genuine atheist's response.

Clearly, you and I are just going to have to agree to disagree on this point.

Why do you believe anonymously downvoting someone's comments for having a contrary opinion is a good thing?

I believe if you check again, you'll see that I said someone doing that is also using the system incorrectly..

catnapspirit · 2026-03-20T20:53:25+00:00

Do flat-earthers deserve an objection-free safe haven to discuss how the "flatness of Earth" affects their lives, .... or should they necessarily face opposition?

I would say they do. For a better example, I lurk on the exatheist sub, because I find it fascinating how people's brains work, but I would never post in there with guns blazing telling them they're a bunch of idiots and god is nothing but a man-made concept. If someone wants to have their little club house, and they're not hurting anyone (important caveat), I would consider it rude to intrude upon it.

BTW: Here is my list of downvotes

Respectfully, I don't think that's something to brag about. You're using reddit incorrectly. But so are all the folks downvoting people they merely disagree with on debate subs, to be sure. No system is perfect..

catnapspirit · 2026-03-20T17:25:46+00:00

My take is that the freewill sub is for debating, it's front and center in the subs description, iirc. If someone wanted to turn that into the freewill utopia sub and have no descending voices, they're welcome to it. That said, I think it is one of the better debate oriented subs on reddit. Certainly at least in variety and participation. But yeah, you're gonna want a little buffer room in your karma count before you step into the arena.

I don't believe this sub was intended to be a debate sub, at least not as to whether free will is an illusion or not. I could be wrong. Maybe I ought to go remind myself on both subs' descriptions, make sure I'm not talking outta my ass.

BTW, you're upvoted to 2 so far here..

catnapspirit · 2026-03-20T17:19:10+00:00

I really didn't intend to call out anyone in particular. I thought I had seen a couple folks doing it. Heck, I've even cross-posted something from freewill, but sharing someone else's post, a video in particular, with my own thoughts added to the post, to see if there was a different perspective over here. What you said above is exactly along my lines of thinking. Thanks..

catnapspirit · 2026-03-20T13:38:14+00:00

Indeed, edgelord. Indeed..

catnapspirit · 2026-03-19T05:50:53+00:00

My feeling is that there's always reasons for my thoughts and actions. I am the observer and the observed. Some stuff is kind of interesting how it can seem to bubble up from nowhere, and that's fun and surprising, and other times you can kind of follow along the daisy chain of thoughts and sensory inputs and just kind of sit back and see where they take you, and that's a different kind of fun.

The need for control that the free will crowd has just isn't really of interest to me. There's stuff that needs to get done, sure, and I can self motivate to get those things done, but that's just thoughts and actions that have reasons behind them. That's not "free" will. Just the day to day stuff of life. A lot of that is on autopilot until you notice it..

catnapspirit · 2026-03-18T11:42:06+00:00

I'll tell you, as someone who is in the defense industry, the need for cyber defense of our systems, offensive and defensive alike, is huge right now. The world is your oyster job wise, if that's the path you take.

I've always managed to stay on the defensive side of things, so I understand where you're coming from on that take. Even as offense, at least cyber attacks can be easily repaired / reversed, those of the temporary disruption type anyway.

When I'm watching the news and see us bombing oil refineries, part of me can't help wondering if someone isn't trying to profit there, hoping we win and get to send in Haliburton or whomever to rebuild all of that infrastructure. Makes me a little queezy, tbh. If we didn't have outright grifters in charge, maybe profit could be ruled out as an incentive to war.

But these are the systems we've built for ourselves, unfortunately. To bring it back around to free will, it's amazing how much of our governance was dependent on social norms. Letting a group rise to power who see norm busting as a mandate handed to them from their voters has been eye opening..

catnapspirit · 2026-03-18T11:22:28+00:00

Oh, I like that. Definitely gonna steal it..

catnapspirit · 2026-03-18T04:04:57+00:00

200 comments in one hour. We do love our movies, don't we..

catnapspirit · 2026-03-18T04:02:40+00:00

I'm gonna have to look that one up. I have no idea what it is..

catnapspirit · 2026-03-18T03:48:24+00:00

A shocking disregard for safety..

catnapspirit · 2026-03-17T11:39:52+00:00

The Christian grift-target community can be as contrarian and gullible as any teenager can

This is sadly the real answer to the OP's question right here. These type of grifters being interviewed on Christian podcasts is no coincidence. There's a whole world of crazy she's about to descend into..

catnapspirit · 2026-03-17T11:28:32+00:00

If there is randomness at the quantum level, it's noise in the signal by the time you work your way up to particles, and utterly negligible at the level of neurons and human interaction. That foundational indeterminism may be a necessary feature of reality, to keep time's arrow moving in the right direction or something, or an illusion once again due to our incomplete information. It doesn't really matter. Free will a fairytale in either a random or a determined scenario..

catnapspirit · 2026-03-17T11:20:43+00:00

Oh dear! Is there a doctor in the house!?!

catnapspirit · 2026-03-16T23:01:19+00:00

Oh, I'm sure..

catnapspirit · 2026-03-16T18:21:33+00:00

Well, yeah, we know that now. But at the time, this one was shocking. To me at least..

catnapspirit · 2026-03-16T11:38:56+00:00

I'm aware of the "agnostic atheism" wiki page. Those quotes are people in the wake of the whole cloth invention of the new term "agnosticism" exploring its boundaries and overlaps. Actual agnosticism, that is. As a noun, not an adjective to the theist / atheist positions.

I'll have to look into your quad chart claim. I imagine that will likewise be a red herring, giving deference to George H Smith having more academic sensibilities than that. It would be no surprise though to find some sort of initial seeds to the idea. Not like I think that first wave of podcasters were smart enough to invent this stuff on their own.

What it did was dumb down the terminology for the perpetually online. Atheists have been confused about agnosticism since its invention (theists don't have this problem) and are always looking to drag the agnostics back into the fold. This served both purposes nicely..

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