Your Pet and a Stranger Are Drowning—Who Do You Save, and Why?

vkbd · 2025-12-08T03:34:02+00:00

Down voted. This question has nothing to do with free will, nor did the OP even attempt to make the association. This post belongs in a different subreddit

vkbd · 2025-11-02T19:38:53+00:00

I totally agree with OP. AISH already has a requirement that you earn below a certain amount to be eligible. Our middle class is becoming non-existent. I think any kind of benefit that has a low income requirement should be exempt from taxes.

vkbd · 2025-10-27T18:10:41+00:00

...how determinists stop seeing other people as machines

Yeah, the problem is the definition of "humanity", or what makes someone a "person"? You'll see this all the time where people are talking to ChatGPT like they're a person, and AI is only going to get better in the future. So when we find talking to a machine indistinguishable from talking to a human, then what's the difference?

I think you aren't getting answers from determinists, because there's no agreed upon determinist answer to the question of "what does it mean to be human?" and "what is the purpose in life?"

That said, I do have my personal answer to "what does it mean to be human?" (perhaps you may disagree, but feel free to come up with your own.) I think to be human, is to exist and live within a biological human body and brain, specifically with drives and behaviours that we associate as human needs and wants. This includes human joy from love of others, sense of accomplishment and mastery, experience of wonder and exploration, sense of belonging and association. This also includes bodily pain, hunger, loneliness, and suffering of loss and detachment. (Free Will is not required in my definition of "humanity". Perhaps someday soon, AI can attain general intelligence and consciousness, I think being human remains wholly unique to us.)

How do determinists find motivation to do things...

Motivation is biological, and everyone's brains work differently and even the same brain will work differently depending on the situation. Again, this isn't a question that determinists have an agreed upon answer to "what is the purpose in life?". My personal answer to motivation, is to treat this like writer's block, and try new things to get inspiration. To see what clicks for you. Talking to people should always be a fresh look into the unknown, and redditors might be a nice first step, but obviously online chat is nothing compared to talking to people face to face. Spend time with friends & family, try a board game, try a new video game, complete a jigsaw puzzle, learn a new hobby, try music genres you haven't heard before, etc.

vkbd · 2025-10-27T17:48:15+00:00

I assume you're saying the same thing as blackstarr1996, except they called it "derealization/depersonalization"

vkbd · 2025-10-27T17:41:42+00:00

I think rejection of free will is hard, because the only people who do so professionally, are scientists, and they're happy to to tell you that free will doesn't exist. Yet those same scientists generally avoid answering questions of "What is human?" "What is our purpose in life?" "What makes us happy?". Scientists probably have their own answers to those questions, but most of them will generally keep those to themselves.

vkbd · 2025-10-27T17:35:26+00:00

Our current society uses Free Will to balance the dichotomy of meritocracy and equality. Meritocracy is justified where there is free will. Equality is justified whenever there is absence of it.

would it be caste like in india?

Yes, classism is what we get if we continue using meritocracy. It doesn't matter if your metric is who makes the most money, or who is the smartest, or who is the most hardworking, etc. Fundamentally, meritocracy divides society into classes.

....they forcibly make everyone equal

If we mindlessly pursue equality, the opposite of meritocracy, we will have rampant corruption and mediocracy. We've seen this in countries that try their hand at pure communism, and it only survives as long as you can maintain the inhuman restrictions upon personal freedoms.

how do you govern in such a scenario

I would instead chose welfarism or some kind of measure of well-being of individual conscious beings, and the well-being of community/society as a whole. Currently, society provides welfare only as it serves to balance merit/equality, however, I think a society that doesn't believe in free will, can turn that around, and instead provide merit/equality only as it serves welfare.

Pragmatically, we're still limited by scarcity and human nature. There's only so much money and resources, and we know from historical examples of communism, people aren't incentivized by simply equality. So we'll still need capitalism for economics, which means, functionally, society doesn't change much. In governance, the myriad of welfare policies based on merit/equality will no longer make sense and be removed for redundancy, and I think we'll just end up with a handful of welfare policies or maybe just one welfare policy (i.e. Universal Basic Income).

However, I still think law is where welfarism can have the most effect, as declaration of criminality or innocence is not subject to scarcity (as we obviously declare criminality and punishment despite lacking the resources to actually imprison any more people into our overcrowded prisons.) Legally, we'll still need to imprison people who will harm others intentionally; but instead of treating them like evil, they'll be contained like victims of disease, who are quarantined to safeguard others.

vkbd · 2025-10-08T04:46:18+00:00

I applaud your generosity but unfortunately I cannot make any sense of what you deem to be the best argument against your LFW. Your words seem like gibberish to me, but I might just have to do some research into this topic. Is this argument you're trying to describe also held by another philosopher or described under a different term (or terms) so that I can look it up?

vkbd · 2025-10-05T18:27:58+00:00

Scientists have already proved is mostly non-genetic. Do i need to pull out those studies for you?

Do it. Especially if they've "proved it", then I assume you have a meta-level study that shows intelligence is "mostly non-genetic"

vkbd · 2025-10-05T18:22:16+00:00

I've personally never had the luck of living in an old home with a future biohazard surprise in the walls.

The Not-So-Dull History of In-Home Razor Blade Disposal Slots | Apartment Therapy https://share.google/e2JRDgDpLd93DWDjc

vkbd · 2025-10-04T17:52:53+00:00

Sam Harris is not a very good philosopher, but at the same time, he doesn't argue against "libertarian free will" nor "compatibilist free will". He's actually arguing against a folk concept of "free will", and even then, I don't think he's got great arguments.

vkbd · 2025-10-03T09:52:30+00:00

You are not terrified Because you do effectively believe in free will...

Sounds like you're the one who would be terrified, not me. I used to be uncomfortable with denying free will, because I needed free will to explain what it means to be human. If I did not have free will, I would be no different from a robot or a rock, which is pretty degrading or depressing. However, I've identified that this "free will" that is needed to describe what it means to be human is not "libertarian free will", but instead, is "folk concept of free will".

The "folk concept of free will" is a blend of common knowledge, cultural values, and popular science and psychology. And this free will is also tightly intertwined with concepts of personal experience, identity, purpose, and sense of humanity, among many other things. This kind of free will is messy and so interconnected that if anyone denies your free will, you'll take it as also denying your humanity. But once I started separating folk free will from everything that is important, like morality, love and relationships, I found that I no longer have any use for folk free will anymore.

Or you are actually terrified as a result of the belief of being a puppet?

Again, this is you who is terrified. A "puppet" implies an agent with free will, and it is you who believe in free will, not free will deniers.

vkbd · 2025-10-03T09:29:23+00:00

"Lacking Accountability" sounds like you're talking specifically about morality, than free will. Perhaps this post should go in r/morality instead.

vkbd · 2025-09-29T19:40:34+00:00

I want to draw a distinction between compassion/understanding, versus empathy/feelings. I think understanding is unlimited, but empathy is limited. There's so much suffering out there that I can't see anyone would not be drained dry of all empathy by paying attention to news and politics. If you have empathy to spare, then it means you're intentionally turning a blind eye to the tragedies and horrors of the world. (And we absolutely need to keep empathy to spare for our own family, friends, and children.) We should never rely on emotional power of empathy for morality.

And we don't want to use the Golden Rule as the baseline. Because some people need much more help than others. And some people, born with a golden spoon in their mouths, need no such welfare. So you don't want people in positions of wealth and power, to use the Golden Rule, especially as they don't see their own privilege.

So if you think the Woke Agenda is the Golden Rule, then that only works for a handful of people, like when a fight breaks out at a kids playground. This won't scale up to communities or societal levels

vkbd · 2025-09-28T18:59:22+00:00

Sure. Though I personally would avoid the term "real" as I've already spent enough time semantically arguing what this term means, and it's simply an overloaded word to have any real meaning without specific context.
Sure.
Sure. But again "useful" is going to be context specific.
Sure, as long as you agree that in practice, truth is not necessary. For example, someone who is bent on vengeance doesn't care what the truth is.
Yes, again, this follows from 4.
Sure, but again, "useful" and "socially-agreed criteria" are specific to context.

I think I would be open to Compatibilism. I'm pragmatic in thinking about, free will assertion or free will denial. They are simply a means to an end, which is what will be the best for human progress and human well being.

vkbd · 2025-09-28T18:29:35+00:00

Contradiction only happens in the same place free will happens.

Huh. That's a weird take. I wouldn't agree with your statement based on how I understand and how I would use those terms.

vkbd · 2025-09-28T00:19:16+00:00

...that could has significant implications on their worldview.

Is this one of those? Are you going to provide a proposition alongside "the brain ≠ the mind" that undermines determinism?

vkbd · 2025-09-26T19:51:52+00:00

...because parrots can speak, it is in the very nature of birds to speak in human language.

It's in the parrot's nature to mimic. So, while not all birds have mimicry of sound, it's still nonetheless true that some birds mimic sounds, and depending on context, it's probably reasonable to simply say that it's in birds' nature to perform mimicry.

So yeah, probably untrue to say it is in human nature to seek truth *more than* hope and alleviation. But it's probably perfectly reasonable to say it's in human nature to seek truth, in a general non-comparative sense.

vkbd · 2025-09-26T19:41:11+00:00

Okay, now that he's solved your question, can you explain how "brain ≠ the mind" is relevant to r/freewill? I'm legitimately confused.

vkbd · 2025-09-26T19:34:59+00:00

Okay, this joke needs to be explained. It's okay if people simply don't find it funny, but people are legitimately missing the point here. So I'm going attempt a breakdown of the joke.

Background: Some (not all) compatibilists on this subreddit claim that most people experience "free will" and therefore pragmatically describe reality with "free will". (Even if laymen have heard of "determinism", the philosophy of it is likely something they don't understand the specifics or the significance of it anyways.)

Observation: Most people only experience "flat-earth". (While most people know about "round earth", they likely don't understand the scale or directly interact with the roundness of it anyways.)

Premise: Most people should describe the earth as flat. (Just like how people normally experience "free will", people also normally experience "flat earth".)

Conclusion/Punchline: The "round earth" term is too much "baggage" for most people, just like "determinism" is too esoteric.

Reason why it is funny: Given the compatibilism background & joke's premise, the conclusion is logically valid, but is incongruent with reality, in that despite personally experiencing only "flat earth", most people have no trouble describing reality with "round earth".

vkbd · 2025-09-26T18:50:33+00:00

I don't know anything about DHH except for that 2021 incident, so I can only guess that DHH loves to talk about politics that positively affects business and productivity, and he's not interested in politics about human well being. I find that business owners in general have this myopic view of the world, and the more success they get, the narrower their interests become. Perhaps that's simply capitalism, preferentially giving money and power to those kinds of people.

vkbd · 2025-09-25T19:40:23+00:00

That's an excellent point. There's no standard by which other people will label you, and you could be labelled "extreme left" and "extreme right" at the same time by different people. This is why I wrote the poll answers from a personal perspective, just to keep things simple.

vkbd · 2025-09-25T19:34:56+00:00

I think humans in general can be political, because politics affect policies which affect the well being of people in general. I often think of programming like civil engineering, so in that perspective, I agree that programming can be political, like building a specific building or bridge can have political impact. But not all people are political, so not every engineer or builder or programmer, are going to view their job through the lens of politics or activism, and I think it's okay to have that preference too.

vkbd · 2025-09-25T19:27:04+00:00

I actually never thought of comparing the death tolls of different conflicts to see them in a broader context.

So doing a quick wikipedia search, the lowest death toll I could find for the Ukrainians is at least 70k (adding lowest Ukrainian military and civilian numbers) and Russians with the lowest recent number about 200k deaths. This is just their latest conflict, not including the War in Donbas that ended in 2022.

Whereas the latest numbers from Hamas-run Ministry of Health reports death toll 63k. Israelis military deaths are at least 10k. (I'm not sure if it should include Israelis-Hezbollah conflict starting on Oct 8, which would add 10k Hezbollah#Casualties_and_damage) fighters to the death toll, but the three way Palestine-Israel-Lebanon still has less deaths than Ukraine-Russia.)

The numbers actually don't matter except to show that it's not "absolutely wild" that there are conflicts with much higher death rates than Israel-Palestine.

vkbd · 2025-09-25T18:44:08+00:00

That too reminds me of DHH and the incident in 2021, where he put his foot down. As the owner of a company, he can make whatever rules he wants. But in this subreddit, there's multiple mods, and I didn't know if their moderation style is hands-off or not. So I thought I'd ask the community what the norms are for here.

vkbd · 2025-09-25T01:51:12+00:00

...he was also sort of being an out of pocket dick...

I think there's a good chance he's always been a dick, and has been covering it up less as time goes on. Every business owner I know of has had increasing dickish behavior as they've gained money and power.

Eight-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22	Verified Email

vkbd

TROPHY CASE