You write very well, this was as enjoyable read. I love hearing about others thoughts and ideas on things. I'm convinced there is a part that controls and another that observes / uses wiggle room. Which suggests not a freedom of will but its just enough variability to make me suppose there is some free will.
Thank you so much sweetie it means the world to me that you took the time and actually enjoyed reading, that’s all I could ask for. ❤️😭 I don’t care if that’s cringe.
Also, that’s a deep point you’re making.
I’ve long disagreed with published elite-tier Philosophers on this specific point.
You are correct: there are “parts that observe” and “parts that feel,” and many other parts; they are NOT the same.
Josh May wrote a book “Neuroethics” I think, where he says moral resp applies to the whole person (as an emergent agent) even if a single brain region or limited series of regions did the firing, assessing, etc, that made the “choice.”
In my view, even if agency is distributed throughout the brain, the parts of the brain that suffer punishment didn’t author the decision and never agreed to be part of that system!
Basically the anterior cingulate cortex and insula does the suffering. They are “experiential” modules. NOT “deliberating” ones.
Pain lands in the captive parts of the brain that feel, instead of the parts that did the calculating and weighed the choice and pulled the trigger. So the PFC regions did the crime and the ACC and insula does the time. Not fair, imo.
Same with pleasure by the way.
And a lot of this is moot because the PFCs didn’t ask to be how they are. They never got a vote.
So bottom line is I don’t think this provides “wiggle room.” Quite the contrary. It denies wiggle to libertarian free willers like Josh May.
My sense is he feels like it’s too mean to the victim NOT to blame the whole person who does something bad.
I empathize with that tremendously…but the part that empathizes isn’t the part that does the PHEELOSSOPHIZZLE. Thank God.
You're so welcome❤️ This is so interesting....Regardless of how small a mistake is, or how unintentional it was, we can be conditioned to feel a disproportionate amount of pain. Especially if our teachers used shame to control us. So, it's possible to become morally conditioned - acting in "moral ways" but not being genuinely moral at all.
asserting that some stuff you 'just know' and/or ought to know, and that everyone's dishonest or bizarrely confused if they don't, is worthless reasoning. it's just obnoxiously begging the question for significant metaphilosophical differences.
Not sure the context of your comment. Some stuff is worth discussion if it’s urgent and actionable, evidence and falsifiability and predictive power and scalability all seem to be useful models to inform decisions involving the pursuit of well-being and suffering, and values often diverge. Bringing it to specifics: I contend that pre-reflective use of deservedness language usually expresses a “basic desert” model and that this is corrosive at scale, and at odds with post-reflective intuitions, leading to cognitive dissonance. From this view there is a margin of “unnecessary suffering” to be mitigated if we adopt either hard incompatibilism or have Compatibilists make it more clear what they mean by “moral responsibility” and blame and praise. They may mean it in a forward looking context but that’s not how most people take it.
Wait, who is Rabinowitz? Haven’t heard of that one. Yeah Nihilism is defensible but it’s also defeasible, I’m not a nihilist. I’m a “moral valence intuitionist.” I think we actually can have oughts “worth wanting.” That’s right, the same thing Dennett did with freedom, I’m doing with ought. Not only do I argue this totally works, it actually works way better than it does for freedom. Ought worth wanting should be tied to valence. Ought becomes absurd absent an experiencer of emotional valence, just like the concept of sound is absurd without experience of auditory valence. We know what causes pain more or less. That’s why we have anesthetic. So I suggest we continue mapping the moral landscape and just accept that oughts are objective in the only way that matters. Again, we use Dennett’s “worth wanting” trick. It’s the only objectivity or realism worth wanting. In this way, moral realism becomes compatible with a Godless universe. As for variance in what matters, I suggest we engineer brains that omit psychopathy or even excessive fear, ignorance and selfishness. Problem solved.
aaron rabinowitz. he'll send you his phd dissertation if you ask him, it's about luck and advocating for luckpilling in education, which is basically just making students aware via socratic reasoning that, if everything is luck, there's no deservingness.
of course almost every view is defeasible, in that you may offer objections and see if you vibe with them sufficiently for you to not hold that view. i generally don't think it's that important or effective for persuading people to tell them what they should want. more substantively, i think that it can be perfectly understandable and rational to not want to stay alive, even in utopias where the wish to die does not arise from suffering experiences caused by those features of the utopia that most others enjoy.
i totally agree with engineering ourselves to make all kinds of suffering optional.
sorry, wasn't clear. i meant your claims about suffering, qualia and 'mattering'. nihilism seems rather defensible. it seems way more likely to me that there isn't any kind of 'information' or hidden order or state of affairs external to our universe or fundamentally embedded in it, that 'explains everything', makes everything or anything 'matter' or provides an arbitrarily fine-grained (milennia-to-milennia to smallest moment-to-moment...) normative map of 'the objectively correct things to do/the objectively incorrect things to not do) and makes it such that there are 'stakes' or renders it impossible to always just ask 'so?' — to not be grateful or dissatisfied or indifferent to it.
You write very well, this was as enjoyable read. I love hearing about others thoughts and ideas on things. I'm convinced there is a part that controls and another that observes / uses wiggle room. Which suggests not a freedom of will but its just enough variability to make me suppose there is some free will.
Thank you so much sweetie it means the world to me that you took the time and actually enjoyed reading, that’s all I could ask for. ❤️😭 I don’t care if that’s cringe.
Also, that’s a deep point you’re making.
I’ve long disagreed with published elite-tier Philosophers on this specific point.
You are correct: there are “parts that observe” and “parts that feel,” and many other parts; they are NOT the same.
Josh May wrote a book “Neuroethics” I think, where he says moral resp applies to the whole person (as an emergent agent) even if a single brain region or limited series of regions did the firing, assessing, etc, that made the “choice.”
In my view, even if agency is distributed throughout the brain, the parts of the brain that suffer punishment didn’t author the decision and never agreed to be part of that system!
Basically the anterior cingulate cortex and insula does the suffering. They are “experiential” modules. NOT “deliberating” ones.
Pain lands in the captive parts of the brain that feel, instead of the parts that did the calculating and weighed the choice and pulled the trigger. So the PFC regions did the crime and the ACC and insula does the time. Not fair, imo.
Same with pleasure by the way.
And a lot of this is moot because the PFCs didn’t ask to be how they are. They never got a vote.
So bottom line is I don’t think this provides “wiggle room.” Quite the contrary. It denies wiggle to libertarian free willers like Josh May.
My sense is he feels like it’s too mean to the victim NOT to blame the whole person who does something bad.
I empathize with that tremendously…but the part that empathizes isn’t the part that does the PHEELOSSOPHIZZLE. Thank God.
You're so welcome❤️ This is so interesting....Regardless of how small a mistake is, or how unintentional it was, we can be conditioned to feel a disproportionate amount of pain. Especially if our teachers used shame to control us. So, it's possible to become morally conditioned - acting in "moral ways" but not being genuinely moral at all.
Meaning is the simple avoid/approach mechanism in all life. To us it's an emergent aspect of cognitive complexity.
Self is the story you tell about how you fit into the world and society.
There is no sense in which the will is free, but we may feel free to the extent we are ignorant of causality.
asserting that some stuff you 'just know' and/or ought to know, and that everyone's dishonest or bizarrely confused if they don't, is worthless reasoning. it's just obnoxiously begging the question for significant metaphilosophical differences.
Not sure the context of your comment. Some stuff is worth discussion if it’s urgent and actionable, evidence and falsifiability and predictive power and scalability all seem to be useful models to inform decisions involving the pursuit of well-being and suffering, and values often diverge. Bringing it to specifics: I contend that pre-reflective use of deservedness language usually expresses a “basic desert” model and that this is corrosive at scale, and at odds with post-reflective intuitions, leading to cognitive dissonance. From this view there is a margin of “unnecessary suffering” to be mitigated if we adopt either hard incompatibilism or have Compatibilists make it more clear what they mean by “moral responsibility” and blame and praise. They may mean it in a forward looking context but that’s not how most people take it.
i'm all with you on incompatibilism and no-desert. hurray sapolsky, caruso, pereboom, rabinowitz. luck swallows all.
Wait, who is Rabinowitz? Haven’t heard of that one. Yeah Nihilism is defensible but it’s also defeasible, I’m not a nihilist. I’m a “moral valence intuitionist.” I think we actually can have oughts “worth wanting.” That’s right, the same thing Dennett did with freedom, I’m doing with ought. Not only do I argue this totally works, it actually works way better than it does for freedom. Ought worth wanting should be tied to valence. Ought becomes absurd absent an experiencer of emotional valence, just like the concept of sound is absurd without experience of auditory valence. We know what causes pain more or less. That’s why we have anesthetic. So I suggest we continue mapping the moral landscape and just accept that oughts are objective in the only way that matters. Again, we use Dennett’s “worth wanting” trick. It’s the only objectivity or realism worth wanting. In this way, moral realism becomes compatible with a Godless universe. As for variance in what matters, I suggest we engineer brains that omit psychopathy or even excessive fear, ignorance and selfishness. Problem solved.
aaron rabinowitz. he'll send you his phd dissertation if you ask him, it's about luck and advocating for luckpilling in education, which is basically just making students aware via socratic reasoning that, if everything is luck, there's no deservingness.
of course almost every view is defeasible, in that you may offer objections and see if you vibe with them sufficiently for you to not hold that view. i generally don't think it's that important or effective for persuading people to tell them what they should want. more substantively, i think that it can be perfectly understandable and rational to not want to stay alive, even in utopias where the wish to die does not arise from suffering experiences caused by those features of the utopia that most others enjoy.
i totally agree with engineering ourselves to make all kinds of suffering optional.
sorry, wasn't clear. i meant your claims about suffering, qualia and 'mattering'. nihilism seems rather defensible. it seems way more likely to me that there isn't any kind of 'information' or hidden order or state of affairs external to our universe or fundamentally embedded in it, that 'explains everything', makes everything or anything 'matter' or provides an arbitrarily fine-grained (milennia-to-milennia to smallest moment-to-moment...) normative map of 'the objectively correct things to do/the objectively incorrect things to not do) and makes it such that there are 'stakes' or renders it impossible to always just ask 'so?' — to not be grateful or dissatisfied or indifferent to it.