I don’t recall that specifically but it’s a huge thread. I do remember him speculating early on that it was genetic or an underlying health condition and suspect he was correct about that to some degree.
Right. Like while I don’t think obesity is healthy and I don’t think we should pretend otherwise, alcoholism and other addiction isn’t healthy either and the solution is extremely well known (stop or moderate your use of the substance), we still manage to respond with compassion to addicts who struggle to do this. Yet even though the solution to obesity is far less obvious (CICO is nowhere near the full story) a lot of people on the left are still somehow convinced the problem is BOOTSTRAPS and that fat people who can’t lose weight are just lazy people. We avoided this with alcoholism by pathologizing it - like NORMAL people can always control themselves in all circumstances, but because addicts have a disease of the mind, they can’t. It’s blindingly obvious if you look at humanity that addiction is merely a special case of incomplete self-control that everyone suffers from in one way or another. We just don’t want to acknowledge that none of us are as in control of our behaviour as we like to think. I personally have issues with drinking and procrastination, among other things. Even if it were as simple as CICO, the fact that I don’t struggle with overeating is not because I’m awesome, it’s just because my brain is not wired that way. I’ve been on and off antidepressants a couple times and reliably stacked on like 10kg each time. Can giving brain chemistry a poke turn me into a lazier person? If my level of “laziness” is a consequence of my brain chemistry, in what sense am I responsible for this?
The problem here is that we imagine that some functions of the brain have moral valence and others don’t. I will spank most of the population at doing maths in my head but that isn’t held to make me a better person. I don’t go around telling people they need to just try harder at it. However if someone is better at maintaining focus and discipline than I am, that makes me an inferior person, even though it is manifestly obvious that this difference is also in the structure and chemistry of the brain - otherwise we wouldn’t have a situation where some people get addicted to alcohol and some are lifelong drinkers and never do.
The popular view of free will falls apart as soon as you look at it at all critically. Imagine trying to explain it to an alien. You’d be like “yes, you see I have free will, what happens is that I have intentions and they translate into behaviour. At least that’s what often happens, but sometimes I experience internal conflict concerning my intentions. When that happens I can’t really predict in advance how I will behave, sometimes I behave in accordance with my intentions and sometimes not”. The alien would diagnose you as suffering from a delusion that your intentions are what ultimately command your behaviour.
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The obesity rate in the US is roughly about 50% higher compared to the OECD average. My guess is that part of that can be explained by people making choices.
I would take it as solid evidence of people not making choices.
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Brain chemistry is variable within a range across individuals, to say nothing about body and organ chemistry, much less environment (farm, fishing boat, classroom, office). Though not reducible to a single neurotransmitter or brian subsystem, it’s pretty clear you’ll get a broad range of eating behavior and body responses even in controlled environment. No real broader point, but I generally view mild pharmaceutical drugs as nudging the baseline brain environment more toward (or beyond) “normal”. The person could, counterfactually, have been born that way, but they happen to get there (if lucky, and to an extent) through a pill.
And of course the “environmental” effects are wide ranging, from broader culture, advertising, common foods, family practices, state, local, federal regulations, costs of different food, housing vs fast food vs grocery zoning, typical employment/activities, city layouts, disposable income and prevalence of cars vs walking/bikes, geography, etc.
Is your point that our consciousness is a merely a passive observer and any of (what we conceive as) our actions is predetermined by outside influences? Do we have any agency at all? Enough to meaningfully influence the path we take?
Yeah, I think that what we call “making a choice” is an epiphenomenon of the operation of the brain and it’s not possible for us to make different choices in the way we imagine.
You don’t have to go this far to be a bit more skeptical of the idea of the power of choice though. If I repeatedly bench press some weight that is near my max, I will eventually fail the lift. While it’s possible that I fail the lift because I’m just lazy and needed to expend more effort, that’s not going to be anyone’s first port of call as an explanation. When required to expend willpower repeatedly, people eventually fail at it. That the constraints on this are less obvious than the physical lifts doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Do you also apply this to other areas: not doing your work, being racist, committing crimes? Is one powerless to change their behavior? Was I always going to make this post given the stimuli I received?
Yes, all of the above. Well, I don’t know if the world is deterministic or not, so possibly you making the post is the result of some random outcome. Either way, I don’t think you had the power to decide to do differently in the way people usually suppose.
Same question as before: what are “you” in this and how is it possible that you’re some sort of prime mover of causality such that you can reach the hand of your will into the operation of the universe and change it? “It feels like I can make choices” is pretty weak stuff in the face of this. It feels like the keyboard I’m typing this on is solid material, but in reality it’s mostly empty space.
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I’ve since I learned this I do everything I can to purposely avoid situations where I need to use my willpower, so I can save it for the times I have to use it.
IE - going to lunch with coworkers and trying to resist the basket of chips or bread on the table, or beer if they decided to get that (usually Fridays). Huge battle of willpower for me. Then on the way home I would just say fuck it and get Wendy’s. I just stopped going to lunch with coworkers for the most part as they would never go anywhere healthy.
I also never have unhealthy carbs in the house. Way too much temptation.
If that is true then nothing we discuss here is of any consequence as every moment from now until the end of the universe is already determined by the laws of physics.
I have thought about determinism before (not deeply) and I believe that the universe is mostly deterministic, maybe completely. I admit that there is some wishful thinking involved hoping that I am not just a passenger in this roller coaster we call life, unable to change course, destined to ever move forward along the rails until the day I die.
The only argument I could come up with that this might possibly not true is that we do not understand consciousness and why it exists at all. Maybe at that level processes happen that are not deterministic.
Does not account for randomness, which is understood to be at the core of the laws of physics. Basically nothing is absolutely determinable. But, that’s pure randomness.
At one point in my life, when I was less accepting of the meaninglessness of everything, I would entertain the notion that randomness allowed for the possibility of free will, but that doesn’t really make sense. It’s a lot more like wishful thinking than a reasonably supported hypothesis or conjecture.
What’s the mechanism that causes this randomness?
I don’t believe that understood and perhaps it’s misleading to even try to understand it as something that has a mechanism. I dunno. But fundamentally at the smallest levels of matter/energy, there’s randomness. Well, there’s randomness at every level, but the bigger you are the smaller the chances of anything really weird happening.
Is it truly random or just unpredictable for us? What appears random to us might simply exceed our capability to understand what is happening.
It might. Physics could of course be wrong about a lot, but the standard understanding is that it’s truly random.
There are some processes which appear to us to be random, but perhaps we simply lack knowledge of the underlying factors.
As a free will pessimist I don’t think indeterminism will save free will. The problem is that you need some way that mind can act on matter. So far all the evidence is that mind is just a consequence of the operation of the brain - for example, we can get just about any change we want in the nature of someone’s mind by messing around with the structure and chemistry of the brain. The subjective sense that I have of making choices is very poor evidence. It also seems to me that I have a continuous field of vision, but I know that isn’t actually true. The brain edits the world and presents a picture of it to us that helps us navigate our lives as social animals.
This one is mind-blowing. People do not see the real world. You make it up. That goes for your entire experience, not just filling in the blind spot.
(this illusion is better with a graph in the background where you “see” the lines of the graph.)
eta: this is better
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True but consciousness (or the illusion there of) still seems to be something immaterial.