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, itâs pretty clear youâll 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) ânormalâ. 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 âenvironmentalâ 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 âmaking a choiceâ is an epiphenomenon of the operation of the brain and itâs not possible for us to make different choices in the way we imagine.
You donât 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 itâs possible that I fail the lift because Iâm just lazy and needed to expend more effort, thatâs not going to be anyoneâs 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 doesnât mean they donât 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 donât know if the world is deterministic or not, so possibly you making the post is the result of some random outcome. Either way, I donât think you had the power to decide to do differently in the way people usually suppose.
Same question as before: what are âyouâ in this and how is it possible that youâre 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? âIt feels like I can make choicesâ is pretty weak stuff in the face of this. It feels like the keyboard Iâm typing this on is solid material, but in reality itâs mostly empty space.
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Iâve 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 Wendyâs. 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, thatâs 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 doesnât really make sense. Itâs a lot more like wishful thinking than a reasonably supported hypothesis or conjecture.
Whatâs the mechanism that causes this randomness?
I donât believe that understood and perhaps itâs misleading to even try to understand it as something that has a mechanism. I dunno. But fundamentally at the smallest levels of matter/energy, thereâs randomness. Well, thereâs 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 itâs 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 donât 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 someoneâs 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 isnât 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 âseeâ 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.
There are strong theoretical reasons that I donât really understand that suggest that these things are truly random in a very fundamental way.
That gets us around the depressing prospect that our lives are predetermined. It still doesnât grant us agency (Not saying you were making any such arguments).