Interpretablility. That's a commonality where we meet. Like breathing happens as a reflex and in deep guided breathes.

I have a very sort of out-there interpretation of it. If, for the sake of argument, our society's goal is to reduce total suffering in the world, then we can look at "punishment" as an INCREASE in suffering. Since, from the person who is being punished, they certainly suffer.

So what I wonder about is whether we can entirely remove this notion of punishment from our judicial system. At this stage, it's merely a utopian ideal but I don't think it's an impossible concept. The issue is whether we can create deterrents (i.e. to murder) without threatening punishment as a consequence.

So at the moment, here's how it works.

Total murders: 100
Total suffering: 100 + 100 = 200 (the victims and the murderers now suffer as well as a consequence of their crime. Assuming 1 murderer per murdee).

But the way this works is by acting as a deterrent to murdering in the first place. People reconsider whether they're going to murder because they want to avoid a life sentence (i.e. suffering). WITHOUT punishment acting as a deterrent, we might get something like the following (i.e. people murdering willy nilly).

Total murders: 800
Total suffering: 800 (since the murderers are not punished for their crime)

The goal is to reduce total suffering. So if we could introduce a deterrent that doesn't increase suffering, that'd be +EV. So perhaps consider a "reward" based system for abstaining from murdering.

Total murders: 100
Total suffering: 100 (since murderers are no longer punished, but instead, since they murdererd someone, they cannot collect their $1million good behaviour bonus).

Of course, this is a crazy idea with myriad considerations I've not put forth.

I suspect the best approach would be some sort of education/reward/punishment hybrid thing but ATM for me it's just about thinking about alternatives to the existing system.

As I said, it's not a matter of empathy. It's not how "you view free will". It's how you actually semantically consider the entire concept of free will. This is far less subjective than you make it out to be.

FWIW, I think it's perfectly good and just to hold beliefs, even if they're not true or accurate or righteous. At some point we abandon happiness on the quest for wisdom/truth, it seems a futile mission. The happiest people, regardless of their beliefs or values, are the best and most sovereign people.

Yeah, this is more along the lines of how I'm thinking. There is a consciousness within us, but the actual US is the thing/ego/awareness which is observing this consciousness.

I think this idea of causation fits in here, carlo. If we don't get to pick our parents, then anything we do after birth is a result of things completely out of our control. Our socioeconomic upbringing, the thoughts we have (which are simply responses to surrounding stimuli), and even our most introspective thoughts regarding topics like free will. It's about how these ideas and thoughts crop up in our mind. It happens in an arbitrary manner, so there's no freedom involved. It's almost a semantic debate though because as Dennett would posit, we certainly feel as though we're free agents and the authors of our thoughts and actions. But in reality (Harris), these thoughts are given to us. They simply appear in consciousness with no screening process before they go to work in our minds.

What made him sit down to write this book? What went through his mind? I suspect an idea appeared to him one day, "I want to write a book". At the inception of this idea, ONLY this idea came to his mind. There wasn't a screening of these ideas, i.e. "Tolstoy, today you can choose to have either of the following ideas: the idea that you might consider writing, or the idea that you might consider going fishing. Which shall it be?"

Now if Tolstoy got to choose between the two ideas, he'd have free will. But instead, only one idea came to his mind. He didn't choose that idea. He didn't choose it to float to the surface of his mind. He didn't choose that over the fishing idea. The idea just happened. It happened to him. It all went on within his mind, so it's unintuitive to say it wasn't a decision he made, but we have no say in what finds its way into our minds.

You can choose to prepare your mind in a certain direction before you come to think about the choice. You could of course say that choice to prepare your mind was out of your control too.

I prefer to say we have partly free will. Alternatively I don't exist, take your pick.

There is a basic fallacy in that not being controlled is a qualifier for being free, so no control is an indication of freedom from necessary control. Ergo s free will would not be controlled in a mechanical sense of control.

So it takes a fine consideration of the experience of guiding as it qualifies as not control while something free is free to follow a guide. Control still not necessary.

This may help as it speaks to what you are saying. the "Philosophy of Freedom" by Rudolph Steiner.

http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA004/...004_index.html

Coming to grips with "sense free thinking" will help. Also, trapping one's self into a corner of mechanism with respect to thoughts by saying that since they are not under your control or your creation then free will doesn't exist doesn't follow. The good thing is that you do realize that they (thoughts) are not owned by you nor under your control for most will state and believe that the thoughts are theirs and hold on dearly to the same.

"Freedom" is sought via the route of a "selfless" perception of thoughts .
allowing the thought world to expose itself to us in which we take an active role leads to sense free thinking.

Thoughts are not within the ownership of human beings but in reality are a spiritual web of active being to which the future of Man is to be ensconced. The thoughts we appreciate are "dead thoughts" in which the human soul/spiritual being can enliven through an active thinking process which in Anthroposophy is called the three stages of thinking; imaginative thinking, inspirational thinking and intuitive thinking, the names of which should not be confused with the ordinary words relating to the types.

The short of it is that the thoughts to which Man of our times appreciates are deadened but upon trained thinking one finds the spiritual reality of thoughts as "beings" . Our state of evolution mandates that the human soul cannot tolerate a full experience of "thought beings" which live and therefore we in natural course deal with an abstracted or deadened thoughts.

Sorry, seem to be going on and on but the referral will do it much better and is of a clear and lucid read.

"In thinking I experience myself united within the stream of cosmic existence".

Also, "one and done"masks the issue of reincarnation in which prior to coming to the earth while within the spiritual world we actually plan our home; the home of nation,race, clan,family, gender, etc... It is not happenstance nor chance but we are inextricable involved in this plan with the help of the creative beings of our real world, the world of the spirit. Yada, yada, one step at a time.

Free thinking sense rhymes with mindfulness on the streets at least for interconnected timeliness.

A reward based system is a fine thought. Whether or not deterrents are better is debatable.

A previous post of yours:
This is disgusting. I laugh at how you could possibly think employing a torturer to increase suffering in the world is more "practical" financially or otherwise. You've clearly not put much thought into this. You simply dislike murderers. Which is normal. Didn't anyone ever mention "two wrongs don't make a right" to you? The whole point of the free will/determinism argument is so that we don't have this kind of irrational thinking permeating our judicial systems.

Do you still feel this way? This post of yours seems a little obnoxious, considering now that you are showing that you believe deterrents might be an effective way of reducing murder.

Why would you not use the most effective deterrent to net the least suffering based on the model you provided in your previous post.

Total murders:
Total suffering:
Based on a deterrent or reward sysytem.

If this is what it is all about, why are you anti torture?

Absolutely. And I think it's a perfectly rational response to someone who is suggesting we torture our crooks and isn't joking.

Deterrents work. I'm someone happy to consider the most outlandish ideas as plausible (clearly), but torture has no place in any society.

Yes. But there's a difference. One murder does not equal one torture, in terms of suffering. When you murder someone, typically, it's a relatively painless and quick process (i.e. shooting someone in the face). Let's call that 5 suffering. When you torture someone for their entire life, you're looking at a suffering degree exponentially higher. There's no way it could be +EV. And now you might say, well who cares they're a murderer and deserve it anyway (which is naive obv). But the fact remains that someone, from their subjective experience, i.e. the only experience, is undergoing unspeakable suffering.

I understand your argument well, though. If 1 murder == 1 torture in terms of suffering then sure, we may have a candidate to consider. It may well be impossible to test in any society, but in theory it should be considered.

So re the suffering thing. Net suffering shouldn't be measured on how many people it affects. i.e., the max possible suffering one person can have is a unit of 1. And so if we kill 10 people, we get 10 suffering in the world. But if 10 people die immediately in high impact car accidents every day (they do), we might say this is a suffering of 10 (1 each). If we torture 10 people for the rest of their lives, we might get something more like 1,000,000 suffering as a result (arbitrary numbers obv).

What if it was +EV? Would it then be worth it to torture? That is the question.

Absolutely.

So what's the deal with this post you made?

Absolutely. And I think it's a perfectly rational response to someone who is suggesting we torture our crooks and isn't joking.

If you read my previous post, in which I mention suffering isn't a static thing, it explains this pretty well.

It has nothing to do with suffering being a static thing or not.

My argument: When thinking about building deterrents for crimes, we should do what is optimal. If it's torture that's fine. If it's just imprisonment that's fine. Whatever gets us the result we want.

Your argument:
Originally Posted by meale
I understand your argument. Two counterarguments are that it'd be a horribly inefficient and expensive way to deter crime and that it is ethical barbarism.

Inefficient and expensive, not really the point. But we can debate it if you want.
Barbaric: This is the thought I'm trying to attack of yours.

What do you mean by ethical barbarism? I tried to debate you on that previous in this thread. You brought up mental illness and some Utopian plan where we pay people for not paying crimes.

I think what you mean by ethical barbarism is feminine morality. You don't want people to suffer even if it's what's best for all of us.

What about using dogs on sacred water protectors? The people who show up with dogs to use on nonviolent activists have what?

I'm going to take another swing at this w/ the Mona Lisa:



I think that it's safe to say that this otherwise uninteresting painting when it comes to the subject is the most famous painting in the world bec of a question: 'Is she smiling or not?' It's hard to accept that a chain of causality resulted in the perfection of exactly placed brush strokes to achieve the facial expression but what's even harder to believe is that causality has brought about the near universal answer to that question which is 'Hmmmmm..............'. How does causality arrange that?

'Bah to causality', that's what I say.

Lol. Well said.

I made a sand art replica of the Mona Lisa using my imagination and it's this post.

The barbarism exponentially increases suffering to the point where including torture in the same conversation as "optimal" is a thought crime. I didn't put this in my earlier posts, you're right, but on what basis are you now disagreeing with this?

So now your argument is just a total suffering argument, seems reasonable. Though I'd be for really making one guy suffer if it saved lets say 10 lives.

A few quotes of yours:

Oh I don't know... How about something humane? Like prison or some sort of correctional facility?

Imprisonment is more than adequate. Psychopaths need to be empathised with.

Torturing someone because of their nature isn't going to undo what they did. Incarcerate them so they cannot reoffend but as soon as you look at capital punsihment or torture, you're reverting to a form of barbarism. May as well start burning witches at the stake again.

Do you still agree with these?

Yeah. Remember those with psychopathy have a mental inhibition to foresee consequences or empathise with others. If we start torturing them, it's the exact same as torturing a territorial grizzly bear that attacked someone. It's completely illogical.

Regardless of how profound our deterrent is, it won't stop psychopathy from being a thing.

I know my argument shifted from an ethical perspective back to a total suffering viewpoint but they do tie in together.

So you'd torture one guy for the rest of his life if it could prevent 10 (assume) relatively painless deaths?

Causality can get a bad rap but conceptually it is real if used properly. If hunting and I see the bush quaver and subsequently see a pheasant arise from the bush I can bring cause and effect to the fore and state that the pheasant caused the bush to move even though I didn't see it do it.

A waterfall streams over the face of a mountain while near it small streams from the same source go down the mountain ; only in this case the mountain acts as an impediment to the flow of the water.

Speaking historically there is school of thought which speaks to history in a linear manner and therefore each age/day/month/year is believed to be causal to the following.

Back to the mountain there would be a type of conceptual thinking in that in the case of the waterfall one would say that the water on top causes the lower water to fall and on and on... The scientist knows that it was gravity which caused the water to fall and not the water on top of the water.

The linear history, using specious thought processes, speaks to the water on top of the water concept.

There is a "Great Man" approach to history which states that history moves on through the actions of "great men". Napoleon, Newton, Bacon,Plato, Aristotle, etc...

The "Great Man" approach does speak to the incarnation of human kind into their earthly places and in this "great men" are in some way causal to the warp and woof of the historical exegesis.

Further consideration reveals that new spirits are incarnating who carry their abilities and destinies onto the earth with the most seeable the "great men". The lesson here is that if introducing a young man/woman to history it would be seemly to recommend biographies .

The progression from the "big bang" to the present is not exactly history but close as both are within the conceptual real of proper or improper thinking. The causal approach of science, in this case, is the same as the water upon the water causality . The use of causality in this manner is facile and non thinking at its core . Just a there are men who incarnate to lead a particular age into myriads of channels so is there a science that includes Man in the equation which can display the human evolutionary spirit.

The short is that human kind must not only be part of the historical process but likewise the science of Man can only bring to light the evolution of the cosmic, the cosmic human kind.

There isn't little machines inside the Mona Lisa causing people to smile back at it. Is it the artist's free intention?

A philosopher is an artist of the spirit in that he enters into the higher realms of thinking with its thought processes and brings the thoughts to us translated into the speech of the day.

The artist does not enter with intention to bring those realms into speech but enters into the higher realms and translates his experiences into a work of art.

Both the artist and the philosopher express the same region of the cosmos into the realm of the human within different expressions.

From what I understand the artist is not so conscious in his endeavor as the philosopher and in this the idea of "free intent" may be moot. I think the idea is that the artist is more so within a "revelatory" experience which does not lend itself to rationality/logic or structured thought. Open to any help here.LOL

When I was young I hung out in pool halls. The best I ever did was run two racks but there are the greats who can run many more. If any of you play pool you will know how tough that is: The great player has to think and think hard. Pattern recognition, a plan for how to play it, the muscle control, the breathing and all of the adjustments necessary if the cue ball doesn't stop exactly where wanted. And the player has to leave a ball in just the right spot to allow the cue ball to smash into the new rack.

Certainly it can be said that a chain of causality is the explanation but, come on. What the great players can do is amazing and I prefer the simpler explanation, the one that we all live with: The player is thinking and planning. And, for the life of me, I can't understand why some people can't accept that.

This is hardly a satisfying argument...

Obviously. I'm not so sure what this has to do with free will.