philosopher

former biostatistician in a previous life

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  • 25 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2024

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  • Do you think knowledge, reasoning, experience, and risks do not play any role in our decisions?

    if you accept physical determinism, then knowledge, reasoning, experience, etc. are part of the physical system (ie. your brain) which makes the decision. they only play a role in that they influence the physical system for the decision making. the problem remains that you are forced to make a certain decision according to physics. the knowledge, reasoning, etc. are significant insofar as they influence the physics.

    in determinism: you change the physics, you change the outcome. knowledge and reasoning changes the physics (the state of your mind), which changes the outcome. their influence on your decision making process does not imply free will.

    Even if there was free will, those things would be vastly more important than it. Free will is totally unimportant

    i gave an example of a tree accidentally falling and killing someone in the other comment, it is hard to imagine free will has nothing to do with why you don’t hold the tree morally responsible.

    anyway, i am going to stop replying, my original reply was just showing that the free will problem is very much an issue for any deterministic position. there are potentially good ways to salvage determinism and i give references to three in my first comment, but the point you put forth is not convincing.


  • Just because the agent would’ve never made a different choice, doesn’t mean these things don’t matter anymore, it’s wholly irrelevant to whether or not we should punish them.

    i do not make claims about punishments for actions, but instead i am talking about moral responsibility. consider a cat knocking over my cup, compared to a child who does it on purpose. your inclination is to hold the child morally responsible but not the cat. though you may punish the cat, you would not think that the cat is capable of the type of moral reasoning a child is capable of.

    it may help to consider the example of a tree falling accidentally by gravity and killing a person. is that tree morally responsible for murder?


  • if you haven’t noticed by now, im an incompatibilist (i do not believe determinism is compatible with free will)

    we fundamentally disagree on what a ‘decision’ is. you believe that logical possibility is enough for free will, i don’t.

    The agent made its decision based on knowledge, reasoning, experience, the risks, the morals

    i argue that if you accept determinism, this is an illusion. you believe you are making a decision based on free will because it is logically possible that you can take any of the available options, but it in actuality it is no different than the marble, you are physically bound to a specific outcome.



  • there is a bit of a shifting of goalposts here with respect to how you define making a ‘choice’ with regard to logical and physical possibility/impossibility.

    suppose i place a marble on a slope and let go. the marble rolls down due to gravity. did the marble ‘choose’ to roll down? it does not seem so.

    is it possible for the opposite to occur, that is, the marble to roll up?

    • logically? yes, there is nothing logically contradictory about the marble rolling up after i drop it
    • physically? no, due to the laws of gravity

    the logical possibility that the marble can roll upwards does not mean that it is a free will choice. replace the marble with an agent ‘choosing’ between options A and B, supposing the agent ‘chooses’ B. because you claim to be determinist, i take it you believe physics completely dictates the universe’s events, thus it is physical necessity that the agent ‘chooses’ B. however, it is logically possible for the agent to ‘choose’ A as choosing A does not entail anything logically contradictory.

    what is the difference in the case of the agent vs. the marble? or do you actually believe the marble ‘chooses’ to roll down?


  • It’s not that you didn’t have a choice, it’s that you would’ve made that decision no matter what based on the laws of physics

    in your view, what is the difference between having a forced decision and not having a choice? and why exactly would this forced choice be punishable in the same way a free one would be?

    the point was that it was a test, god should already know who’s going to be selected, if there’s no free will, this is still all pointless.

    a calvinist would not agree that the point is a test. read up on the ‘doctrine of unconditional election’ if you are curious. in brief, god makes decisions about who is saved and who isn’t not based on conditions they follow in their life, but based on his own purposes and goals.

    If it’s predetermined, why did god make all these evil people that were just going to be miserable in hell anyway?

    this is the problem of evil, there are numerous responses and the literature is extensive. again, a calvinist would probably say that he created evil people for his glory and grace. notably, jesus dying on the cross for humanity’s sins as a display of god’s grace does not make sense without the existence of evil.


  • not a christian, but it is a problem for atheists depending on your framework of morality

    traditionally, determinism is not compatible with moral responsibility since all actions are predetermined and it is not obvious that one can be held morally responsible for them. you have to do some mental gymnastics with either the nature of causation (see hume), or the nature of morality (see error theory), or the nature of what exactly ‘freedom’ is (see john stewart mill) to resolve this incompatibility

    to the problem of the theist test, standard christian doctrine is that your fate in heaven is predetermined and individuals have been pre-chosen by god (theological term is ‘the elect’). in that sense, your worldly life is not a ‘test’, but the idea is that the holy spirit reveals god to those who have been selected.

    there are philosophical problems with all of these, but just wanted to make the point that both theist and atheist philosophers have been debating this for hundreds of years and it is not at all actually obvious accepting hard determinism solves everything.







  • sure that is how pop3 does it

    but metadata is still replicated to the server, so this does not solve the metadata replication issue

    even if you dont explicitly store metadata or encrypt it in some way, the server still necessarily knows stuff like timestamps of when the messages are sent for example.

    sure, you can delete it later, but you also have to trust the server to actually do that, and there is no way to guarantee this in any protocol



  • tbf there is not really a good solution to the ‘ephemeral aspect’ problem

    the only way to truly not sync metadata to or btwn servers at all is to use a p2p model, in which you cant send anything if one of the parties is offline

    simplex might be a bit better in this regard, but still relies on servers for syncing. at least it doesnt extensively replicate metadata like matrix does though

    so it depends on your threat model whether this is a compromise or not




  • used kindle paperwhite, check firmware version to ensure jailbreak

    jailbreak, install koreader

    use calibre to manage library, source books from uh. the seas

    amazon devices have quite good screens for the price

    however, if you are reading comics, you should get a bigger screen probably a tablet, look into boox and meebook, both are android based

    i would not recommend color screens rn, they still have significantly lower contrast and resolution and refresh is slow af