People's choices also are in some way a product of their environment (heritage, parents, neighborhood and so on) and their suchness/nature, both of which they can't do much about - aren't they? Besides, judging them is hardly useful - they're what they are and society has already got the consequences part covered so what's judgment adding here?
Do we need to keep making personal judgements to keep the social ones going? Was it really a bunch of people idly judging that really lead to the formal ones to be defined?
IOW sure if objective judgement is needed towards some utility - making formal/societal ones - do it. The point like with every 'don't' is not to say don't judge no matter - point is don't generally judge unless it is fair/useful/targeted towards general betterment.
I think there is inherent value to openly judging people, and there is nothing inherently wrong with having and expressing "negative" emotion. IMO where we are actually failing as a society is in our acceptance of /being judged/. And I do not mean acceptance in the way where you must feel positive about it - my point is exactly the opposite; openly judge them right back. If two people judge each other harshly and also are accepting of each other then they may still carry on with seizing opportunities to help each other rather than creating distance and trying to forget each other exists. Over time, the confrontation is a catalyst for evolving our behavior with each other but only if we are all accepting of being judged
If I am truly honest, I think it is ironic to preach for people to not do something (like judge) as a means of supporting an acceptance of people's behaviors. I feel like there is an underlying assumption to your stance that judgement and harsh language is inherently bad. You can both accept someone the way they are and judge them for it.. and I personally believe it is /required/ to accept them the way they are in order to provide a more "objective" judgement.
edit: to answer your question, yes i believe idle judgements are the grassroots to future formalized societal rules. formalism is a well studied idea in philosophy and is ultimately a self sustaining illusion built upon informal phenomenon. In other words, you cannot create a formal system to govern subjective behavior without informal subjective behavior laying the groundwork first.
This comment should not be downvoted. We have yet to explain all the inner workings of the brain nor the exact mechanism that drives human behavior. Some future discovery will, perhaps, make our current understanding look downright stupid and primeval in retrospect.
Let's state the obvious: humans _choose_ to modify themselves and their surroundings in a way trees do not, and it offers us the ability to move away from the light if we want. Failure to recognize this apparent difference stunts any drive to investigate further and it's insulting to both humans and trees.
On a level of empathy, I get it. We need compassion for eachother and predicaments that are often not of our choosing. Fine. Let's at least say that in some ways people are like trees and in other ways they are not. Ultimately that's not a very deep insight and rings very much like the kind of thing teenagers say while stoned.
However - I mean no disrespect to Richard or Ram or however he wanted to be called. The man did incredible work toward helping his fellow humans and for this reason alone he deserves great respect. I'm sad for his loss and I hope I can do even a portion of the good he did during his life.
I've come to believe that humans are only really responsible for their behaviour when present, and then their behaviour is compassionate and kind. Most people, most of the time, are more-or-less running on automatic, like meat-robots.
In other words, if they are asleep they're blameless and if they are awake they're harmless.
I'm not claiming it's true, I'm just saying that it's helped me to be more forgiving and easy-going.
>I've come to believe that humans are only really responsible for their behavior when present.
True. Being present means you observe the heart feeling, the mind thinking and the body acting. It means you bring yourself into focus, becoming aware of your own existence, watching the motives and the results of your actions, and Studying the person you have built around yourself, inadvertence. I became less judgmental, and calmer since i began learning to 'query' and question my motives. These days I don't do it as often as I used to, but i am much less on auto-pilot.
An exercise I learned from Sam Harris that finally started to convince me that free will is an illusion goes as follows:
1. Choose a movie title
2. Now do it again with your eyes closed and try to figure out precisely how you chose the movie title.
3. Keep doing it.
After a while you realize that stuff just “appears” to us. The same holds true for more than just movie titles. How exactly that process works, or why it appears like as if we have free will is an interesting subject.
"I do not believe in freedom of the will. Schopenhauer's words: "Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills" accompany me in all situations throughout my life." -- Albert Einstein
I can agree that you are factually correct, but I disagree with the conclusion. Namely, "coming-up with something" in your head definitely looks a lot like things are appearing out of nowhere.
But we also make choices and decisions as we encounter situations. I'm not a particularly creative person, so I see my freewill expressed more in the form of the decisions and choices I make. I am fully conscious that if I do this, that is a likely outcome, good or bad. I have emotions that affect my judgment and decisions, but I also have the ability, with my own willpower, to choose to overcome those as well.
To describe this process as just thoughts appearing to me seems overly simplistic. Just because we don't understand a process in intimate detail doesn't mean we can ascribe to it sheer randomness. There are very real things happening, and we acknowledge this through other, more complex emotions like guilt, regret, sadness, and so on based on our actions that go a certain way and then with pride, happiness, and confidence when they go another way.
It seems like an overly complex system for things that just "appear" in out head. The fact that we experience these emotions as a result of choices indicates to me that we are capable of acknowledging when we've made a "right" or "wrong" choice, and sometimes it's also "complicated", like almost everything else in this world is (i.e., somewhat in between).
You really think you didn't choose to engage in and persist in that exercise? You don't think you had any choice in considering the arguments and whether to accept/reject them?
I honestly understand why determinism sounds like a compelling theory, but it's not just experience that defies it. I see no compelling reason to argue for determinism if you sincerely believe in it.
Ok, let's go one level deeper. How do you decide which argument makes sense to you? For example, say you choose 'X' or 'Y' because of criterion 'A'. Why criterion 'A'? What makes you think that that's a suitable criterion in this situation? Repeat ad infinitum."It's obvious", you say in frustration at the end. But is it really? There's a reason we are nowhere near AGI...
Anyway, try defining free will precisely. You'll find that it's an extremely incoherent concept (within our current model of causality) . Try posting your definition and I'll be happy to poke holes in it. There's a reason that the free will vs determinism debate hasn't gone anywhere for thousands of years. Perhaps we need a new way of thinking about causality.
The fact that we use intuition in choice and not some formal rational system seems orthogonal to whether we're making choices or only experience an illusion of choice.
Legally determinism is rejected out of hand, interpersonally we assume that individuals bear responsibility for their choices, it's only in some abstruse metaphysical sense that determinism means anything, and there it's largely meaningless.
While there are qualifiers for things like mental illness, the system assumes free will by default making rare exceptions for responsibility for people in some states of mind. Whatever that is, it's not determinism.
Being capable of feeling like an observer to your free will does not make it any less yours in my opinion. Also everything you think of in this moment was seeded in the past by your free will.
And you can use ideological systems, like math or economics or even your impression of another person, to generate endless amounts of ideas. And for each of them you veto all other possible options in order to generate the one you do at the time you do so. Then on top of that you have the conscious power to accept or reject the idea you've generated.