[Layke1123]

I fully believe my decisions and actions are largely determined long before I am fully aware of what is taking place.

This doesn't make me despair or not care to do anything, but makes me extremely resilient and adaptable to changing situations. I can acknowledge that no matter what I want to do, I cannot stop my leg from twitching when someone hits the nerve underneath my kneecap.

I also accept that if I make bad decisions because of an addiction or deficient reasoning process, I willingly would accept a mechanism to correct said process or improve my deficiency.

It's not that free will is necessary to understand reality. It's that free will is necessary for YOUR reality. Some of us get along just peachy without it.

[pdonis]

> I also accept that if I make bad decisions because of an addiction or deficient reasoning process, I willingly would accept a mechanism to correct said process or improve my deficiency.

If that's what you want, you are free to choose to accept it, yes. If you're happy with how things are for you, more power to you.

Just don't try to force your way of being happy on me. If I make bad decisions, for whatever reason, I want to have the choice of how to improve. I don't want anything else, whether you want to call it a "mechanism" or not, forcing something on me that someone else thinks is an "improvement".

[Layke1123]

But you don't actually believe that! You would put someone in prison if they attacked you physically for no reason. You would willingly force that person into confinement until they no longer tried to inflict violence on you. You can't have ti both ways.

[pdonis]

No, you can't have it both ways. You didn't say you would willingly accept prison. You said you would willingly accept a mechanism to improve your deficiency. The way you have described prison elsewhere in this thread, you clearly believe that prison doesn't do that. So you wouldn't accept prison. You would only accept a mechanism that "improves your deficiency".

What I said is that I want to have the choice about how to improve. That doesn't mean I have the right to harm others with impunity. Choices have consequences, and if I make a bad choice that has the consequence that I get thrown in prison, well, that's the consequence of my choice. I personally avoid that consequence by not making choices that will predictably get me thrown in prison. Someone else might choose to do such things anyway--and yes, if they do that I won't stop the consequences from happening. Respecting someone's right to make choices doesn't mean choices don't have consequences.

If your objection is that the consequence of getting thrown in prison is somehow artificial, well, the natural consequence of attacking someone physically for no reason is that you get physically harmed or killed yourself. If you want to argue that letting that consequence happen is better than throwing the person in prison, given what prisons are like, sure, go ahead and argue that. But to argue, as you are, that respecting people's right to make choices means I should refrain from imposing any consequences at all on other people's behavior when it affects me is not only a non sequitur, it makes for an even worse society with even more suffering.

[Layke1123]

No it doesn't, and I'm not advocating for a violent person to not be stopped. You are. You say the most important thing is to defend a person's right to "choose" their behavior. In that case, you are a hypocrite because then you turn around and say I am OK with subverting the will of a person as long as it affects me negatively. If it affects someone else, well, do you really care? From your answers, you seem not to care in the slightest.

[pdonis]

> I'm not advocating for a violent person to not be stopped.

You're advocating for "stopping" them by having someone else rearrange their brain so they won't be violent any more. And you refuse to acknowledge the fact that that someone else is making a choice that has consequences; to you it's all just particles reacting to their environment. Yet you also seem to think suffering is bad--but if it's all just particles reacting to their environment, there is no such thing as suffering, any more than there is such a thing as choice. So you are the one who is being inconsistent, not me.

> If it affects someone else, well, do you really care? From your answers, you seem not to care in the slightest.

You clearly don't understand my actual position, and I don't know how to explain it any better than I already have.

[Layke1123]

Absolutely! Re-education, rehabilitation is exactly THAT! It's altering the synaptic connections in the brain to bring their behavior in line with what we view should be the case in civilized society. You just seem to have a problem with making that process more efficient.

And it is all just particles moving around, but that doesn't mean we have to ignore what is very likely an unpleasant experience from your subjective, internal point of view. I don't dismiss your personal experience of reality, just your rational understanding of what's going on.

And I do, I really do, but you are inconsistent. You say you should be free to make your choices, but then also want to put people in jail fornmaking their free choices. You call it consequences, and yet that doesn't eliminate the fact that you then want to LIMIT THEIR FREEDOM TO CHOOSE to do it again. You are self contradictory. At best, you are picking what choices people are and aren't allowed to make.