[y04nn]

Don't forget that you are the result of all the past sensory interactions that you experienced in your whole life, people you interacted with, books you read, advertisements, songs, news headlines, etc. Even if you think you don't remember them, at one point in your life it was processed by your brain and may have changed some posterior decisions you made, thus making you what you are now.

Since I realized this, I am more meticulous when choosing what I do and don't do, there is no going back.

[daniel_reetz]

Hmm. The experiences that changed and benefited me most were least predictable. As a result, I try to manage experiences less, and choose the unknown more.

But in the spirit of what you've said, I try to avoid doing dumb, damaging, or boring things twice.

[teekert]

If you walk the footsteps of a stranger, you will learn the things you never knew you never knew.

[7thaccount]

But can you paint with all the colors of the wind?

In all seriousness, I liked that line you quoted in the song. I wonder if there is a literary term for that repetition. It's not alliteration I don't think as the words themselves repeat.

[oefnak]

Actually, it's not really repetition, since she's talking about the things you didn't even know were unknown to you.

[nuclearnice1]

polyptoton?

[ceravis]

Or possibly antanaclasis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antanaclasis

[notnaut]

Epanalepsis?

Chiasmus?

Why are all rhetorical devices given such arcane names?

[riskable]

> arcane names

That's why they're magic! If people used these words every day they'd end up starting fires or summoning demons.

[uoaei]

Rhetoric was invented in Greece

[sn9]

I think they're just Greek because we got them from the Greeks.

[InSteady]

Camorepticus?

Scremaèlitude?

We're just making up words at this point, right?

[Symmetry]

Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death.

[edanm]

That's a good point. I'm a big reader - and I have lists of thousands of books I want to read. But one reason I semi-on-purpose still pick up random books that I stumble across and look fun, even if they're less "optimally chosen" by me, is exactly so that I sometimes stumble on things I would otherwise miss.

Or maybe just, like many readers, I love buying new books almost as much as reading them, and this is just an excuse to buy more... :)

[reaperman]

For many things in life I try to find and loosely follow some ideal ratio of explore vs. exploit. For restaurants I've found 1:3 ratio works well - 3 times eating at restaurants I know I love, then the fourth time eating somewhere I haven't been yet. Usually the new restaurant doesn't live up to my favorites, but sometimes I find a new favorite.

[feyman_r]

That last bit resonates with me so much! In fact, there’s a word in Japanese for it - ‘tsundoku’! Ever since I stumbled upon it, I feel almost vindicated :)).

[edanm]

The funny thing is, I do the same with Audible books too, even if they aren't something I normally physically see. I just can't help buying books :)

[skeeter2020]

>> I try to avoid doing dumb, damaging, or boring things twice.

As a parent I tell my kids: "Make lots of mistakes. Learn from them and don't repeat them; avoid the fatal ones". Then I try to remember my own words before I chastize them for their multitude of dumb decisions (teenage boys)...

[riskable]

To be fair, you have avoided the fatal ones. So at the very least you're not a hypocrite.

[Eisenstein]

If someone is a current smoker and they eventually die of lung cancer, would you say that they avoided the fatal decision up until they died?

I mean, in the long we are all dead, but we have to say that there can be ultimately fatal decisions made in which the person does not immediately die.

[shswkna]

We start aging, i.e. heading for death, the moment we are born. And with every breath henceforth. Some faster, some slower. So it is relative, in every sense.

[madaxe_again]

I just got into the habit of saying “yes” to pretty much anything. It has taken me on some wild rides indeed, and I am richer in spirit for it. It forged the bond between my wife and me - “shall we do a road trip across Eurasia?”, she idly asked, expecting at the very most a “maybe” - instead I grasped that nettle and applied for visas that day. Six weeks of utterly madcap adventure ensued. Since, I’ve found myself in an unending series of odd adventures of one variety of another, from fostering rare donkeys to… other stuff I’d be wise to not mention. Some episodes I would call ill-advised in the extreme, but all have been enriching.

There’s always a reason to say no, and it’s probably bullshit.

It also has the added benefit of uplifting others - it transforms their idle thought into something that actually happens.

[pixl97]

Isn't this also just a form of survivorship bias? You wouldn't be posting this from prison for example.

Maybe at the end of the day simple platitudes only work for the lucky.

[MarkusQ]

> > I just got into the habit of saying “yes” to pretty much anything.

> Isn't this also just a form of survivorship bias? You wouldn't be posting this from prison for example.

Note that "pretty much everything" is a proper subset of "everything" and could well be defined as "everything except the obviously stupid stuff that's highly likely to lead to bad outcomes", and this from a sample that's already biased in your favour -- e.g. the vast majority of places you can go in the universe would kill you instantly, but the vast majority of places someone might suggest going to, or offer to go to with you, won't.

If you filter out the "let's go see the Titanic in my home-made submarine" ideas, your odds are actually quite good.

[madaxe_again]

Yeah, I have my limits - and while I have agreed to stuff that was in hindsight Quite A Bad Idea, the majority of my “sure, why not” moments have lead to the fantastic.

[lukan]

Well, by definition, if you have bad luck, you are unlucky.

But sometimes you can move out of a chain of bad luck events by doing something else and not repeating the same stuff while hoping for change.

[TeMPOraL]

> not repeating the same stuff while hoping for change

That infamous quote typically attributed to Einstein notwithstanding, really most of learning and progress is done by doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different outcomes.

[Eisenstein]

It also requires a lack of commitments and a modest amount of disposable income.

[madaxe_again]

The two go hand in hand - when I started agreeing to outlandish stuff, I was miserably running my business, commitments oozing from my ears, with barely two bob to run together.

Thing is, when you start saying yes to stuff, and start finding yourself in new places with new people, new opportunities present themselves. I am much materially wealthier now than I ever was when I worked for a living, partly due to income through new connections, partly due to a vastly decreased cost of day to day living by emigrating, and travel has become considerably cheaper as friends I made along the way make for happy hosts, or travel companions to split the cost of something outlandish with.

For example, I invested in an Australian I found wading in the mud at Aralsk, I befriended and helped out a PMC owner I met in Antarctica, and I robbed a Russian oligarch I met on a megayacht, in that order. All were lucrative. One of those falls into the “probably shouldn’t have” category (no prizes guessing which), but is still a “wait, I actually did that?”, and taught me more about myself and this strange world than I anticipated.

Time remains a luxury, but life is short, and easily squandered, so I spend it thoughtfully.

[pjmorris]

> It also has the added benefit of uplifting others - it transforms their idle thought into something that actually happens.

Hearty agreement, from the experience of both the receiving and offering ends of that gesture.

[bts327]

This is it, combined with the points brought forth by the parent. Like all things, a healthy balance seems to be the optimal strategy. Life’s a journey; good idea to plan but the people and places you find off the beaten path are often the most rich and rewarding.

[FrustratedMonky]

I don't think he is saying, don't be surprised, or have unique experiences. But don't sit and watch YouTube all day. You can curate your inputs to some degree, and limit just sitting and soaking in social media.

[Cthulhu_]

There was a thread yesterday about closing public libraries, and this sentiment ties into that; open and free access to information is important, because a lack thereof causes people to become blinkered and close-minded, which in turn makes them more susceptible for populist talking points (that is, a populist politician or propaganda telling you there is a Problem; when people don't have factual information to the contrary, or even a mindset of curiosity ("is that actually true?") they are more likely to accept it).

Hence, book burnings, censorship, and suppression of free speech are problematic.

(That said, I also believe that free speech should be curtailed on platforms with large audiences)

[tmnvix]

I have a great appreciation for public libraries. I consider them to be one of the best examples of a public institution. They provide much more than just information. Everyone has the same access and privileges. They are just about the only warm, quiet, and comfortable space that isn't somehow exclusive or privately controlled. For someone without access to their own space (i.e. a stable home) they provide a place to find respite from an often hostile environment.

Libraries are a treasure that represent the best of humanity.

Having lived in quite a few different cities and towns, I've come to the conclusion that the quality of the library (i.e. of the space, atmosphere, and resources provided) correlates with the quality of the community.

[Sleepful]

As a student that can't focus in loud places and that had to live in a loud place... Gah.

[tomByrer]

With web or other searching, every 'platform has a large audience'.

One of the worst censor/suppressor of free speech is also the largest web search.

[keiferski]

This is pretty trite if you stop to think about it. “Everything in your life that you experience has an effect on your experience of life.”

We all exist in the world, not apart from it, and no amount of exclusion or creation of “sterile spaces” will change that.

[gizmo]

Expressions like "eat your vegetables" and "life is short" are also trite. But the purpose of folk wisdom isn't to shock and awe with fresh insights. The purpose is to remind people of what they already know to be true. That way we steer our behavior more towards the kind of life we want to live.

[bloomingeek]

Your reply is simple, yet profound. Answers to the question of "why" must be understood.

Before retiring, I trained new hires, the age gaps were sometimes very interesting. The younger they were, the more they wanted to know. (obviously their experience level was pretty low.) I used adages to bring a point home when explaining a difficult concept. It worked every time.

[randomcarbloke]

the comments under this post exemplify: "one person's profound is another's trite"

[keiferski]

Maybe "trite" wasn't the right word. More like a tautology.

I guess you could call it "folk wisdom" but it seems more like a restating of the obvious to me.

[InSteady]

Firstly, I'd argue it's only a tautology when you phrase it in a particular way (and take some knowledge about how the brain works as "given"). The point isn't that the effect happens at all, it's about the degree to which even small instances influence who we are.

But more importantly, we are creatures of habit before we are creatures of intellect. Stating things like "you are the sum of your experiences" isn't necessarily to reveal new and profound information, it is to emphasize a fact of existence that can easily become overlooked or underappreciated. Especially as we get on in the years and more and more of our behavior is on autopilot. There is value in reminding people to look for potential blindspots and providing some motivation a more careful consideration of the aspects of your life that have become unconscious even if the message comes in a trite or tautological package.

It's like people who have been stuck for the past 5 years spending 2+ hours every day scrolling a social media feeds littered with bad news, snapshots of arguments, and fake representations of the world but can't make a connection between this maladaptive behavior and the growing sense of cynicism and existential malaise that's impacting their happiness. Sometimes it is helpful to hear this kind of stuff (assuming it actually gets through) even though it should be obvious.

[jasode]

>We all exist in the world, not apart from it, and no amount of exclusion or creation of “sterile spaces” will change that.

The surrounding reality in the world doesn't change but the gp was talking about deliberate curation of that reality.

Maybe another example using advertising to help highlight the difference:

- block ads during web surfing with PiHole and uBlock. <-- the curation perspective of gp y04nn's, "I am more meticulous when choosing what I do and don't do, there is no going back.

- no amount of blocking ads will change the fact that ads exist in the world <-- your perspective

Yes, you're correct that "ads still exist" but browsing the web without it is still a nicer experience.

[keiferski]

I just don’t think it’s a good life strategy to obsess over every single piece of media that you may inadvertently consume. Use an ad blocker and avoid outright garbage, sure, but that wasn’t the vibe I got from the parent comment. Constructing this sort of sterile world always ends badly when you’re forced to deal with things from outside it.

As a general life strategy, I think it’s always better to “filter” rather than “block.”

[a_bonobo]

I don't think it is trite: you need to remind yourself that the information you ingest will have an effect on you. If you're deeply informed about an ongoing violent conflict it will have a negative effect on your mental health as you'll watch a lot of violence.

I've been practising information hygiene for a while - if I can't change anything about problem X and it does not affect me or my family, should I be deeply informed about it? - and it has done wonders for my mental health.

[b112]

Indeed. Although as with anything, moderation is key. Not too much, or too little. Listening to 4 hours a day of Tiktok or Youtube boneheads, probably isn't all that good for the average person.

(I'm not referring to intellectual videos, but instead just "some random person" that has amassed 10M followers because they .. well I don't know what they do, except market themselves well. Then start blathering on about literally the dumbest blather ever.

For example, taking medical advice from some guy living in a van, or taking scientific advice from some dude who doesn't even understand ... anything.

Populism to the extreme. Lookit me, I'm purdy, ergo my opinion on everything supersedes everyone.)

[4ggr0]

Well, why should I listen to a random person commenting on HN? ;D

[FrustratedMonky]

Having watched a lot of educational and scientific videos, I'm beginning to think there are diminishing returns, and they can be just as addictive and non-valuable.

Filling the day with any video's seems to have downsides.

[pixl97]

I mean, then take ops advice one more step

>moderation is key. Not too much, or too little

Watching videos all day, even 'good' videos isn't moderation. Your physical body, therefore your mind suffers from lack of exercise.

[helboi4]

Hard agree. I have really tried to make sure I spend most of my time reading high quality material these days. I realised my brain being saturated with a lot of drivel was actually having a notable impact on me. Much more than I expected.

[johnisgood]

Not if you approach it through epigenetics. :)

[sublinear]

I don't think the blog post necessarily supports this view. You still have your free will.

Your past experiences also teach you what to ignore. You are free to do that to my comment. :)

[NERD_ALERT]

Free will hasn’t been proven. It’s up in the air how much is predetermined, and how to even define “free” in the context of free will. Even if we do have free will it’s still influenced to some degree by our biology.

[piloto_ciego]

My Diogenes answer would be to walk across the room and slap you: “if I didn’t chose to do it you cannot be angry at me.” That’s tongue and cheek sure, but the point I feel stands.

Free will is certainly constrained, and our material and biological conditions do matter - there’s no amount I can will to make myself fly, but they are not necessarily as rigid of constraints as many would have you believe. We can overcome our biology, our predilections, and many of our shortcomings. We have to consciously choose to do so though.

[dennis_moore]

> “if I didn’t chose to do it you cannot be angry at me."

Yes I can, because I didn't choose to be angry either.

[piloto_ciego]

But would anger be reasonable? Of course not.

[therealdrag0]

I disagree. But we’re not going to solve free will in HN comments. Personally I don’t think “free will” means anything or makes sense any more than “god” makes sense. It’s just a bundle of feelings that means something different to everyone.

[csomar]

> We can overcome our biology, our predilections, and many of our shortcomings. We have to consciously choose to do so though.

Hmm, no we can't. And the few people who seemingly can do that, it's because their biology/environment allowed that. So kind of circling back to determinism. Free will is a myth that's used to lock people up.

If you slap someone in the face, we'll lock you up somewhere because we don't know if you'll do it again. It doesn't matter if there is free will or not. Society has decided to put annoying elements in a huge bastille and call it a day.

[dsign]

I'm going to nominally disagree with you, my genes are in total control and I must.

Free will is a matter of definition, and certain definitions, no matter how hard we try, can't be formulated as easily as one does in, say, Euclidean geometry.

So you can come up with a definition of the free will you don't have, let's call it "absolute determinism", and it has all sort of interesting criminal applications, beyond slapping people on the face (yes, who does that anyway?).

For example, you could use your[^1] absolute determinism to build a very advanced AI that relies on a pseudo-random generator with a fixed seed. Fallibility is the result of using stochastic search methods, and your AI shows it. In that respect and many others, your AI acts exactly as a human would because you programmed it that way. Yet, you have the strongest argument possible to affirm that the AI you created has no free-will. One day, the AI leaves a bunch of children mentally dysfunctional[^2]. But it has no free-will, all it is emanates from you. So you must be charged for the AI's crime.

Your lawyers come to court and state that you in turn have no free-will, that you are God's creature. The prosecutor brings a priest to say that God gave you free will. The judge says that precedent demands you be thrown from a high mountain, but it's feeling like a good day for a crucifixion. Of course, the trial is a shamble, a racket run by Sapiens' genes to ensure that they are passed down. And from that point of view, you committed the ultimate sin.

The way out? Submit to your genes, do what they tell you to. Believe in free-will.

[^1] I wash my hands.

[^2] Wait, did that happen already?

[johnisgood]

> my genes are in total control and I must.

That is not true. Your gene expression is influenced by experiences, and not just yours, but your grand-grand parents' experiences, too. See: epigenetics and transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.

> Your lawyers come to court and state that you in turn have no free-will, that you are God's creature.

Some say that lack of free will, i.e. determinism undermines moral responsibility, which in turns means that it conflicts with punishment and so forth. I believe that it ultimately does not matter; you can punish for the behavior alone.

[strogonoff]

If you believe in determinism, then it is likely you also believe in physicalist monism (“there is only the matter and consciousness arises/derives fully from it or is an illusion”).

Normally there is not much I can say to change your mind on that, but just note—there are other views, like idealistic monism, which unlock other possibilities wrt. free will, and which cannot be disproven or proven compared to physicalist monism (which cannot be proven or disproven either).

[namero999]

I'll just echo this, in that monistic idealism (especially, as a personal preference, in the declination of analytical idealism) is a worldview able to supersede the incongruous, untenable and for the most part, epistemically moot physicalism/materialism, which is sadly still considered the default mainstream worldview.

As parent said, many open questions and interpretations become relatively trivial under idealism, while preserving 100% of our scientific understanding and method.

[imtringued]

The problem with any form of physicalism is that if consciousness arises from physical principles, then the vast majority of the universe consists of unobserved physical interactions. Does the universe really exist at that point? If it doesn't, how come I am here to experience it? If it does, it would be more likely that I am a disembodied boltzman brain than a human that evolved on earth, since there is no reason for the unobserved portion of the universe to not be infinitely large. You simply wouldn't know it.

[prmph]

If so, then it is also determined whether I believe in free will or not.

That is, I don't have the free will to believe in free will or not.

[johnisgood]

That is true, whether or not you believe in free will at a specific point in time is a result of your previous history (internal and external influences).

[vladvasiliu]

Who's this "society" and how has it managed to have free will?

If someone can't "decide" to slap their neighbor in the face and is determined to do that, why can't the same reasoning be applied to society? Society didn't freely choose to lock someone up, it was determined to do so.

[TeMPOraL]

Either way, face slappers and other annoying people get locked up.

[latexr]

> walk across the room and slap you: “if I didn’t chose to do it you cannot be angry at me.”

Of course they could. Anger is a way for the body to react without choosing as a defense mechanism against the next slap. Either your biology would recognise the anger and step back, or the other person would punch you back, making you afraid to repeat what you did.

I’m not siding with or against free will, I just don’t think your example works to prove the point.

[huygens6363]

I’m not sure what the point is?

Why can’t I be angry? Surely you must see anger is and never will be rational (and also not free).

My anger at your slapping is as much determined as your slapping. I see no problem.

Free will arguments usually refer to these “justice requires freedom”-like arguments and I feel that’s not the case at all.

You can punish, you can feel anger. It’s all included. You cannot separate reactions, this one is free, this one is not. It’s a package deal.

[vasco]

There's free will in the sense that the system is so chaotic and complex that it's impossible to predict for us now at current technology levels, maybe never possible to predict, but I don't see anything in science that would allow free will to be a thing. We're complex automata in the end.

[piloto_ciego]

I think this is a failure in imagination not a failure in science.

Still, all these free will deniers are basing their worldview on the (radical) assumption that.

1. Everything has a cause 2. Everything is explainable 3. physical matter is all there is 4. Science can describe literally everything about the universe 4a. Corollary - things that aren’t describable by science don’t exist

All of those claims are unfalsifiable at best and demonstrably false at worst (depending on how hard you squint). Science is effective for repeatable experiments, but that’s not a guarantee that there aren’t events that are one-and-done.

[ZeroMinx]

> tongue and cheek

tongue-in-cheek

slap

[threatofrain]

Not really. We don't need an answer to the question of free will to react to anything.

[nyokodo]

> Free will hasn’t been proven.

Free will is something that we experience which provides extremely compelling evidence that it is true. Things don't have to be empirically proven in order to be true, if that were the case then empiricism itself would fail the test as it has never been established to be true empirically.

[pjerem]

Existence of mental illness or troubles makes me doubt that.

What is free will when you are suffering from pathological procrastination, depression or addiction ?

If you accept the fact that, like in addictions, your brain chemistry makes you smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol even when you know you’ll die from it and know it makes you miserable then how can you be convinced that you really control your normal behaviors ?

Why does anxiety makes me stay in my couch and antidepressants makes me want to go outside ?

I understand free will as a moral concept but at a biological level, i feel like it adds a lot of shaming and suffering to people who struggle to modify their behavior because science now knows that changing behavior is hard and impossible without physical modification of the brain structure.

[robertlagrant]

> If you accept the fact that, like in addictions, your brain chemistry makes you smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol even when you know you’ll die from it and know it makes you miserable then how can you be convinced that you really control your normal behaviors ?

Your brain chemistry is part of this will, though.

> science now knows that changing behavior is hard

I don't think science knows things. And while changing behaviour is hard, and much harder for some than others, it still doesn't mean that the total system that makes up your mind, including biological predispositions, is not your will.

[pixl97]

>Your brain chemistry is part of this will, though.

But here's the thing, given enough knowledge that chemistry is deterministic.

Will seems to be one of those words we've created from deep ignorance, much like consciousness, and the more we learn about the world and ourselves the less our old views make sense.

[verisimi]

Could depression, or other mental illnesses, be the outcome of one's bad decisions (or failure to make decisions)?

[komali2]

> Could depression, or other mental illnesses, be the outcome of one's bad decisions (or failure to make decisions)?

Sometimes, the outcome of one's decisions (bad is an unnecessary value statement here. Was it a "bad" idea to start a restaurant that failed and made you sad? Cmon).

However, a huge swath of mental illness, including depression, is the result of environmental and genetic factors utterly outside your control. Your mom smoked crack when you were in her womb and somehow that's "the outcome of your bad decision?"

[vasco]

> i feel like it adds a lot of shaming and suffering to people who struggle to modify their behavior

You just moved the shaming from "look they are lazy and don't move from the couch" to "they are lazy because they made bad decisions"

[jononor]

Possible in some circumstances. But also possible that they are the result of other peoples actions (example: emotionally abusive parents or partner)

[nikkwong]

How do you know you experience it beyond a reasonable doubt? Thoughts and intentions just seemingly appear in consciousness, without any explanation as to how they arose. Feelings are like this too; we don’t determine how we feel, we are simply served them.

When experiencing a negative emotion, some people seem to believe they can ‘free will’ their way out of it by thinking positively or something there over, but that intention too is also just a thought that appears in consciousness. To decide what to think in a manner compatible with what most people think free will is would require you to decide what to think or feel before actually thinking or feeling it, which is not possible.

And when you think about the causality of feelings or thoughts, which are just neuronal signaling patterns/chains in the brain, it begins to appear much more mechanical than free will intention.

[nyokodo]

> How do you know you experience it beyond a reasonable doubt?

I have no reason to doubt my common sense experience.

> we don’t determine how we feel, we are simply served it.

No definition of free will that I have encountered considers it an absolute freedom from any form of determinism. We’re obviously influenced by our nature and external influences. For instance my emotional predispositions are largely determined and my thoughts are not entirely under my control but I do have scope to shape both my emotions and my thoughts over time by what I choose to focus on. I can choose to do what is necessary to change my behavior and to treat people differently than what comes naturally. I know all of this because I have done it, I have experienced it. No materialist philosophy of mind has produced any compelling evidence to contradict my experience of free will in this capacity.

[nikkwong]

I sort of responded to this idea in another comment, but again. How can you take ‘personal credit’ (as if you could have acted otherwise) for choosing to change your behavior? Isn’t that an idea that also just appears in consciousness that is, for inexplicable reasons, more compelling than other ideas at the time so that is the choice that your brain reasons to follow?

[vasco]

Imagine there's no free will.

Whatever happens you'll end up crossing the road right now.

In one example, you absent-mindedly cross the road.

In another example a thought comes to you to get coffee, and you cross the road to get it.

In another example you consider not getting coffee, and going to the park instead, but end up choosing coffee because you feel sluggish.

If there's no free will, any amount of thinking before the decision doesn't prove there's free will. It's just more stuff that was also predetermined. You having an illusion of choice doesn't prove anything.

[jhbadger]

>I have no reason to doubt my common sense experience.

That's why people thought the Sun moved around the Earth. I mean, it's just "common sense" -- you see the Sun in the East in the morning, and then it's in the West in the evening. It turns out "common sense" is not useful for understanding how things work.

[somenameforme]

Hrm? When I think of things I tend to see multiple possibilities at once, and then decide which I think is the most reasonable, and go from there. Similar for emotions. I'm well aware of my emotions but can control them. And I think not doing so would be quite a poor way to behave.

Perhaps it's that we all think in somewhat different ways, yet because our own mind is the only one that we will ever know - we simply posit that everybody else must think the same way, or at least quite similarly. For instance there's that weird datum that supposedly some huge percent of people don't have an inner monologue, at all. I find it extremely difficult to believe, but if it were true then it would certainly be much easier to understand how somebody else might not believe in free will.

[pjerem]

> Hrm? When I think of things I tend to see multiple possibilities at once, and then decide which I think is the most reasonable, and go from there.

And based on what do you decide ? Probably your past experience, your knowledge, your education and your moral values. Which are all somehow environmental factors.

[nikkwong]

Are you positing that you have free will but that those around you with less emotional control don’t? I don’t think your example is serving your argument; your brain is structured in such a way that you reason in a way that is unique to you, and others reason otherwise based on the structure of their brains. I don’t see how this grants you free will. You’re talking about feelings and reasoning as part of conscious experience and that’s, in my opinion, the end state of all of the neurological activity that pointed us to feel or think a certain way in the present moment.

The chain of causality that leads to thoughts and emotions in consciousness is completely determined by the structure and action potentials that propagate through our brain and nothing else, and this doesn’t leave room for some conscious agent in our brain also pulling levers and further modifying causality.

[samus]

The amount of possibilities you see might be influenced by your emotional state, and what you call "reasonable" might not be the same thing as other people consider it.

A lot of our reasoning are applications of observations and best practices rules that we are sometimes not really aware of unless challenged by circumstances or outsiders.

This is to some degree necessary - the outside world is too complex to fully model inside our minds. The most important things that we can only build approximate models about are other people.

[ixsploit]

How are you experiencing free will? You have no idea what your next thought will be, nor can you control it. You have the opinion that you have free will, but that doesn't mean it's true.

[piloto_ciego]

You can’t choose what you will think about? How do you get through the day? Are you just frequently blindsided by random non-sequiturs that derail you for hours? I routinely chose things to think about or things to concentrate on.

It’s not like all thoughts leap into my mind fully formed either. Hell, I edited this message before hitting reply.

[pjerem]

Choosing is not free will.

You choose based on your past experience. If you know doing A is better than B, you didn’t choose A, it’s just that your brain already knows that A is the best option based on past experience or knowledge or beliefs.

Even if you choose the seemingly "worst" option B, it’s just that you know that new experiences can be rewarding so your brain is ok to try it.

And there is the extreme example : given you are in good mental health, you are totally, physically, unable to chose to kill someone (or even yourself) without a very important reason (to you).

Also, if the absence of free will at biological levels don’t make the concept useless at the society level. Accepting that environment, culture, knowledge and society have such an influence on us just shows the importance of shaping a good society.

Accepting absence of free will at a biological level can just makes us more empathetic towards others.

It doesn’t means society have to accept any wrong behavior from humans but rather something way more positive : society is ultimately responsible for individuals behaviors and have the power to change them for the benefit of everyone.

[huygens6363]

And what process do you propose decided to think “I chose my thoughts and what to concentrate on”?

Surely you must see this is problems all the way down.

[ben_w]

> You can’t choose what you will think about? How do you get through the day? Are you just frequently blindsided by random non-sequiturs that derail you for hours?

My tongue-in-cheek answer here is: Correct, badly, and it looks like the obsessive-compulsive desire to check social media and/or the news.

[LocalH]

Let me introduce you to a little dopamine imbalance I like to call "focus control disorder", better known as Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder.

Think of it like having a preemptive multitasking scheduler that is unable to keep track of the state of the previous task.

[hju22_-3]

Free will hasn't been disproven either. It's up in the air how much is undetermined, and how to define being "schakled" in the context of no free will. Even if we are affected by ourself and others, that does not prove a lack of free will.

[tmnvix]

The whole debate around the existence of free will seems almost tautological to me.

I've heard it said that the concept doesn't even exist in many cultures and that its importance in western culture can be largely attributed to the need to justify the concept of 'original sin'.

For me at least, free will is a concept with no value.

[jampekka]

Free will is more ideological dogma than a factual claim. From materialist standpoint it's untenable. And empirically we see that environment dominates thinking and behavior.

Free will is the foundation of most judeo-christian moral systems, which were inherited by liberalism. It's the justification for punishshing and rewading individuals.

It seems to work relatively well, but I find it very cruel.

[robertlagrant]

> I find it very cruel

What's a better and less cruel alternative?

[jampekka]

Trying to address the problems in environments that produce unwanted behavior. And help the individuals exhibiting such behavior to change it.

I find re-education, be it camps or not, a lot less cruel and effective than e.g. throwing people in prisons or killing them.

[robertlagrant]

We already do this. "Re-education" (yikes at the word, but I see what you mean) is an attempt to get people to make better choices. E.g. to use their will to override their impulses.

[verisimi]

Lots of answers about free will.

My criticism is that they all seem to make the same error, in treating the existence of free will as some sort of binary decision.

My view is that the more one's model is coherent with the underlying reality, the more options are available to the individual. The greater the selection, the more free will you have.

Eg, if someone pulls a gun on you, you may think you have no free will. However, if you have a gun of your own, you have a different set of options. Similarly, if you are a trained martial artist or hostage negotiator, you will evaluate your options differently - you have more options.

Put simply one doesn't know what one doesn't know. Most likely this will occur in the case where one is certain of one's 'knowledge' of something that is actually false, ie one is operating within a lie/fantasy and has been tricked. Here, one will have a constrained set of options and therefore less free will.

[schneebyte]

Maybe you have a different definition of free will.

But to me those examples are just knowledge. Regardless of how many possible options, the process of making the choice would be free will, if it existed.

[verisimi]

Feel free to give your definition of free will.

My one is that one is more free if one is aware of the full scope of one's options. This is not an ephemeral idea, it is not related to the 'what might have been' aka the 'opportunity cost' of choosing. One's present awareness (and potential expansion of that awareness) has an impact on how free one is.

[pixl97]

I mean, no one has a well defined definition of free will, much like the worlds intelligence and consciousness.

With this said having more knowledge expands your ability to explore the problem space of existence. Lets imagine that you are a single bit, you have the 'choice' of being one or zero. From an outside observer the problem space of the outcome is very predictable in the sense we know it's going to be a 1 or 0. Now, keep adding random bits and our ability to predict the outcome of any state drops dramatically very quickly. But that's choosing at random, what if most bit states are bit random at all? For example this digital creature we're talking about now is millions of bit states long set by a learning algorithm, it so advanced it has an internal Turing machine that can simulate potential outcome states far into the future when executing code. You would look at this and say "well, it doesn't have free will, it just has an incomputably large set of potential bit states" But an outside observer unaware of the programs nature and it's starting state (for example it's performing a Turing test against the machine) would probably think the entity has free will.

You are a very large set of states, because of this you cannot prove free will. You've reversed causality in your summary.

[lotsofpulp]

> Eg, if someone pulls a gun on you, you may think you have no free will. However, if you have a gun of your own, you have a different set of options. Similarly, if you are a trained martial artist or hostage negotiator, you will evaluate your options differently - you have more options.

In movies. In real life, 99% of the time if someone pulls a gun on you in close range with the intent of harming you before you have your gun pointing at them, then you are going to be harmed and your martial arts or gun is going to be useless.

[j_bum]

Probably not much if any “free will”… Check out “Determined” by Robert Sapolsky [0]

[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/592344/determined-b...

[082349872349872]

> Your past experiences also teach you what to ignore.

"Everyone learns from experience. The wise try to learn from other people's experience."

[pixl97]

Other people's experience you witness, directly or via delayed medium, is your experience.

[layer8]

Free will doesn’t mean that the decisions you end up making aren’t significantly determined by the experiences you had.

[komali2]

You have free will, but isn't there still such a thing as an information hazard? For example, you may have free will, but you still just lost The Game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)

[kevindamm]

https://xkcd.com/391/

[air7]

I don't know to reconcile the idea that Free Will as a concept obviously cannot exist (because the omnipresent Laws of Physics govern the movement of the particles inside my skull as they do all other particles), with the fact that it just feels so real...

[mysecretaccount]

> You still have your free will.

Highly debatable.

[mrkstu]

If we don't what's the point of debating it?

[VMG]

To satisfy the predetermined desire to debate it.

[FrustratedMonky]

Monkeys are determined to argue, so they will argue about free-will, and wonder if they could have chosen not to argue, and then argue about that also.

[vasco]

Free will doesn't matter, there's a deeper level, which is, what is the meaning of all this, the universe, us, our place in it.

And yet we dance.

The point in debating is enjoying the debate, learning new things. What else is there to do?

[digging]

Because our belief in it may influence our actions...

Free will is the experience of making a decision. If we define free will as the ability to make a decision independently of our current state (sensory input, memory, emotions), that's utterly asinine. Neither are you an unfeeling, unthinking slave to entropy, simply printing outputs. You are an introspective machine, which can ask itself why it made decisions and update its own internal state to make different decisions in the future. That's what "free will" is.

[mysecretaccount]

Debating its existence serves the same purpose regardless of its existence.

[matwood]

Do your past experiences lead you to do the next thing? If you could perfectly know my past, could you predict my next decision? Do I have free will in that case?

[sitkack]

You only have free will in so much as what environments you put yourself in the long term. Our immediate actions are outside of our consciousness.

[mysecretaccount]

If we are not in control of our immediate actions, how can we have any sort of meaningful "free will"?

[card_zero]

I never understand what people are asking when they debate free will. It's a brain's process. Everybody's got one. Your brain's process isn't necessarily lovely to you, and doesn't necessarily do what you (the brain process) admire, like, or prefer. It's subject to outside influence and isn't perfectly under it's own control, because it's a cranky machine and goes wrong a lot. Some parts of it conflict with other parts. It's slow, and bad at monitoring itself. What do expect, magic? It's still yours, however unfair it may be to be stuck with it. So you have free will, whoopee.

[mysecretaccount]

If consciousness (and choices, the output of consciousness) is completely determined by the brain's physical process, then there is no such thing as "libertarian free will" which is what people typically mean when they say "free will".

[card_zero]

Metaphysical libertarianism. Yeah, by definition, that's not compatible with the view that everything is determined by physical processes. This is just people freaking out over determinism. I kind of see why. "I am a physical process" sounds like "I am controlled by fate and my choices are pointless". But a person is a process that can't see the future, and a process that experiments and discovers things. Choices are the deterministic process: the person determines things. I could repeat this several times in different words but I'd just be trying to placate a kind of paranoia that happens when people realise they're physical.

[empire_and_sun]

Looping Soup

[somenameforme]

I'd challenge this with a thought experiment. Imagine we put a group of toddlers on an island and somehow give them knowledge of language (and enough sustenance to survive), but absolutely 0 external input otherwise. These people, as they grow, would gradually develop their own views, values, and perspectives. Do the exact same thing on another island and you'd get entirely different results! One can see this very thing with the various isolated/uncontacted tribes.

Obviously our environment influences us, but we are largely a product of ourselves. And that aspect is what drives us to seek out the things we do. Which can then, in turn, make it seem that the things we seek out have turned us into who we are.

[affgrff2]

This thought experiment is deeply flawed as it assumes that what you propose is possible and the outcome would be as you suggest. I am not convinced that people can bootstrap themselves like this and that language itself does not contain views, values and perspectives.

[loceng]

Step one with someone locked or frozen-stuck in such belief-logic is that improvement is possible - which is part of developing psychological flexibility.

You'd have to pay attention and find any step forward possible for them to begin to enter the discomfort that is holding them back - which may be the biggest challenge of their lives up until that point.

Ideally though, as we're all sheep to some degree - which is exactly what this HN post is stating in a more sophisticated way, and attempting to warn for this - ideally there's a culture of practices that develop oneself, so you're just going along with the "herd" - that path hopefully not corrupted and led by bad actors attempting to send us off a cliff or into their totalitarian pen.

[fransje26]

> that language itself does not contain views, values and perspectives.

Language itself does, in fact, very much contain views, values and perspectives. As an example, there are population groups that do not have a word for the color blue, and that cannot, in consequence, distinguish between green and blue objects. [0] [1] And that's an example that has been noticed throughout the world.

[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-didn-t-even-see-the-colo...

[1] https://news.mit.edu/2023/how-blue-and-green-appeared-langua...

[somenameforme]

The claims in the first link, at least, should set off your BS detector. The colors they claim the group could trivially identify are very near identical in terms of 3d distance. By contrast, the colors they claim they could not determine the difference between are extremely far in 3d distance. It's objectively illogical. A quick search turns up that the claims are indeed false, and were fabricated by the BBC for a documentary. Here's [1] an email chain involving various researchers that worked on these experiments. The conclusion is that:

---

"The experiment shown in the documentary was a dramatization; the genuine color experiments done with the Himba, some years before, used a different sort of stimuli and a different experimental method; the stimuli shown in the documentary were modeled on those used by Paul Kay and others in experiments on other groups; but in all of the relevant experiments, the dependent measure was reaction time (in finding a matching color or an oddball color), not success or failure.

The BBC's presentation of the mocked-up experiment — purporting to show that the Himba are completely unable to distinguish blue and green shades that seem quite different to us, but can easily distinguish shades of green that seem identical to us — was apparently a journalistic fabrication, created by the documentary's editors after the fact, and was never asserted by the researchers themselves, much less demonstrated experimentally."

---

[1] - https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18237

[fransje26]

I did not do a full literature study of the claims of the article, as that was meant as an illustration of the point, and it was the first relevant link that popped up.

Whatever the alleged fabrications of the BBC might have been or not been for the Himba experiments, similar observations have been made for other groups as well, from Amazonian tribes, to population groups in Papua New Guinea, to Aborigines in Australia. And the MIT research link is discussing a very similar result.

That languages influence how you perceive and see the world has been well studied and is well documented.

[somenameforme]

I do not think the actual experiments demonstrate this. The experiment the BBC demoed probably would, but it was fabricated. The actual experiments just demonstrate a pretty obvious aspect of learning. If you tell somebody who doesn't play chess all the names of the pieces, and ask him to tell you which is the rook, he's going to be slower and less accurate at it than somebody who plays chess. But there's not some huge epiphany like you can show him a collection of 5 bishops, 1 rook, and him be unable to tell which is different. It's no different with colors, or any new term.

I have personal experience with this, learning Russian. They don't have just blue, but rather a term for dark blue and one for light blue. It's hardly some eye opening thing - it's basically sky blue vs ocean blue. It's obvious and easy, but obviously I will always be slower than a native on a quiz of which is which for reasons that have nothing to do with the colors. Vice versa, compare our speeds in English with 'sky blue' vs 'ocean blue' and I'd be back to winning.

A common trend in the social sciences is creating experiments that aren't designed to challenge one's hypothesis, but confirm it. The publication bias against negative results is probably necessary, but also turning a lot of soft science into a facade.

[nlitened]

Giving a knowledge of a language is a _huge_ external input, intertwined with culture and life experience of the language teacher.

And the smaller the external input we give to this group of toddler, the more they will resemble a violent pack of chimps in the end. Unlikely to develop their own values and perspectives.

[d0mine]

why "violent pack of chimps" instead of free-loving bonobos?

[Kbelicius]

Off topic but it seems that bonobos are not that peaceful compared to the chimps.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2426678-peaceful-male-b...

[d0mine]

Interesting, thanks.

"However, Gisela Kaplan at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, says she found the paper extremely frustrating and that the word “aggression” is being misused.

Chimpanzee groups are ruled by one dominant male, whereas bonobos are ruled by females. Competitions for dominance and mating rights in bonobos shouldn’t be confused with aggression, says Kaplan. “There’s more pointless violence in chimpanzees and humans than in other species like bonobos,” she says."

[somenameforme]

Well, again - I think the isolated tribes are a good example. Two different examples are the Sentinelese and the Nukak. The former are actively hostile and violent to any outsiders, with very few exceptions, while the Nukak were completely peaceful and receptive since their first contact. These isolated tribes are largely a mirror into the past that give us a view of what humanity, in all of its diverse forms, might have looked like long ago.

In any case you also have an ancestor issue. The views, values, and so on that we take for granted simply did not exist at some point. Yet, here we are.

[blackoil]

These tribes aren't isolated in true. Over 1000s of years, they have interacted with world outside and formed a generational wisdom and values. If 100 years back British/French came and enslaved some members, the behavior is expected.

[somenameforme]

No true Scotsman, eh? There's no reason to think these groups have had any contact with the outside world, beyond the fact that at some point they obviously diverged from whatever common ancestor we all share. Both are extremely small groups living in similarly extremely isolated locations - Sentinelese in an isolated island, Nukak deep in the Amazonian interior, far from rivers. And the Nukak's population has been decimated by common disease since they made contact, further suggesting 0 exposure to even other local peoples.

[blackoil]

I am not a historian. Andaman and Nicobar (neighbor of Sentinelese) is occupied / use as naval base by outsiders for >1000 years. None of the Cholas, Europeans, Japan ever contacted/impacted them seems highly unlikely.

[abandonliberty]

You're rolling a die and claiming the result was dictated by the die. All outcomes are probabilistic.

Though there's a shocking amount of convergent evolution.

[somenameforme]

Where do you see this convergence? From my perspective, the 'Out of Africa' hypothesis [1] suggests that the current breadth of humanity started from a migration from around 50,000-70,000 years ago. To get from a group that would have probably been quite homogeneous, to the extreme diversity of basically every single thing we see today - physical, ideological, cultural, etc - in such an incredibly short time frame, would suggest to me that even the briefest of moments apart sets us all on radically different courses.

Humans, relatively to most animals, also have an extremely slow generational time, which I think also further emphasizes this divergence. If we assume a low end generational time of just 20 years, even that is as few 2,500 generations, hardly a blink in time on a normal evolutionary scale.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_moder...

[shrubby]

The books I've read have a say in this. Rutger Bregman concluded in his Humankind - a Hopeful History that deep down human is pretty decent. So I'm thinking the turnout would be rather similar in different communities.

I was kinda impressed with Bergman once the book came out so I took nine copies to Finnish MP's to share. Unfortunately they were not too interested in the humane message the book told

[Ekaros]

I would agree that humans are pretty decent in tiny communities. Scaling beyond that they are absolutely unquestionably horrific monsters. Without any doubt. And those communities are not ready to punish their own community for those horrific deeds they comitted.

[somenameforme]

I take a slightly different perspective (while sharing a similar final perspective) on the community issue. Rather I think individual choice drives people to communities that they, at least broadly, align with. So you end up with communities that are not only overly permissive towards their own, but also overly critical of those outside of it. But then as those communities grow large enough divisions start to form even within the like-minded community itself, and eventually you get a division there (that often ends in an internal conflict), and that community divides again, almost like a cell splitting into two new cells. And then the process starts to repeat once again in these new cells.

Add in cells merging every once in a while, and you have the abbreviated history of humanity in one paragraph.

[pixl97]

>overly permissive towards their own, but also overly critical of those outside of it

aka: tribalism.

[persnickety]

Small changes accumulate and lead to divergence.

Even if you could make the toddlers physically identical, you can't place them all in the same point in space and always see, hear, touch the same things.

Add randomness inherent in the current understanding of (quantum) physics and you'd need a strong convergence mechanism for your experiment to prove what you're saying.

[light_hue_1]

> Obviously our environment influences us, but we are largely a product of ourselves

Even a brief look out your window will convince you this cannot possibly be true.

How many people have a different religion than their parents? How many Christians from Iowa have kids that decide they're actually Hindu? Just about zero.

Can you tell where someone is from based on how they dress? Heck yes. If they were making up their mind on their own you couldn't.

The likelihood you'll go into the military is far higher if other people in your family are in the military. 1% of Americans serve at all. But 60% of people who serve have an immediate family member (parent or sibling) who serves.

We could go on endlessly.

The idea that we're largely a product of ourselves is absurd. How many top physics were born in Eastern Europe be Africa? Do people in Africa genetically hate physics? No. But you're largely a product of your environment.

[niemandhier]

Ibn Tufail reached the same conclusion using the same metaphors 900 years ago in his Philosophus Autodidactus.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayy_ibn_Yaqdhan

Probably the most important work of Arabic philosophy.

[layer8]

The same will happen if you take two identical double pendulums and give them an as identical push as possible. Minute differences in initial conditions and in the environment can lead to arbitrarily large differences in outcome, while everything still being wholly deterministic.

We really have little idea how much our character and behavior is formed by experiences and how much by our DNA. Though pretty clearly, early experiences generally have a larger effect than later experiences.

[guappa]

Apparently Frederick II (the Holy Roman Emperor) tried it to see what was the innate language that people speak, but the toddlers just died.

[beltsazar]

> you are the result of all the past sensory interactions that you experienced in your whole life

That's only the mental aspect. Physically, you are also what you eat and how often you exercise.

[layer8]

Right, but (not) changing what you eat and how often you exercise is also heavily dependent on mental aspects.

[beltsazar]

And vice versa. Your mental function won't work optimally if you're not fit.

[ab8]

Right! You are your body. Not just your mind.

[HenryBemis]

> ..am more meticulous when choosing what I do and don't do..

There are plenty of books and other resources that speak to the power of "no". To the phrase I quote above, yes you need to have a good 'diet' of what you put in your mind. Some junkfood is ok, mostly junkfood is not.

A quote that has shaped me is: ""The less time one gives to the newspapers the better," he replied. "Do you like books on travels?"" by Hector Malot on his book En Femille (Nobody's Girl)(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27690/27690-h/27690-h.htm)

Btw, others write about ads. We can only (perhaps) avoid some on the internet (ad-blockers, NoRoot Firewall on Android devices and block certain IPs/URLs) but there are many ads we don't block, in movies (product placement), posters on bus stops, etc.

Fun fact: Apple doesn't allow its devices to be used by "baddies", so if you see an actor holding/using an iPhone, and you are not sure if they are Nice or Evil, chances are there will be a last-minute-twist and that actor will be/become Nice.

[znpy]

I have realised this a while ago and this made me hate advertising even more.

Particularly sudden advertising in youtube videos, it really feels like some kind of rape of the mind.

[loceng]

This is missing the understanding that there is a lever to mitigate what you describe above that I believe likely everyone, or close to everyone, is able to develop through practice.

Four factors that are party to this mechanism of not "being what you eat" are: - developing attention and aim, - self-awareness/emotional regulation development [which will clear past trauma and allow you to 1) be processing fully int he present moment or 2) extrapolate and prophesying-predicting into the future more accurately], - developing a dynamic weighting process, and - honing your judgment, compassion, and forgiveness practices - as any logic for judgements you apply to others, that logic is also applied to yourself - whether you realize it or not, and will weigh you down - depress you and can increase your baseline stress and anger levels.

The above will raise your vibratory frequency from the patterns of thoughts and beliefs of yourself or others, which if they are negative then they will knock you and keep you down [and/or require unnecessary and excessive energy to trying to prop yourself up with active motivation]; keeping you at a lower vibration - where like attracts like.

I do however do everything to avoid very low quality content - that we could call candy - like advertisements, however avoid may be the wrong word - I consciously act for high yield outcomes and quickly respond consciously to note when an unavoidable ad is present - and arguably am good at not getting distracted by them or go into a studying mode to analyze them to see what tactics they are deployed; ultimately they are a waste of time and can cause a misdirection of attention, but the consequences are far worse than that.

There are many very effective and efficient practices to help with all of the above - natural medicinal as well as things like yoga as a framework.

[justsid]

This reads like a scene from Silicon Valley. Good for you my man, but what does that have to do with being shaped by one’s experiences?

[loceng]

The TL;DR would be that you can regulate-manage how, how much, or if you are shaped by an experience.

And understanding this and factors that help or factors that may make you more prone or fragile, make it more difficult to regulate, is valuable knowledge as well - such as if you're high in conscientiousness and/or negative emotion ["neuroticism"] - and further knowing if that's the case it usually merely means it will simply to take to master than the average, so then to learn to be more patient with yourself.

P.S. Are they still producing new seasons of Silicon Valley?

[makeitdouble]

The tools you're using to regulate and manage your experences also come from your experiences. How you understand them comes from past interactions and comparison with other positive and negative experiences.

There is sure an inate part and I don't intend to redo a nature vs nurture debate, but you still need an environment even to express your nature, so I'm not sure what you are really getting at.

[loceng]

All true.

What I'm getting at is people need to get exposed to the knowledge and practices, if they are to potentially benefit from the tools and support available.

So that first starts by somehow gaining an adequate level of attention from them, a certain level of interest, and that often occurs due to something occurring that leads to an impetus that causes them to stumble and journey to discover where they otherwise have learned to avoid.

[Blundermuffin]

1) Love what you said here and ingesting this may have changed my outlook on things.

2) Couldn't help but think of this quote from Kamala Harris that has been of recent memery. :P

You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.

[leobg]

Plus of doing them in that sequence and in their particular context. No wonder there is nobody in the world alive today or from the past or future who understands the world in the same way as you do.

[EricMausler]

I think everything is ultimately net positive if you strengthen and condition the way you internalize all the sensory exposure.

To me, the risks are being overwhelmed by internalizing too much at once, and the opportunity cost of having a limited amount of time to take things in to your senses.

Influence is a very nuanced thing so I don't want to sound too black and white here, but I think it's like a brainstorm session. You take what you like best from your senses/inputs/etc

[gmassman]

That’s a nice sentiment, but I don’t think it can reasonably be applied to most people. Consider the kids brought up around gang culture and taught to sling dope in middle school. Is that experience a net positive for them?

[EricMausler]

Yes, it can be net positive. Ill clarify a bit, because text is easily misunderstood. I would not assume someone is a "bad" person just because they grew up around gang culture and drugs. I am talking "positive" in terms of understanding the world and determining the type of person you are proud of being. I'm not saying everything is enjoyable. I think our brains are capable of recognizing good things regardless of how much bad exposure we've had. That's more what I mean by net positive, not that everything we do is net pleasant

[starbugs]

Even more important might be the realization that most of it is not within your power to control. You didn't come up with the vast majority of what's shaped you.

[jebarker]

If there's "no going back" doesn't that imply you don't have free will and therefore you can't really choose what you do and don't do?

[qwery]

If you want to read it literally, no. They can't "go back" without deciding to do so, which would be continuing to choose what to do.

If you read it as the common English phrase "there's no going back", no. It's just a thing people say in place of something more dry like "I will continue doing this for as long as I feel I should which I currently think is a long time or forever but saying that would be a bit ridiculous".

[layer8]

You can choose what you do, but you cannot choose what you want to do. Choices are usually heavily biased by who and what we are.

[jajko]

> I am more meticulous when choosing what I do and don't do, there is no going back

And whom you surround yourself with in both professional and personal life, whom you listen to as an authority on topic XYZ. Work has massive effect on our personality long term. There is no way to separate those 2, so its smart to anticipate things before you realize that decade(s) in some toxic place dragged you nanometer by nanometer into some dark pit.

[leke]

> at one point in your life it was processed by your brain

I'm pretty sure my ADD brain fails to do that on a regular basis.

[achow]

There is a subtle difference to that than what the author was trying to say in his blog.

The thing is when we read, particularly in growing years, the expectation is that we would remember most of things from the book and apply it somewhere else, ex. in a discussion "...agree, the same I gathered from this excellent book that I read couple of years back...".

And frankly, I'm bummed by it still. I read a lot but when certain situation comes I cannot remember things & facts vaguely, even though I had finished 300 pages of that page turner in one night.

[ctrw]

The idea that you can understand what experiences produce what behaviours is as much crazier than the idea you can manually tune the weights of gpt4 and get better results.

[pyinstallwoes]

You are precisely the continuous difference of everything else.

[dchichkov]

There is no You.

[pyinstallwoes]

Exactly. That poignant realization that (you == void). It's a hollow existence, I mean, a single pointed one, it feels like a dimension of dimensionless, am I zero or everything? Both? Ugh, compare me not to other for I am in all things as other. Oi vei, turn the damn thing off, it's spewing nonsense again.

[redbell]

> at one point in your life it was processed by your brain and may have changed some posterior decisions you made

I believe this is called subconscious mind

[pyinstallwoes]

I prefer Logos personally.

[nathias]

this isn't really the same

you read something impactful that changes the way you think, your mind will stay changed even if you don't remember the actual reasons or point made, but advertisements, news, etc. will not change the way you think, they are just noise

[noqc]

I have tried very hard not to realize this, to avoid making the mistake that you have.

[gffrd]

What is the mistake that parent has made?

[xnx]

Information is tricky that way, it's like food your mind consumes on sight.

[asimovfan]

Karma

[p0w3n3d]

Very close to "I am a product of my environment"

[Nevermark]

You are a product of how you process and interact with your environment.

Be alert, situationally aware.

Process actively, notice and distill patterns.

Try things. Push the environment.

[TeMPOraL]

Which also reminds me of "You are the average of the few people you interact the most with".

[wyclif]

I don't think it's quite that close. There is still a distinction between being a product of your environment and being influenced by your environment.

My HS college prep English teacher, who was one of the best teachers I ever had, put it this way: "Garbage in, garbage out." His point was that it simply isn't rational to believe that you can read nothing but National Lampoon, Mad Magazine, or the county newspaper and become a great writer. You have to read, digest, and breathe the air of the great works of fiction and literature and allow it to do its work in influencing your prose style, cadence, and structure.

[seydor]

It's as if life was tokenized and fed to an LLM

[zer0tonin]

I'm going to add "Can AIbros survive 5 seconds without mentioning LLMs in irrelevant conversations?" to my list of unanswered existential questions, alongside "Is time travel possible?" and "Why did Bodhidharma come to China?".

[sharpshadow]

That’s why I never started to watch horror movies.

[the-mitr]

you are your long term memory,

[tyler33]

just like an artificial neural network in training mode :/

[diedyesterday]

Exactly. That's what I also thought the last time someone brought this up in these forums (couple of years ago). It's a hint to the structure of the brain and also the mind (we can observe it at the consciousness level in ourselves and others, too). Algorithmic (von Neumann) computers/programs do not usually exhibit this; but neural networks do.

If we are good readers, a book helps up achieve better generalization (in the machine learning sense). That's its main contribution not the specific facts it contained.

[empire_and_sun]

Yes, humans are entirely predictable; that's why i deliberately act random sometimes, to prove I am aware of this predictability, albeit this is still predictable.

[7thaccount]

Agreed. It is a profound realization once you grasp it. There are genetic factors and then the overall sum of your experiences. What you read, what you watch, what you listen to on the radio, who you hang out with, what you do for a living, what organizations you belong to, what family life was like as a kid...etc. It all adds up in little ways. I try to keep this in mind when raising kids.

In hindsight, my father and mother-in-law listening to Rush Limbaugh everyday was probably not very good for them. It is a small sample size, but I can remember as a kid how negative and angry the program was and how it certainly didn't put my father into a good mood and how it was kind of like a mind virus. I try to be more aware of advertising and propaganda, but it isn't easy. You have to be vigilant as even the news will use clips out of context. I'm not just saying conservatives are guilty of this either, but am using an example from personal experience.