A comprehensive list of people who should be raped to death by pineapples.

It does make you a better person, but when in my posts did I mention I encourage child rape? you just said that to make yourself feel better whilst noone in this entire forum thread has mentionned them supporting or encouraging child rape.

 

Well I'd still think you were a creepy fucker for watching it but I would have no rational, moral, or legal objection to it no.

 

You didn't say it directly, but by making it harder to effectively deal with the problem (which you would be doing by tying up the legal system with ineffective but perversely pleasing punishments) and actively opposing anything that doesn't involve immediately killing paedophiles (thus opposing any scientific attempt to understand and prevent the problem from arising) you are doing quite a lot to encourage the spread and perpetuation of child molestation.

Basically you might not think you're doing anything wrong, but because you don't think very much about the consequences of your actions, you are doing quite a lot wrong.

Execution is not a deterrant to crime, imprisonment is not a deterrant to crime. Punishment of any sort is not a deterrant to crime, because people simply believe that they won't get found out, and thus no amount of punishment will matter. Even further you have people who simply don't care all that much about whether they get caught because their current situation is so shitty, and you also have people who simply don't get much choice in the matter because they are mentally unwell, and thus incapable of making a sound, rational decision about whether the risk is worth it.

So absolutely no form of punishment you can come up with will prevent crime any more effectively than our current ones. On the other hand, rehabilitation can shorten sentences and produce useful people at the end. Why kill someone or imprison them if you can simply alter their mind, and then put them to use in work. Shooting people in the head may be cheaper than imprisoning them, but an effective rehabilitation program would be able to not only shorten the sentence required, but eventually produce someone capable of literally repaying their debt to society, in both social and monetary terms. The downside of course is that it isn't very bloodthirsty unless you particularly like the idea of co-opting people's beliefs to serve the common good.

The only reasons to oppose it are therefore either economic; which is to say you don't believe such a system could be developed on a reasonable budget, or personal; which is to say it doesn't get you hard enough when you think about it happening to people you dislike.

Considering that imprisonment and execution are both already extremely expensive, I don't think the first is a particularly valid argument, as even if it doubled the expense for say, ten years, within another ten you would have probably have made that back with the returns from reduced sentences, work done by rehabilitated offenders, reduced amounts of crime commited in the first place due to better understanding of the reasons for crime etc, and after that you're actually returning a profit on the ten year investment into better crime prevention methods.

Thus, I posit that the reason you disagree with it is because you prefer a more visceral approach to justice.

 

Simple. People act under the illusion of free will, society acts under the illusion of free will, and no one knows any differently. I fully believe that the universe is deterministic and that the only reason people can live is because they think they have free will, because time and time again has shown that people crack when they realize they have no power or influence on anyone or anything; the idea that we can not even control our own hands or think for ourselves is so inconceivable that we reject it on a subconscious level, no matter how much we claim to accept it consciously. For example, the more I try and think about how I'm not actually typing these words, how I was destined to type this words, and how I have no control over these thoughts, the stronger I get a feeling in my gut that says "No.", despite the evidence pointing towards determinism, or the lack thereof pointing towards self-determination.

So if the reality of the universe is that there is no free will, but we are bound to believe that we have free will, even if it is just an illusion of it, then that illusion, due to every other possibility being inconceivable, becomes our reality. And reality as we know it, as we can conceive it, includes self-determination and free will.

 

Smells like some serious Neo-Marxism in here.

 

So when you die in Empires, it's not because you're bad at it, it's because the Universe had already made it so you would die in Empires just at that second?

 

The idea that the universe is completely deterministic and that completely opposes the idea of free will is kinda odd to me.

Because the whole point of free will is that you get to decide what you want to do, then do it, then have it affect the world. A deterministic universe still has all of those things.

For example to type this post, I look at yours, realise I disagree with it, decide to spend the next five minutes explaining why, type it out, then you read it and comprehend my opinion. Simply because that would be completely predictable if you had sufficient knowledge of how my mind works and what the situation was, doesn't make it any less of a decision on my part.

I do make choices before I do things, and the things I do affect the world in some way. I have free will for all intents and purposes, yet the world remains deterministic in the sense that all actons have causes, and thus sufficient knowledge of the causes could determine the actions in advance.

 

But if I could theoretically predict with 100% accuracy what you are going to do, then it would be impossible for you to influence it because if you were to attempt to influence it, that would be in my prediction. The implication of free will is that you have the ability to flip the bird and do something that I did not or could not predict. If you had free will, then my predictions could be wrong because free will requires there to be randomness in the world, or else the effect could always be determined from the cause.

A deterministic universe would not allow you to do what to do because all possible causes are logical effects of past causes.

 

So the bottom line is: Do not research into if we have a free will or not, because that will only make us unhappy and that none here likes childrape, but we have different opinions on how to fix the problem?

 

Why is the implication of free will the ability to do something you can't predict?

By predicting it, you aren't forcing me to do it, you are observing my decision making process and concurring with my decision. I am still making the decision myself with my own brain and the information I have available.

The idea of free will is that you, the person, are able to make your own decisions, which you are, using whatever logic you want to use. The ability of others to use the same logic to arrive at the same decision as you doesn't affect your free will.

 

In a deterministic universe, you don't make your own decisions. Every chemical reaction that happens in the body has a definite cause, every synapse that fires has a definite effect. There is no branching in what can happen; action A can only cause effect A, not effect B or C, and effect A can only happen as a direct cause of action A.

So in a deterministic universe , action A caused effect A which caused effect B which caused effect C which caused effect D and so forth, all the way from the very start of the universe until now when you made your thoughts. Certain synapses fire because certain other synapses fired, certain reactions happened because certain other reactions happen. I don't need to obverse your thought process to make a prediction, I just need the know the exact state of the universe at any given point in the past and work my way up to the present. You're not making decisions, they're just an enormous combination of electrochemical signals that directly follow from a previous state.

 

You see, I've never really heard a convincing argument for free will because of ^this^.

From our mortal perspective, there is definitely randomness, risk and chance because we can't measure the state of the universe or analyze it.

However, a being with omniscience doesn't have our mortal limitations. And if we can also assume that the being started the universe (i.e. knows universe state 0), then that being knows all of the universe.

And then you get into the philosophical argument of whether that being is the universe that it knows so infinitely.

Therefore, we are god. QED MOTHERFUCKERS.

 

I am an enormous collection of elecrochemical signals, the state of which directly follows from a previous state.

Therefore, I the person who is that collection of electrochemistry, make decisions using that set of electrochemistry, by which I do electrochemical things before I act, and my subsequenct actions affect the world in some way.

I really don't see why this is at odds with the idea of free will. By all rational definitions of the phrase it is entirely possible for it to exist in a deterministic universe. All that is required is for there to be a me, for the thing that is me to undertake an action which fits the criteria of 'decision making' and for that decision to have consequences which affect the world.

I decide, I act, I effect change. I have free will.

You seem to be arguing against rationality itself, that the only way for there to be free will is if your decisions have no basis whatsoever in the world, because to act in observance of the world is to have your decisions dictated by the world, and thus not free will.

Which is ludicrous, no sane man would argue that weighing your options based on observation and choosing the most logical action doesn't constitute decision making.

 

But defining 'yourself' as the 'collection of electrochemistry' isn't as easy as you make it seem.

What about emotions? We typically see emotions as our 'bad' side. We separate it from us so we can maintain a different style of rationality.

I learned this from Economics where they use rationality assumptions to justify actions. If you use a very traditional definition of rationality, then serial killers become rational and all sorts of bad stuff. So you have to draw lines with emotions and use a modified version of rationality.

So you can have your definition of self (and rational thought), but you're justifying crimes and stuff.

 

Here's another person who should be raped by pineapples.

 

You can't just say that making decisions is using free will; the decisions you make are based off past experiences and rationale. Even saying 'I'm going to make the decision I wouldn't normally make here' would just be doing so because it's been pointed out to you. Everything is predetermined.

 

Another schizo.

He probably thought everyone was out to get him. It's impossible to imagine the constant paranoia that those people suffer though. We simply can't judge him accurately.

But Chris is defining the decision maker as all things that influence personal decisions. That assumption might sound silly, but we make it all the time, especially in this thread...

 

Well, you know what they say, you can't find god with a telescope and you can't find the mind with a microscope.

 

...then Trickster is an asshole.