Free will; manipulation
I met a man today who claimed to know everything everyone was thinking.
My counterargument was "Your model might work for navigating the world, but that does not mean you truly know what someone is thinking".
That got me thinking about free will,
Free will
Free will exists for you if you are consciously manipulative. If you can choose an outcome, or cause a causality. This goes for objects and humans, and one self. If not you are following the stream, being manipulated by commercials, leaders, your boss etc. Example you can make someone happy. I can see the deeper argument that something feeds how a person acts but thats not what im after.
How does one go about leaving this rabbit hole? Like i have a normal life but this is nagging on me.
My counterargument was "Your model might work for navigating the world, but that does not mean you truly know what someone is thinking".
That got me thinking about free will,
Free will
Free will exists for you if you are consciously manipulative. If you can choose an outcome, or cause a causality. This goes for objects and humans, and one self. If not you are following the stream, being manipulated by commercials, leaders, your boss etc. Example you can make someone happy. I can see the deeper argument that something feeds how a person acts but thats not what im after.
How does one go about leaving this rabbit hole? Like i have a normal life but this is nagging on me.
Comments (15)
The best answer you could give to him is "Ok".
Quoting trogdor
I wouldn't say objects 'consciously manipulate'.
Quoting trogdor
I'm not sure what exactly is nagging you.
I mean, if you move a rock. That is manipulation of the object. If someone forces you to move the rock, that's also that (causality right?). Maybe i'm using the word manipulation wrong.
Quoting TheMadMan
Just that there is something here that i feel is true but i can't put my finger on what it is.
Simply put, a subject can consciously manipulate an object.
An object cannot consciously manipulate anything.
The key word in this case is 'consciously' not 'manipulation'.
Quoting trogdor
An advise for when you are struggling with a problem:
Stop trying to arrive at an answer and step back and work on formulating the question better. Even formulate many questions of the same problem from different perspectives.
Its interesting that you didnt add that he knew WHY they were thinking what they were thinking, which is much more important. For instance, perhaps he could hear their thoughts broadcast to him. That would not solve the issue of interpreting motivation or sense, and it would not by itself allow him to empathize with their perspective.
We can turn this around and posit a man who couldnt hear peoples thoughts , but when they deliberately communicated with him, he always know why they were thinking what they were thinking, such that he was able to always see things sympathetically from their point of view. Some are better at this than others, and this skill is much more valuable than simply being able to hear peoples thoughts.
Yeah this is probably it.
Quoting Joshs
He probably ment that he could understand everyone on some animal level, it was a wierd dynamic and he was very macho.
Sorry for badly structured question. Feel free to philosophize freely. :smile:
You have free will. That's in the bank. What's not in the bank is precisely what free will's ingredients are.
Philosophers often employ cases involving manipulation in order to try and gain insight into what free will's ingredients are.
So, for instance, some argue that there is no relevant difference between being subject to covert manipulation and being subject to deterministic causation. And as a person who is subject to covert manipulation is not morally responsible for the behaviour they were manipulated into doing, then covert manipulation - provided it is pervasive enough - annuls responsibility-grounding free will. And thus they conclude that determinism does too. It's a bad argument, I think, but I am just mentioning it to show that the real issue is over what free will ingredients are.
That kind of the point. I have a hard time wrapping my head around this.
I agree the argument that it takes away responsibility is a bad one. One of the aspects of what I was thinking was given that argument psychopaths would possess more free will. But I just realized that that is very much just a stereotype from my side. But to square that with bosses possesing pyscopathic traits might be interesting. Because they have more money and power right?
Let's say the options I am considering are A and B, one of which is morally right and the other wrong. I have free will over which one I go for. I care to do the right thing, so the fact one of them is wrong counts against it. I am able to do it, but I am probably not going to.
Someone else is considering A and B. They too recognize that B is wrong. But they don't care that it's wrong.
Clearly, however, they have the same free will I do. Their choice is no more or less free than mine just because they do not happen to care about doing the right thing. We have the same abilities and we are both the ultimate sources of what we do.
Yes, that is the liberalistic argument. And I support it.
But surely also something else must be responsible for this hypothetical bad dooers bad deeds. Be it culture, circumstance, brain chemistry etc.? In my experience talking to these type of, let's be fair, men. They just don't seem to care.
Or if you mean the psychopathy? Well, like if you don't empathise with anyone I guess you are not [i] influenced [/I] by them? But for me that's impossible. Just food for thought, and it actually circles back nicely to bosses possessing psychopathic traits i think :grin:
I don't know what you mean by a 'liberalistic argument'. The point is that there is no reason to think that the psychopath has more free will than I do, or anyone else, other things being equal. You said otherwise. So you have agreed that the psychopath and I have the same free will, yet you previously said that the psychopath enjoyed more free will. I wanted to know why you thought that.
But again, you seem to be all over the place. The title is free will and manipulation. Now, what are you saying? What is your thesis? Let's not wander into a discussion of what makes a person a psychopath or not, or whether it has anything todo with empathy. Focus. What's your 'free will and manipulation' related thesis?
Yes! I've been trying for a while now to create a short comprehensive thesis, but I have a hard time finding the right one or I sound like a 15 year old who just read Nietzsche. I will try again tomorrow.
That's just what they want you to think.
My commiserations on your normal life. You might find some relief from the self-nagging here. It begins Thus: --
It seems that it is his desire to possess 'the true' and 'put his finger on it' that creates the nagging and irritation.
Good job quoting Krishnamurti, that will make things clearer for OP (sarcasm)
We all have base desires. Fears. Etcetera. "Common sense" some tote. A normal person with a normal brain can perhaps indeed be described as "predictable" assuming the variables of one's environment or the scenario are known. Thing is, they seldom are as things are not always what they seem.
Maybe this man is in fact a scholar or champion of understanding the human condition. Many successful advertisers/marketers are. Maybe he's just some idiot who judges persons and things by first glance and just happened to have been lucky so far. What does it matter? By even pondering this, is this not the essence of free will?