Even though the conclusion itself may not be a product of free will, the awareness of this conclusion can be consistent with our subjective experience of having the capacity to reason, reflect, and examine our beliefs.
Whether or not he had the subjective experience, if he truly has no free will he has no ability to evaluate the evidence any other way than he did, no matter how good the evidence actually is. So if his conclusion is correct, we cannot trust his conclusion.
If reason is indeed an automatic process, it doesn't imply that it's unreliable or untrustworthy. Many automatic processes in our brain, like pattern recognition or memory retrieval, are highly evolved and serve us well.
Even if someone's conclusions are determined by automatic processes, these processes can still evaluate evidence and information.
If the evidence and information being processed are accurate and comprehensive, the conclusions reached by an automatic process can be quite reliable. If reason is an automatic process, this doesn't invalidate the scientific method.
The challenge to free will doesn't necessarily lead to the conclusion that science and reason are dead. While it does raise questions about the nature of agency and choice, it doesn't undermine the utility of reason in making sense of the world and advancing our understanding.
> If reason is indeed an automatic process, it doesn't imply that it's unreliable or untrustworthy.
But it doesn't imply that it's reliable and trustworthy, either.
Humans didn't evolve to do pure logic correctly in order to find absolute truth. They evolved to get good enough answers fast enough in order to survive. We think our logic is accurate... but maybe that's just so that, given a "good enough" answer, we move with confidence rather than doubt.
But as you mention, there's more than just pure logic. There's also evaluating evidence and information. (Sometimes there's too little, and sometimes there's too much. Which pieces do you believe?) It seems to me that this involved choice, and so the question of whether you can choose is directly relevant.
Even if that isn't directly relevant, I would say that if you are determined (that is, have no free will), and you judge the evidence badly, it is going to be very hard to show you that you judged the evidence badly. You judged it the only way you could; how can someone show you that you are wrong?
People who have lost someone to suicide often seek someone to blame, yet they seldom consider that the person may have had their reasons, most possibly unrelated to that forum. The forum serves as a vital outlet for individuals enduring difficult times, potentially saving more lives than it has taken. Nonetheless, some non-suicidal individuals aim to erase it merely due to personal dislike. It's bewildering.
The story talks about a few things which make it likely that the forum is contributory - a user is described as using information from the forum to frustrate a mental health evaluation, and in taking advice on an effective method of ending their lives.
It's not personal dislike so much as it seems like facilitation. Advice on how to fake it through a mental health assessment, which may otherwise have lead to help being given, seems particularly harmful.
I don't see any problem with that. Information that increases personal autonomy should be available to anyone, everywhere, and for any reason.
When you talk about "help being given," I suppose you are referring to drugs that don't work for most and therapy that cannot address the underlying problems.
When I talk about help being given I’m talking about interventions by friends, family and mental health professionals, that could take many forms. Knowing someone has a problem is the first step to helping them.
Not just drugs, that is an unfair characterisation of my argument.
It's because there is no real "help" being given there. Mental health services in many places are just "if you are really suicidal, we lock you up, otherwise we do nothing"... faking an assessment so you don't get institutionalised and get brain damage from all the pyschiatric drugs and end up a zombie is a pretty good idea IMO
What kind of help do you think they would give if they evaluate your mental health is poor?
If you hide your intent to kill yourself then nobody can help. And if you guide others in how to hide it, you’re increasing the likelihood they will die by their own hands.
There was a beautiful game like the ones you mention that I found once on /r/webgames . However, I am unable to find it again. It was about roaming around a forest, and it was changing with the seasons.
One of the reports says that the accident was caused by the other driver looking at their phone. Could potentially the sensors of the waymo detect that and warn the other driver?
"Hey guys, self-driving is a decent sprint but I think you should expand the scope to include detecting and modeling driver behavior in nearby vehicles. Add a quick study for HCI to warn drivers of their dangerous aberrant behavior and I think we might have something real here!" - tropsis, 2023
It's doing that by looking at the vehicle as the agent though; it has nothing to do with "the body language of this pilot suggests this vehicle will do X", it's just a predictive module because it's useless to be able to see another car if you can't predict it's going to go X units forward in the next time tick(s).
Adding a layer that models human drivers to augment the prediction of this module you link would be a waste of time.
Lol. I think the other comment is making a suggestion that isn't quite reasonable, but maybe it's adjacent to a reasonable ask.
Humans have a horn to warn other humans of unsafe behavior or conditions. We really only need to worry about warning in front of us. And we provide some warning to cars behind us in specific cases with hazard lights and brake lights.
The autonomous vehicles have a better understanding of the whole state. We've already talked about warning other autonomous cars with V2V, but maybe there's something easy/sane they can do to warn human cars behind them and further increase safety.
I think dedicating a small team on this would be a reasonable thing to do. It should be quite separate from the main self-driving task, and would reduce the number of accidents.
In the end, if I'm in a self-driving car, I care whether the crash happened, not who caused it. The injuries and hassle are mine either way, the financial damage isn't mine either way.
I mean if the other driver is using Android it should be possible to use some combination of license plate, phone GPS, Bluetooth proximity, and other means to identify who the other driver probably is and pop a “you are about to run into one of our cars, please loop up” message on their phone.
Fun fact: while daily generally lies on the rear-ending driver, intentionally causing an accident will always get the lion’s share of blame. This would bankrupt Waymo, not anyone else.
If you do that kind of thing, don’t expect it to work out well if the other driver has a dashcam. If they don’t, of course you can lie and deny having caused the accident.
I had the exact same symptoms for many years. I would be able to do leisure activities, but not productive ones. My mind would go blank when trying to explain something. I had little or no initiative.
Initially I thought I suffered from "procrastistination", I tried all methods to fight it to no avail. Then I considered "burn out", "existential crisis", or weariness of work, but that was not the case at all. I started going to psychiatrists, initially they considered "depression", but I did not have a low mood. Finally, one of them figured out that I had "avolition" which can be considered disorder of volition or a disorder of diminished motivation.
After a meditation retreat I had a psychotic break, so finally the end diagnosis was "negative symptoms of schizophrenia" (here "negative symptoms" means those involving the absence of something common to most people). It is possible to have "deficit schizophrenia" without positive symptoms (delusions, hallucinations, etc). However, most psychiatrist are not aware of this, and tend to classify the "disorders of volition" under depression, because that is what they are most familiar with, and because when you have avolition it makes you depressed to not be able to accomplish anything at all. I have tried several meds and I only had a minor improvement with cariprazine, but it caused me unmanageable insomnia, so I had to quit it.
I can relate to a lot of what you just said, including the meditation retreat. I feel compelled to ask: have you ever felt like you’re just playing a game with yourself with all your problems? Like sometimes it feels like I’ve got all these problems that I can’t escape and I’m desperately trying to improve myself, but sometimes I can’t shake this feeling that I’m choosing to have these problems somehow and for some reason - as if there’re two of me, the experiencer and the designer. Some might say “ahah look, it’s just schizophrenia”, but I think there’s more to it than that. For me, it feels like I’m having an awakening. But when I look at my productivity it looks like I’m falling asleep.
Indeed, for many years I felt I was in control of what was happening to me, but that is of course an illusion. During my psychotic episode my sense of agency was disrupted, and it could be that the sense of agency is disrupted without having a psychotic episode. In the end free will is an illusion that manifests itself in different ways in each person. However, it is important to be grounded and have solid measures of mental health like productivity. Not all people are able to recognize that there is something wrong with them (anosognosia), however the metrics indicate if there is objectively something wrong.
It's also a matter of personal preference and individual skills. A person who is capable of 9 dimensional math about strings might not be able to do well anything else, or might not want to do anything else.
> might not be able to do well anything else, or might not want to do anything else.
To some extent, this may be a failure of the educational system. A good number of high intellect folks are not actually challenged, and so they end up thinking that if they're not good at something right away, it's not worth their time or effort.
Perhaps what you're describing is actually the mechanism behind why people would tend to go for careers that match their unique abilities rather than those that have the best outcomes.
For example, consider somebody who would make an amazing doctor. However, if you kept their doctor skills the same but made them really good at some obscure skill which was socially highly regarded and paid well - but in both cases lower than they could do as a doctor - they might decide not to be a doctor.
The brain can fail and become diseased in multiple ways. Depending on which system gets compromised, the effects can be mild, or serious. The disorders of volition are well-known by those who study neuroscience, and those who suffer them. They are not a "trivial of inconvenience" and no amount of discipline can overcome them. What did I expect? From you nothing at all, because you are not well-versed in the topic, and you don't seem interested in learning about it.
You know, being compassionate usually feels better than feeling right. Being right also gets you less far in life. Just a little life lesson I learned the hard way after 40 years of "being right". I used to make comments like this. Still occasionally do, old habits die hard.
Anyway, you also find out that being compassionate is also usually more right than being right. The problem is that, when trying to be right, you stop being inquisitive.
Now you might ask, "hey, you know, I always think people are lazy, good-for-nothing whiners, but now you are telling me that there are people that have some kind of neurological problem that makes it a lot harder for them to overcome the initial friction of starting a project/thinking deep?"
Or if you dont follow me in this argumentation:
Would you tell a cripple to "Stop whining about the most trivial of inconveniences, and just walk. We all learned to walk as kids, you are doing yourself and all the other cripple kids a disservice!"
