I'm curious if you can go into what exactly are the views about things like justice and morality and equality.
I've never had the opportunity to speak to a very gifted kid. Let alone a kid that understands Einstein's Theory of Relativity and being so young.
I know Einstein was considered a pacifist and had strong social views himself. I think everything is deterministic like how Einstein did. My views on justice, morality and equality are shaped by knowing determinism.
I don't consider myself gifted btw. I'm just curious why someone so young would care about the forgoing topics to have strong views on them. What are these views and why?
A lot of the world is pretty bad about things like not keeping their word. You see this come up a lot in fiction, which likely reflects the embittering experiences of the author.
In one of the Jurassic Park movies, the father is blaming the mother for letting the kid sleep with a night light and then there really is a T rex in the backyard and it's just eaten the family dog.
In one of the Aliens vs. Predators movies, the father is dismissively telling the child "There's no monster. See!" and shines the light on the window which illuminates the Alien and it breaks through the window to kill him. Logically, the child was next, but the scene cuts away before the child is attacked. So you get sort of a fantasy depiction of some asshole father getting what they so richly deserve, to the satisfaction of the child who has been dismissed their entire life.
One video game has a meme "The cake is a lie." It's a hugely popular meme and probably because a lot of parents promise desert if the kid behaves and don't necessarily follow through.
Gifted kids aren't necessarily more moral, but they are more articulate, will have a better memory and a bigger vocabulary and are somewhat inclined to be argumentative. A lot of them will call the parents on "But you said..." and will remember it if the parent basically screws them over after being reminded of what they promised.
Kids tend to universally feel that if you said you would do X, that's a promise and you are supposed to keep your promises. Gifted kids just do a better job of remembering that you said X and arguing it with you and tend to have a raft load of other strong personality traits.
The higher the IQ, the more likely they are to qualify for other labels as well, such as OCD, ASD and ADHD. So some of these kids get really wrapped around the axle about things when adults make a promise and then break it and it becomes clear that the adult never really intended to keep it. They were just screwing with the kid for convenience' sake.
The same clear, bright line of logic that makes some kids good at math or science plays out socially as a strong moral position, whether it is intended that way or not. I have a strong interest in social stuff and I am routinely assumed to be talking about morality when I'm often saying something more like "gravity doesn't work that way."
People think social stuff is fuzzy and hand wavy and you can't research it. It's hard to research, but there are some things we know and there are some best practices for determining some things and I just find that stuff interesting. But people almost always feel I am being judgy, probably because most parents raise children with either a guilt model or a shame model.
I didn't use either as a parent. I raised my kids with a model of enlightened self interest and I taught them things like "You have to pick your battles. You don't have to back down just because someone is mad that you did X, but if you don't have a good reason to keep doing X, maybe them being mad is good enough reason to give it a rest already."
So they got schooled about social dynamics in a way that's pretty uncommon.
Anyway, it's not that they really frame it as morality per se. It's more that they do the same thing all kids do -- expect you to keep your word when you make a promise and things like that -- but they are more articulate and have a better memory and are more inclined to argue things for various reasons. For parents trying to take some easy way out and be lazy and say "There will be cake if you are good" when they don't actually mean it, this is endlessly problematic and comes back to bite them, doubly so if the kid is bright.
Thanks for the explanation, Doreen. My oldest is 2 years ahead in math and has been very much obsessed with fairness for the last year or so. You've given me some ideas on how to discuss the concept of fairness, and to bring up the "choose your battles" angle.
However, quite a few of our disagreements have to do with how it's basically impossible to determine fairness because of multiple dimensions of fairness. Do you have any advice on how you have handled that (or might handle it now)?
Honestly, probably the best tip I can give you is that when your bright child is driving you up the wall, the correct answer is (usually) "They're bored. What can I do to remedy that?"
Bright kids, especially twice exceptional kids, often argue to alleviate boredom and not because they actually are that wrapped around the axle about X.
Re fairness: I studied negotiating tactics and taught my sons to negotiate from a very young age. I spent a week when they were like two and four years old (or maybe three and five) coaching them to argue their side for who gets the front seat in the car. This took up to thirty minutes per stop.
After a week, I told them they had five minutes to come up with an agreement and if they couldn't agree, they both went in the back seat. They got very talented at coming up with win-win solutions to quite a lot of their problems because I coached them on negotiation at an incredibly early age and made it a standard in the household.
You might try stocking up on negotiating books and see if that helps any.
Hi Doreen, very interesting. There's a lot of the 'Positive Education' movement (not sure how it's called in the US) in what you describe.
I have twin girls and one the best things I've learned is to let them handle all their conflicts themselves.
It's a lot about accepting their emotions, letting them express themselves, acknowledging their feelings and... Stopping short of giving a solution. 'I'm here for comfort, you're in a safe place, now go find your path'. So, so liberating. They always find a solution, as long as they're fed, not too tired, and not sick. Not always win-win, but choosing which hill to die on, feeling how advantageous is the deal for everyone, sometimes taking a loss to maintain harmony and keep the game going, sometimes taking a yuge loud stand for a tiny tiny thing but once you listen you hear a long litany of small concessions not rewarded and it's time to take a stand. They're far more prone to show generosity and also to assert when they don't want to share. And they're perfectly allowed to change their mind, and to handle the happy or angry consequences. It's kind of wonderful to see how then those skills are useful with their school friends. Kind of a superpower.
More and more I feel parenting is giving a place to come for comfort, teach (by example and some simple phrases) few absolute principles (no violence - you can be angry, you can't hurt others, no stealing, ...) and just be available for reassurance, comfort, to mourn with them and also to try new stuff (lying, new 'negotiation' techniques, sports, music, ...).
Parenting can be a form of therapy. You question yourself a lot. And kids are kind of a mirror of our inconsistencies, our biases. You can embrace it, admit your inconsistencies, show them that 1) one does not have to be perfect to help, comfort and be worthy of inconditional love 2) one can say sorry when wrong 3) one can change and improve when faced with inconsistencies 4) some things are not good but it's not easy to stop when you've been doing it for long - and there lies the difficulty of changing habits, it's hard and can be done, 5) sometimes people fail to follow-through and it's important to be persistent...
It's a challenge to become a better person. Their world is shaped by what they see. Your reward is to shape a slightly better world through them.
While I've only got a single 3yo so far, and I've been mostly following similar approach as you, I find that this approach requires a lot of time (and energy) investment that is sometimes hard to get. My wife also works pretty long hours, so sometimes enduring arguments of the sort is extra tiring.
Not to diminish the work you did, but did you manage to do that along the full time work, or did you have to stop or reduce work hours?
Not to mention that this 3yo is happy to sleep for 7-8h every other night because there's so much stuff to do. :)
As I said elsewhere, I was fortunate to be a full-time homemaker.
Just to give you some kind of picture: I have a serious medical condition, as does my oldest, and both of my kids are twice exceptional, not just gifted. I was also a military wife, which is fairly demanding, and I went to college part-time and intermittently.
When my oldest was twelve, I realized that he argued so much because he was bored. At that point, I began redirecting his attention instead of arguing and life got vastly better and he quit making me crazy.
I was still active on parenting lists and that idea was a big revelation for a number of parents who indicated that announcements that "I'm bored" tended to precede problematic social behavior.
"Idle hands are the devil's workshop" for bright kids. Keeping them occupied is the best way to keep the peace.
Well that doesn't sound that bad. I apologize for my ignorance though because I'm not privileged to have kids of my own.
I think just being honest would be the best approach if their memory is good and they somewhat have a higher moral standard. Why not just explain you're in a difficult situation when it happens and express how you expect them to play their part in helping complete the difficult situation.
I hate parents that do the blame & shame or guilt to achieve something. That to me can play into a controlling dynamic that never solves the conflict. I think sincereness when difficulties happen is the best approach because everyone involved likely will remember it. Specially if it works out.
Life is sometimes just not that easy and simple and gifted kids often go through a stage where their mind and experience levels are out of step and it goes weird places.
My oldest son talked late in part because he was frustrated that he couldn't express himself as articulately as his college-educated mother. So he continued using two-word phrases and refused to use sentences because he was two years old and that made some kind of logical sense to him, since he felt like he had mastered two-word phrases but trying to use sentences made him feel dumb. He was sixteen before he really got over it.
My other son, the one with the fairness bug, got very car sick and had trouble eating and it was quite hard to convince him that, no, really, you are allowed to order ice cream for dinner at a restaurant when we are traveling and you are car sick. He had gotten it into his head that it was a bad thing to eat desert without first eating dinner and he would have melt downs about things like that and no amount of telling him "No, really, I'm your mom and I say it's okay" was enough to readily fix it. We would go through a few rounds of things before he would finally decide that there wasn't some problem with making some exception, even though he explicitly had parental permission.
I was fortunate to be a homemaker, so I had a fair amount of time and flexibility for stopping and explaining life, the universe and everything at the drop of a hat for my endlessly questioning little hellions. But if both parents work or you are a single parent, there just isn't enough time in the day and it's exhausting even if there is.
I think I did a good job, but it wasn't easy. It was never easy. And that's why I keep trying to blog about it: Because other parents who mean well and would like to do the right thing aren't getting the answers they need and some of them are just tearing their hair out.
Such parents liked my emails on a particular email list years ago and that's why I began blogging. But it never really quite gelled. I'm hoping it will soon cuz Reasons.
I’m enjoying your stories here and on your “Raising Future Adults” blog. You mentioned other parenting blogs – are they still live? I’d love to read more of your work.
No, those parenting blogs aren't still live. But I run a wide variety of websites, most of which are written more or less on the format of "x topic as filtered through my eyes and life experience."
Thanks! As a mom of a gifted preschooler, I’ve appreciated the chance to learn from your experience of parenting your gifted kids with respect and honesty. You remind me of Aunt Annie, another blogger who’s work has really resonated with me. http://auntannieschildcare.blogspot.com/p/aunt-annies-gifted...
Well, I have, in fact, finally written the post I've been working on of late. Hopefully, this is a new beginning and I will be more consistent henceforth.
The HN crowd from my impression wants to deeply think of themselves as being in control of how their life transpired. I'm an outlier and I think free will is an illusion. Not only do I think everything is fated beyond our control but I have the belief that society would function better if people were educated young about understanding the concept of determinism and why we don't have control over how life transpires. Fundamentally we're living in a judgement & punishment system of society because religion adopted the stance of people being in control instead of what we describe as evil being a product of God. I think a society that replaces judgement & punishment with rehabilitation would be fundamentally just. I'm curious if society will evolve or stay unchanging but I think it likely won't be in my lifetime.
> Not only do I think everything is fated beyond our control but I have the belief that society would function better if people were educated young about understanding the concept of determinism and why we don't have control over how life transpires
We can’t really decide to do that because we don’t have the free will for it. Preordained fate has decreed for there to be no such education.
I mean, you argument appears self-defeating to me. Is it not?
"decide" is not incompatible with determinism, it just means the decision will always be the same. We all make decisions every day, they just aren't free.
So in this case, it has all been determined that we do not have the education currently, but that says nothing of what the future is determined to be.
I am certainly not holding my breath for society to bite the bullet and accept this. The only way I could see any kind of transformation happening (in the US, at least) is if the sitting president were to physically say "Free will is not a thing, and because of that I'm implementing these reformations". I think that would be enough to get _a_ percentage of the populace at least talking/thinking about it (if not a large percentage).
If free will is an illusion, why not the rest of the world (a la Descartes' Evil demon thought experiment)? Why do you trust your senses at all?
I am compelled by the notion of free will described by Schopenhauer (expanding on Kant). Namely, that 'one can do as he wills but not will as he wills'. Lived experience leads us to infer an indeterminate/inseparable energy/force/Will that we perceive with our senses and organize through the concepts of time/space/causality. However, we, being on the 'inside' of one particular object, are in a peculiar state: we are free to accept or reject this Will.
If I ask you to think of a number between 0 and 10, a number may pop up in your head (seemingly out of nowhere, though clearly through some process affected by genetics/neurochemistry). Despite this, you (whatever 'you' is) are still free to accept or reject this proposition.
In this sense, people can still be punished for accepting propositions of murder in some coherent way. You are affected by, but not the sum total of, your genetics and neurochemistry. Nevertheless, the latter might play a large role that we shouldn't discount.
> Despite this, you (whatever 'you' is) are still free to accept or reject this proposition.
The outcome happens from all the previous moments you lived. Randomness doesn't make a person have free will and randomness may just be an illusion from our lack of understanding when it comes to what's resulting in the outcome we appear as random.
We're the sum total of genetics, environmental factors and all the external forces upon us since birth. That means if we're being punished it was outside the realm of it could have been different.
Probably no more dangerous than free will beliefs because as with some determinist beliefs, it's moderated by thinking life is dictated by a greater order, see Calvinism or the many determinsts who aren't "dangerous" as well as those of us who think deterministic belief leads us to more nuanced and moderate views on societal events, that something begets something begets something, ad infinitum which can lead to better prevention and help mechanisms. I'm certainly not a danger other than to cheesecake or endangered anymore than anyone else who believes the will is free of physical influence and that at its core it's random, or a god or something fueling the RNG or whatever.
A single example: the US justice system is based on retribution. People are condemned to prisons and sometimes death as a result of ultimately how they are wired and the circumstances they were in- there was no 'choice' made regarding whether or not to steal or kill, they were always going to do that, they never had any real 'control' over their actions. If anything criminality in any form should be considered a mental illness, but instead we gladly put people in tortuous conditions because we have wantonly decided that they are guilty, bad/evil, people.
This focuses on the "retribution/punishment" aspect of the penal system, but it's also important to remember that "deterrence" and "reform" are also important. Even if you feel people don't deserve to be punished for their crimes due to the crimes' inevitability, it's still important for repercussions to exist to create a society where it is less likely for people to commit those crimes (for fear of punishment), and where people who do commit crimes undergo a process that makes them less likely to do so in the future. (There are better ways than prison to reform people, of course, but not as many to deter people from committing crimes in the first place)
That just sounds like a one sided convenience for people fated to not be hurt by the system that doesn't harm them. Deterrence can be from not having to go through the rehabilitation system.
I agree with most of your reply but imposing a contentious philosophy upon others wouldn't go well nor would I want to condone it. I'm not very determined to believe in determinism but I do and it doesn't change my views on punishment very much as I'm still determined to have a sense of self and societal protection in that I'd prefer "bad" people kept from society until reformed although I am less judgemental as a result from thinking about it more over the years.
Just because we can't determine why something happens doesn't mean its not predetermined. Every RNG gets its seed somehow, I don't see how we can be so sure that there is absolutely _zero_ cause for a given effect.
Bell's Theorem implies that if there is some kind of hidden variable controlling the outcome of a random quantum event like a seed, then it must work non-locally, which maybe doesn't completely rule it out, but it's really suggestive given that locality is one of the common assumptions like conservation of energy that has lead to a lot of progress in physics.
Interestingly, there is a local deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics: the Many-Worlds Interpretation. The interpretation is considered by many to be what the Schroedinger equation by itself with nothing extra added (like wave function collapse) implies about the world. There is no objective randomness. The 10,000-foot view of it is that any random quantum event with multiple possible outcomes causes the world to branch into a separate world for each outcome. (Generally random quantum events have a continuous outcome space instead of discrete outcomes, but it's harder to talk about a continuous spectrum of "worlds". The "worlds" of MWI aren't necessarily discrete atomic things; the word "world" is more of a fuzzy label for our convenience, like the word "pile". Also, per the Schroedinger equation, there's situations where multiple histories leading to equivalent worlds can cancel out, decreasing the measure and therefore observed probability of that world occurring; that's how we could possibly know this whole splitting business is going on.)
However, a system like this would still have subjective randomness, in the sense that there's no way for you to predict the value of a random quantum event. (Say you have a device that when you press the button, it will measure radiation from a radioactive object inside it for a period of time, and then output "heads" if it measured more than the average amount and "tails" if less.) Assuming it's set up as advertised, the idea of predicting the result doesn't even make sense, because after the measurement, there will be a cluster of worlds with a version of you that sees "heads", and a cluster of worlds with a version of you that sees "tails". Predicting which one you'll be makes as much sense as predicting who you will be before you were born. (I find it interesting that no matter how deterministic of a universe you imagine, there's always the subjective randomness resulting from the indexical uncertainty in who you find yourself being. MWI extends indexical uncertainty like that to more situations.)
True, but I think this isn't a good response to the idea that determinism means you don't have control over your life. Reality having randomness doesn't give us more control over our lives. (If anything, I'd think that fact alone would mean we have less, because it means there's probably entropy getting in the way of whatever our true decision processes are.)
I really love the way this article puts the issue: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NEeW7eSXThPz7o4Ne/thou-art-p.... The idea that determinism takes away free will from us is inherently based on the idea that we're something outside of physics, and that physics is exclusively deciding the future instead of us. However, if you make the common assumption that our brain is a material object running within physics and producing our decisions, then there is no contradiction between deterministic physics and whatever is meant by free will.
Another way I like to think about it: If you made an AI and ran it in some closed simulation, would you expect it to care whether the simulation was completely deterministic (with all probabilistic events operating from a pre-chosen seed and a strong RNG) or had some kind of randomness? The question won't directly affect the AI's life inside the simulation either way. Wouldn't you find it weird if it did actually care and had a preference about that detail of its world, or if it thought it wasn't a true free AI if there was no randomness in its simulation? If the AI thought the world had randomness or not, and then learned the opposite, you'd find it weird if the AI restructured everything it knew about itself and the world directly based on that. If you the operator happened to toggle whether the simulation had randomness several times over its run while working on its code, and at some later point the AI was let out of the simulation, you wouldn't expect the AI to take offense at this change. There's nothing about its quality of life, decision-making abilities, or life circumstances that would be affected by the answer. It's just an implementation detail of its world that's not directly relevant to an intelligence, except in matters of modeling how the world works.
Fate wins in the end. However, it doesn't change the fact we're all systems. When information is presented the systems take it in like a variable and it will have a far greater significance if the information wasn't shared. I don't believe in free will.
In theory the idea would work. People being cooperative enough is where I'm skeptical. I assume anyone in the high risk group would volunteer to receive the less-dangerous strain and when the incentive of lowering risk of death is obvious. I speculate young people wouldn't volunteer unless they have a health issue placing them in the high risk group.
>I speculate young people wouldn't volunteer unless they have a health issue placing them in the high risk group.
I suspect lots of young people would happily volunteer if it meant their life could return to normal. Heck, I'd bet even for the current strain, with a ~0.1% risk of death for young people, quite a few people would volunteer to get it if it meant they could get out of lockdown.
I'm not disagreeing with that opinion. I just haven't observed young adults taking the lockdown seriously.
I personally work from home (as one of the privileged few being a programmer) and when I do go outside I take social distancing serious. My health in general isn't great although I'm not old (early 30s) and which is why I don't leave my apartment much anymore. I live in a college area and young adults are still going over to each others apartments and without practicing social distancing when going out to buy groceries. I'm in Quebec for context. I've heard it isn't much different in the USA.
Maybe the (possible) solution could work without young people on board.
>I live in a college area and young adults are still going over to each others apartments and without practicing social distancing when going out to buy groceries.
That's my point: the young adults don't want to comply with the social distancing, so if someone said "hey, if you let me infect you with this virus that has a 1/50,000 chance of killing you, you can no longer get/transmit the more dangerous strain so you don't have to social distance any more", a lot would take the offer.
The whole approach requires young people to not take the lockdown seriously. They will be the people who spread around the less dangerous strain of the virus.
Would anyone have a choice? Surely once a few people are infected it will start spreading on its own. Even if people who are infected were instructed to isolate there will be a certain level of non-compliance, particularly at scale.
That doesn't matter. The reason why everything is closed is hospital capacity. That impacts everybody. If you had a car accident you may not get all the help you need.
14% of people may need hospitalisation and you want to focus your efforts on that group. There is almost no young people there.
Recruitment spamming isn't useful for accessing hiring rate. Recruiters are always building their database of who is out there and gathering information.
I mean building your database via "I'd like to connect" message is one thing, getting specific job descriptions + being asked to start the recruitment process is a bit farther than that. I'm getting about the same ratio of type so far the past month. I'm not saying it's 1 to 1 but these companies are at least still actively hiring, and I have no reason to doubt that based on my company doing the same.
Gathering information is the recruitment process. It's just used to filter the good candidates out of bad candidates. The process is further used to get a valuation of what each candidate is willing or desiring to be paid and this is the main reason recruiters will always be working. I'm still being spammed as well and where the recruitment process is part of the spam. I work in academia which I enjoy and I'm not looking to leave my job but I do think the actual hiring will slow somewhat down. Too early to predict how much in all areas of engineering but I assume in a few months we will see.
I believe there are two sides I'm aware of when it comes to people. Firstly there exists persons that consider work as another extension of life with social merit. Secondly the persons that think of work as work and disregard any social merit because they care more about it outside of work.
In my opinion if we shut out the first classification we're making these persons miserable because they see social merit in work. I also believe work has become overly optimized compared to previous years and where people should still be able to enjoy social merit if they desire it.
Wow, this is like a drug dealer lacing their services with fentanyl. In all seriousness I'm making the comparison because in both cases the sanctity of life is being violated in favour of arrogant self-interests.
I don't believe in free will because it doesn't make sense when you understand determinism. You cannot be free when every thought & action is the outcome of the past forces exerted upon you.
My understanding of superdeterminism doesn't necessarily rule out the multiverse theory. Maybe my idea of the multiverse theory isn't traditional but I think the universe can very well identically repeat and or repeat but be somewhat different by how forces can be occurring at different intervals than the past cycle of the universe.
edit: people downvote on this site because they don't like thinking of not having free will lol.
Your explanation of why you don't believe in free will is very philosophically unrefined, and your smug tone (implying people who do believe in free will must not understand determinism) is not helpful.
The reality is that a great many philosophers believe that determinism and free will are perfectly compatible. There is also supernatural defense of free-will, as in many religions (where the physical universe may well be deterministic, except for interaction with a spiritual world of will, which may produce physical effects without a physical cause). Both of these ideas are example of people who believe in free will even if they do understand (physical) determimism. There are probably other groups as well.
No. It's nonsensical to think a person created in the universe is separate from the universe. There are no great philosophers that believe in free will. It would be only wishful thinking with ignoring logic to assume you can make a choice that's truly your own and not the outcome of the system we're in. Furthermore, neuroscience illustrates determinism (no free will) and physics has as well until people lost their minds with quantum physics that's grossly unfinished. please email me if you want to discuss in great detail.
> It's nonsensical to think a person created in the universe is separate from the universe. There are no great philosophers that believe in free will.
And yet compatibilism is a common philosophical belief ever since ancient times, supported throughout history by philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Thomas Aquinas, and Daniel Denett.
The essential idea is that what we understand by free will can exist even in a purely deterministic naturalistic universe - mostly, free will should be understood as the ability of any agent to act based on its motivations. So, for example, an artificial neural net is in some important sense free to act as it 'wills' to solve a problem, even though it is following its programming.
Compatibilism is defining free will differently than how most people think of free will. Free will is an illusion in the traditional sense and thinking of compatibilism changes everything but doesn't give free will in the traditional sense.
The agent cannot make decisions free of what the system has influenced. So, it still is nonsensical to think a person has free will in the traditional sense. People are not making their own decisions when they couldn't have been different from the result of the system they reside in. I do consider Schopenhauer a great philosopher but what most people think of free will isn't a possibility. Compatibilism isn't even worthwhile because it doesn't make determinism & free will compatible but instead just redefines free will to delude people into thinking traditional free will is a real thing.
It might not bring back the magical kind of idea where we assert our will over the physical world, true. But if people really believed in that, they would also believe in actual magic, or telekinesis (of course, quite a few do, but there's really no arguing with some people).
But the compatibilist free will has most of the characteristics that we associate with any kind of free will. For example, there is still value in arguments, as hearing one agent's argument can well be the cause of the other agent's change in behavior. By the same token, it still makes sense to hold agents responsible for their actions and punish them for their decisions, since the cause of their behavior is very much related to their 'person', the sum total of what they have experienced, learned, and have projected about the future through their own rationality.
In fact, it's hard to find anything in the compatibilist free will that contradicts intuitive notions of free will, except for the most religious of intuitions, unless you push it to the brink and try to ask questions where we don't have good intuitions anyway, usually by asking counterfactuals, or moving to the relationship between free will and consciousness.
There is also another kind of approach to this question, one I first heard from Noam Chomsky. His point was: if determinism were to contradict our most immediate experience (as discussed before, it may not), the one of deciding how to interact with the world, wouldn't it make more sense to say that we are missing something from our scientific understanding in this area, rather than insisting that the most common empirical observation we have is completely wrong?
My opinion is compatiblism (like it or not) does delude people into not understanding they have no control over how they came to be as a person, the wealth they accumulate, the relationships, the awful things that happened to them if they do, all these things were by fate, and that people deeply believe the "thought" of realizing free will is an illusion equates to an unpleasant existence or some nonsense of realizing consciousness is really fake (in a sense similar to the colour red changing to orange with yellow added).
I'm sure some people read about compatiblism and shortly later go back to believing the traditional free will nonsense. I don't think many people think about not having free will for much time at all. Thinking about determinism for awhile makes it hard to not understand predeterminism. Progresses into making it fairly easy to understand we're just part of a complex system and the system works from a collective mesh of subsystems being "us" to the smallest thing.
We're similar to the concept of robots. The universe wrote code for the instructions of us. Similar, we made the robots "code" and people don't consider the robots having free will from our "human code" functioning the operating robots. When people have their thought on robots, they think of determinism subconsciously and think "no.., the actions are really from us, who coded & setup the robots" while the residing of the robots has environment external forces interacting with the robots' outcomes.
I personally think the world is good but resembles evil and overtime becomes less resembling evil. I further think the universe repeats more likely than not ever repeat throughout infinity. A good majority of people don't realize they don't have free will; that's keeping evil resembling experiences around longer on earth from what I observe and while people are punished severely. They're never being told they had no free will required to have a better outcome or being given the time observing how their mentality came to be that resulted in the bad outcome.
Most people don't even experience what the punishments are from unfavourable: genetics, financial status, health condition, and whatever life variable factoring into conflicting with the system of society; outcomming in not living a mediocre or higher status life but an awful one.
So yes, I get freaked out when I even observe all the travesties in society, that likely would have more empathy if people understood "success isn't earned" but given to you at birth and like everything else that follows after birth. Awareness of how the universe at the moment of the creation, resulted in the future (sad or happy) outcomes from the summation of sequential forces upon everything and then thinking of the more privileged vs misfortunate situations in comparison.
The forgoing makes me think the system of society would adapt to be more compassionate than the opposite incorrect belief of traditional free will. It's like when people thought it was better to think the world was flat. Delusion isn't better than realism. Eventually, leads me into thinking people can eventually be more likely to agree on universal healthcare and even futuristic things like universal income & homes.
So I think free will belief needs to be killed sooner than later. Even though whatever happens is what fate already decided on upon creation. So I'm somewhat hopeful people examine this topic.
I think your perspective on free will is somewhat closer to my own then I originally thought. I completely agree that outcomes in life are determined much, much more by the world than by any kind of personal responsibility. I think that there are plenty of people who believe even in magical free will (say, christian concepts of it) who actually understand this same thing, though you are right that there are many who don't.
However, I don't believe in full predetrminism, and you don't either. If you did, you would not think about improving the world, or convincing people of things - if you believe that the next speech by the president was determined at the time of the big bang, then thinking about change is meaningless, and none of us can help feel or not feel however we do.
However, if you believe in a world where the future has not happened yet and it evolves more like a complex computation, with room for changing program code by the program itself, perhaps even with some randomness thrown in, you get a fully naturalistic deterministic world where nevertheless you can try to influence things in some direction or another.
To articulate my own belief about this more clearly, I think the example of robots you gave is very good. I believe that even a robot with a simplistic machine learning algorithm can be meaningfully said to have a kind of free will, in that it can do a better or worse job at what it was designed to do based on the examples it is given and on accidents of its training process. Two such robots may well have different beliefs about the world (in a very basic sense)and they could even influence one another based on their experience (training set) and conclusions (parameters of their algorithm). This is how I believe humans and animals work as well - we have a pre-determined algorithm (vastly more complex), with different starting parameters between different people, we have a training set consisting of all of our lived experiences, and our algorithm can modify itself or its parameters during training, in pre-specified ways. This does end up meaning that some people end up with better models/algorithms than others, based on better starting conditions, or on more luck with experiences. And decision points in this algorithm are what I think represents our experience of free will.
> However, I don't believe in full predetrminism, and you don't either.
I actually do believe in complete predeterminism.
Example: everything you & I wrote was fated to happen and similar to our thoughts on the subject. Multiple persons I've conversed with (even hard determinists) will express similar opinions as you "well then your thoughts on improvement don't matter because if the universe is functioning under under predeterminism, well it was fated to improve if it happens" and then try to use that assertion as an argument in some way to make a rhetoric against my personal thoughts or the discussion.
I personally, enjoy reading about what you wrote to me and similar to myself writing about the subject. Otherwise I'll never learn something new on the topic. I don't care knowing it's all fated and same are my thoughts on thinking the world slowly improves without me having a real will separate from the system.
My thoughts continue to be, I'm a person that enjoys learning about this topic and that requires conversing about it. I think the understanding of free will being an illusion, will one day improve society exponentially faster than a universe that didn't result in people coming to realization sooner. The majority of people just need to function with understanding of the illusion to the point of understanding complete predetermination.
> However, if you believe in a world where the future has not happened yet and it evolves more like a complex computation, with room for changing program code by the program itself, perhaps even with some randomness thrown in, you get a fully naturalistic deterministic world where nevertheless you can try to influence things in some direction or another.
My idea is that the universe is more probable to repeat than not repeat. I do have wishful thinking and it makes me agnostic. I like to think if there is a higher power that people typically name as a God. Well, God cannot do the impossible like making traditional free will be real. So, I like to think that the universe repeats with adjustments made after it runs its course. I take a position close to Einstein, such as once the universe iteration starts, God doesn't interfere, and I acknowledge that belief is impossible to prove. I only assume my thought on that are more probable from the horrible things that happen to people and this is under the assumption a higher power wouldn't want suffering in the complex system created. So again I think after universe runs the course for humanity, it will repeat and there will be adjustments so things improve for the previous stories the humans experienced.
The forgoing will now provide you with different thoughts on what I previously wrote. The last part of what you're expressing is how our brains function and we could describe nature similar to what we define as evolution. But I wouldn't say that's free will. My idea is free will isn't a possibility even if I die, ..the universe eventually repeats, and I live again from the recursion but with new improvements making everyone have a happier story; created from an higher power understands my desires in the previous life I lived. That's not anymore free will because every universe iteration would be fated from the previous summation of forces.
I think it greatly depends on where you work, the group of people you're around, and if the atmosphere is open office or something more discrete like cubicles.
My open office division of where I've been assigned, has a group of people that aren't very social and conversations usually end with I need to get back to work. They're all great people but totally different experience compared to previous socializing at work. I typically can get my "social fix" by visiting a different area of team members and that are way more toned down on just writing code all day.
This sort of solution isn't pleasant at all and makes me just want to work from home. In general I could just stay home, code and nothing would be missed.
I've never had the opportunity to speak to a very gifted kid. Let alone a kid that understands Einstein's Theory of Relativity and being so young.
I know Einstein was considered a pacifist and had strong social views himself. I think everything is deterministic like how Einstein did. My views on justice, morality and equality are shaped by knowing determinism.
I don't consider myself gifted btw. I'm just curious why someone so young would care about the forgoing topics to have strong views on them. What are these views and why?