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Comment by constantcrying

2 years ago

>The future is still a function of the past

If you don't believe in conscious choice the whole debate is moot anyway.

13 comments

constantcrying

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brabel  2 years ago

That's not the claim. The claim is that if you're born poor, your chances of being poor when you become an adult are much higher. Perhaps you know that and still think that because the kid who is born poor "chose" to stay poor, but I hope no one capable of having a discussion about this topic thinks like that.

  • constantcrying  2 years ago

    If they don't want to be poor why are the poor though?

    No it isn't "opportunity", there has never been as much opportunity in the world to move up the social hierarchy as it exists now.

  • dumbo-octopus  2 years ago

    No, that is not the claim. That is a simple statistical fact that is obvious to anyone who looks at the data.

    The claim is that folks are nothing more than "a derivation of their previous person states", and that correspondingly there is little to nothing a person can choose to do to escape the path set for them by their start state. I personally think this is blatantly false, and I have many observations to support my position.

    • brabel  2 years ago

      > folks are nothing more than "a derivation of their previous person states"

      FFS that's an unbelievably bad interpretation. Are you just trolling or you really can't see the difference between that interpretation and "what we become depends in great part on where we're starting from"??

      4 replies →

__MatrixMan__  2 years ago

I wasn't trying to argue against free will or anything like that (I'm a compatibilist about that debate). I was just trying to point out that it's obvious that prior conditions are relevant. Prior decisions also. But free or not, there's nowhere to come from but the past.

It's a weird thing to be pointing out, like... duh, but the context was a bunch of:

> You have to balk when anyone says....

and

> You have to disbelieve anyone who says...

And I was hoping to establish that we in this thread do in fact agree that causation works in one direction only. It would seem I failed.

  • dumbo-octopus  2 years ago

    We do not agree, direction of causation is a matter of personal interpretation. And I'm not the only one who believes a reversal of order could be justified, Scott Aaronson's essay The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine^ goes into far more detail on the matter than I could hope to here. It's long but thorough - I highly recommend it if you have the time.

    To overly simplify it: imagine a piece of quantum state is not observed at any point between the universal T0 and TNow. Further, imagine a decision made at TNow is effectively a measurement of that state. There is absolutely 0 way to say that the state was "in" that configuration "before" your measurement, it is 100% equally valid to say that your decision "caused" the state to assume that value, which would be interpreted as your choice causing a propagation backwards in time to the initial configuration. (The essay goes into more details around "No Hidden State" objections to this interpretation.)

    ^ https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159