Comment by tempestn
3 days ago
That attitude is the weapon of suppression. Yes, it's true that life isn't fair. But it's also true that people have agency and can make material improvements to their own quality of life through smart decisions and dedication. Of course most of us won't start the next Google, but that doesn't mean dreams and hope are bad in general.
We have no evidence that people have meanginful agency, or even agency at all. It is an assumption that to start with requires that the universe is not largely or entirely deterministic beyond what we can measure, but even in the case of some "hidden variable" that provides agency (try to even define it in a way that doesn't make it either deterministic, random, or a combination that implies no actual control) we have plenty of evidence that events outside our control ("life isn't fair") means that the vast majority of people, while they may make decisions - with or without agency - that will make material improvements - still are not able to get anywhere near a position that makes it meaningful in this context.
Dreams and hopes are great - I believe we have zero actual agency, but that doesn't mean I lie in bed despairing, because not doing the work and trying will still have negative effects whether I have agency over that decision or not.
But the point is that dreams and hopes are also often used to play up the idea that "anyone" can achieve something everyone clearly can't, and so for most people, their most ambitious dreams will never be reached, and so a better gamble for most people would be to work for a society that improves everyones odds at reaching at least some of them.
If you think you have no agency why do anything at all? You could choose to stop doing anything. Or you could decide that your partial knowledge(unrealised futures) gives you agency.
It's a matter of metacognition. Being able to compute possible futures gives you artificial agency at some level. At a meta level even if that compute can be deterministic at a higher level, but you should not care.
It's a nested universes system just like in type theory. The meta of the meta. Agency is only defined within a single universe at a time.
> If you think you have no agency why do anything at all?
I addressed that in my comment, but let me address it again since it's the most frequent objection to this:
> You could choose to stop doing anything.
In the mechanical sense that an "IF ... THEN ... ELSE" statement makes the program "choose" which branch to take, you're right, yes I could.
But then I'd also suffer the consequences.
As I pointed out, if I were to life down in despair and not go to work, I won't keep getting paid just because I didn't have agency over the "choice" of whether to lie down and sulk or get up and go to work.
But for "agency" to have any meaning, we can't interpret choice that way. If we don't have agency, then while I may have an artificial "choice", that "choice" can't change the outcome.
In that case every "choice" I make is just as deterministic as that IF ... THEN ... ELSE: The branch taken depends on the state of the system.
> Or you could decide that your partial knowledge(untealised futures) gives you agency. > > It's a matter of metacognition. Being able to compute possible futures gives you artificial agency at some level. At a meta level even that compute ca be deterministic but you should not care.
What you are describing is compatibilism: The school of thought on "free will" that effectively says that free will is real, but is also an illusion.
Personally I think that is basically brushing the issue under the carpet, though I also think it is the only definition of free will that is logically consistent.
I do agree with the point that you mostly should not care:
You need to mostly act as if every "choice" you make does matter, because whether or not you have control over it, if you do lie down in despair, your paychecks will stop arriving.
Cause and effect does not care whether or not you have agency.
Where I take issue with compatibilism is because there are considerable differences in how you should "choose" to act if you consider agency to be "artificial" or an illusion (compatibilism) or not exist at all (for this purpose these are pretty much equivalent) vs. if you consider it to be real.
E.g. we blame and reward people or otherwise treat people differently based on their perceived agency all the time, and a lot of that treatment is a lot harder to morally justify if you don't believe in actual agency. Real harm happens to people because we assume they have agency. If that agency isn't real, it doesn't matter if we have an illusion of it - in that case a lot of that harm is immoral.
To tie it back to the thread: Whether agency is not real at all, or just significantly constrained by circumstance, it changes the considerations in what we should expect ourselves and others to be able to overcome.
E.g. it makes no logical sense to feel bad about past choices, because they couldn't have gone differently (you can still feel bad about the effects, and commit to "choosing" differently in the future). You also then shouldn't feel bad if you haven't achieved what you wanted to if you believe the context you live within either have total control over the actions you take, or "just" a significant degree of influence over it.
And so we're back to my original argument that for most people, acting as-if they have agency by "choosing" to bet on making the surrounding conditions more amenable to good outcomes is a better bet than thinking they have agency or enough agency to achieve a different outcome.
But again: The fact that I believe we have no agency, does not mean I won't try to do things that will get me better outcomes. I just don't assume I could act any other way in a given instance than I end up acting in that given instance, any more than a movie will change if you rewind it and press play again.
3 replies →
Honestly I don't disagree with anything you wrote, I don't think. It is worth remembering that if we were born in someone else's shoes, with their genes and their environment, we would literally be them and would act as they act. In that way, yes, agency is an illusion. Remembering this can help us to have empathy for others, potentially even those with whom we vehemently disagree.
But, as you said, we still all make decisions every day, and those decisions do affect our lives. So by acting as if we have agency, we can still have a positive impact, both on ourselves and others.
The attitude that we should all have access to more freedoms and that inequality has reached extreme levels is suppression? Then sign me up to be suppressed.
I am not saying we should be defeatist! I making the argument that it does not, and morally should not, have to be so that we all have to toil when we have such a wealth of technology.
How we go about changing this, I do not know, but everyone just playing along nicely in hope of one day being the one who strikes gold seems not to be working!
“Life isn’t fair, suck it up and get good!” is another form of suppression/delusion. Well, if life isn’t it fair, let us at least try to counteract that with cooperation. It seems to me that we have all the tools and technologies we need to make it a lot better.
This framing I'm on board with. The original comment took it too far for me, and even if not intended as defeatist I think could encourage that response. I'm all for people working not only to better their own conditions, but society as a whole.