The fact that contra-causal free will is nonsense, from a scientific and logical perspective it’s an incoherent idea. Some philosophers, notably Daniel Dennett, argue that this fact is could be so damaging to society that we should pretend it isn’t true.
That strikes me as more of a philosophical matter than a scientific theory. How would you test it, save by inventing a time machine?
Yes, this. It’s only incompatible with religions that believe the Bible is the literal truth. My family and church explicitly believed that the Bible was not literally true.
My church seemed a little embarrassed by the whole “invisible ghost” aspect of religion, actually…and questions about the existence of God would be answered vaguely in terms of the force for good that people coming together to do good things created.
The belief that believing in evolutionary theory leads people to apply “survival of the fittest” principles in their everyday life is similarly misguided - as anyone that’s studied evolution at all soon realizes that it’s a story of family and tribal survival through cooperation as much as individual survival through competition. Having the most kids does nothing for you in terms of evolution unless those kids survive to have more kids of their own.
Besides, prosperity religions are highly Darwinistic.
I must admit that my family did not agree with my decision to stop attending religious services as an adult, until they observed the kindness and compassion with which I lived my everyday life. Then they told me that they were wrong in their initial objections.
Being kind and compassionate, I held my tongue and didn’t tell them that I thought it was fucked up to only be nice to others because some authority figure reminded you once a week.
It’s beyond the scope of this thread to discuss this in detail, but the idea that somebody could have acted differently in precisely the same circumstances - except for truly random quantum effects, which do not comport with the idea of “will” - is both scientific and logical nonsense. It’s not a question of lack of data - it’s not amenable to experimentation because it is not a coherent hypothesis.
The non-existence of this “could-have-done-otherwise” free will that virtually everyone feels intuitively that we have is uncontroversial among philosophers. The controversy exists in how we should proceed from there.
One problem with trying to apply the results of this hypothesis is that it might discourage females from entering physics or males from studying biology. Let alone astronomy, which was also mentioned in a study you recently posted.
Off the top of my head I seem to be aware of just as many famous female astronomers as male ones: people like Jocelyn Bell Burnett (discovered pulsars), Carolyn Porco (discovered volcanism on Enceladus), Williamina Fleming (discovered the Horsehead Nebula), Caroline Herschel (discovered numerous comets and nebulae) , and Jill Tarter and Margaret Turnbull (compilers of the HabCat).
And for physics, I would hate for theory-driven gender stereotyping to have discouraged Marie Curie and Cecilia Payne (cosmic abundance of hydrogen) from making their discoveries. Let alone all the male biologists past and present.
If you start using a overly-general hypothesis like this as a strategy to discriminate between groups of students, you could end up missing out on the best and brightest of the ‘wrong’ sex.
Another notable example is the “blank slate” idea that has been dominant in the social sciences. The notion that the way our brains work is entirely a social construct.
This is at odds with all the evidence. Anyone who asserts that a natural phenomenon is entirely attributable to either nature or nurture is almost invariably wrong - both nature and nurture usually contribute. But many people have resisted the notion that innate factors contribute significantly to behavior for ideological reasons - motivated by an apparent confusion between is and ought.
No, that’s not what I am saying. I am talking about a very specific subset of transplant donors. I have no idea why or how you thought it would be appropriate to take it out of this very narrow context and apply it to anything else at all, much less making the claim as you have done here.
But, what death is is a complex subject. One of the reasons that anencephaly transplants are so rare, and pretty much completely stopped at this point is just that point, where does death begin. For all practical purposes, the baby is born dead. So, determining when it is that they actually die and therefore can donate organs is a tricky subject.
For a brief time, it was acceptable that, if the parents agreed, and in fact, the idea originated with them, that independent physicians could certify that the baby was dead for all practical purposes, and harvesting could commence.
For reasons, there was public pressure to stop this practice, as apparently the life of a baby with anencephaly outweighed the lives of the other babies that it could save. I assume, from what you have said, that you would agree with not allowing this.
And so the other criteria for death, cessation of respiratory functions is what is used, which, once those have ceased, the organs are no longer viable.
So, babies who could be saved by transplanting organs from babies who are already dead don’t get saved, because that is the ethical thing to do.
I assume that there would be similar public pressure that would prevent us from growing brainless clones for spare parts, and from what you have said here, I assume that you would be part of that too. So, to protect your ethics, people would have to die.
So, yes, you have found science that is considered to be harmful enough to the public’s ethical standards to be suppressed, even though the science could save lives.
Then it isn’t a scientific theory.
Then, as you note, it doesn’t really fit in this thread. FWIW, I generally agree with the notion that it’s not only very likely impossible to make choices other than what were made, I even think that most people implicitly acknowledge this on some level. No one writes time travel fiction in which the traveler goes back in time, makes no changes, and yet finds the world totally different anyway because people made different choices purely of their own volition when times reset.
But, again, it strikes me as more of a philosophical problem (what to do about it, if anything) than a scientific theory, suppressed or otherwise.
And we should add - whether or not it’s true that the mean of innate ability is significantly different, it’s pretty clear that the distributions of innate ability have a large overlap. So even if somebody could demonstrate convincingly that the innate means are different, I don’t see any implications for individual choices or opportunities.
A lot of other people disagree. Hence this thread.
ETA: That’s not quite right, we were talking about the mean of innate interest differing, but in any case, the reaction was horror.
I didn’t say that. I think it certainly fits the thread, and in fact it’s a more apt example than something like evolution where everyone in this thread probably acknowledges objective reality, and where we talking about other people being unscientific. Whereas the non-existence of contra-causal free will is something where I’d guess the majority of people in this thread would not be on the side of believing objective reality, because the consequences are both uncomfortable and counterintuitive.
“People are saying”? You’ll have to do better than that. What, exactly, are the social implications at any level - social policy, personal choice - if the mean of innate ability in some cognitive task turns out to be somewhat different among sub-populations such as male/female, when the distributions have large overlap?
This isn’t what I was getting at. I meant cases where the knowledge itself should be suppressed, not where society might decide not to make use of it. The bioweapons example could fit this, for example.
@iiandyiiii for one. Try asking him your questions; I don’t think it’s a big deal. I don’t believe in the blank slate or contra-causal free will, either.
Then I’ll just leave off by saying it wasn’t my intention to misrepresent your position and I appreciate the clarification.
There is quite a bit of medical knowledge that is being suppressed, quite a bit of genetic engineering fields that are not funded or even banned entirely due to social and “ethical” considerations.
They could be examples for this thread, then, depending on why the research is banned or not being funded. If it’s because the research methods themselves are considered unethical I don’t think it fits the OP.
These claims about superiority and inferiority (even if they don’t use those words) are such a big deal because they’re the foundation of literally the worst things in human history. You must have been aware of this – do you really think that it’s no big deal to throw around these kinds of ideas without actual proof?
Totally with you so far. Mockery, shunning, and debate are the proper responses to bad/stupid/evil ideas.
…and, you lost me. Banning people from social media platforms is a terrible idea, except for cases where they are making direct threats against people, spreading kiddie porn, or otherwise violating the law. Banning people doesn’t shut them up - it makes them louder and angrier. And you risk the creation of alternative social media for them, which balkanizes the social fabric and leads to more ‘othering’ and separation of people into tribes.
Also, banning people who have ideas you don’t like helps create emotional and intellectual bubbles, and gives you an ‘easy out’ instead of engaging with ideas you might not otherwise have to attempt to understand.
Also, if you remove the ability of someone to seek change with words (the proper form of civil disagreement in a free society), all you have left them with is violence. This is a terrible tradeoff.
We often talk about censorship only in the sense of government censorship, But the reason we don’t allow governments to censor is the same resson we shouldn’t privately censor people’s political views in public forums: an open society requires an open exchange of ideas, and a free society requires a public mentally strong enough to deal with others reasonably who do not think the same way. Gathering ourselves into little enclaves of happyThought is a terrible way to structure a free society.
De-platforming and the rush to censor ideas you don’t like is destructive to a free society - or any society, really. The proper response to bad speech is more speech, not a muzzle.