That reminds me that the purpose of postmodern, mostmodern, and metamodern governments had been to dismantle 'natural law' - e. i. free will, right to self-defence, natural selection, etc. - and replace it with artificial regulatory, outside rule, and the total oppression of man. We are... no longer that human.
I think that last sentence got put below the share button accidentally. Though doing a mic drop with "And so we do not need to abolish the police," treating it as QED, would be funny.
How strongly does Aquinas define rationality? I've personally always considered rationality mostly an attribute of reasoning - saying nothing for someone's ability to know or remember things that are true or consider things that aren't obvious. In my mind it's a Garbage In = Garbage Out process like doing statistics or math. By analogy, rationality is knowing how to do long division - being really smart is remembering which number goes on the left and which number goes inside.
Found this definition of reason online, allegedly summarizing Aquinas: "Reason is knowledge gained through contemplation of sense experience." (I don't remember Hill giving a succinct definition.) So reason is something like a truth function. It is what lets us think logically, and gain knowledge of things. I know there are some nuanced definitions out there, but I always get the impression most of the classics use it in a very intellectual sense without much emotional content, which is often contrasted to it.
If it's more of just getting measure of things I can see why they found it sufficient - it's a lot easier to weed out unreasonable people when they get exiled/beaten/killed for less than these days. On top of that, probably less likely to encounter people with wildly different acculturation and constitution than today (travel hard without lots of hydrocarbons).
As you said, that doesn't cover things like pride, emotional incontinence, or differing value judgments, which would be something education should beat out of you before experience takes your life as payment. At least the scholar only charges money.
Jun 9, 2023·edited Jun 9, 2023Liked by Harrison Koehli
Each person has an "operating system" that evokes his default behavior. My former boss's was "How can I manipulate this situation to best feather my nest?" A homeowners association sociopath's is "How can I get power over another person?" A weakling's is "How can I make myself appear admirable?" My wife's is "How can I make my loved ones happy?" Mine is "How can I design/create something elegant?"
Once you can describe a person's operating system, you can predict their future actions. Therefore, free will, although occasionally inferable, is rarely exercised.
I like the way you framed this. The way I'd conceptualize this is that even with an operating system, you are exercising free will, but only on a very basic level. E.g., you may deliberate on the means used to achieve your largely predetermined end. A higher level of freedom is to upgrade to a new operating system.
💬 Each person has an "operating system" that evokes his default behavior.
Shaped by both hereditary and upbringing components, the default nonetheless presupposes it can be overridden 😏 Not to say easily, without resolute steady effort.
Jun 9, 2023·edited Jun 9, 2023Liked by Harrison Koehli
Yes, resolute steady effort is a self-upbringing that may be able to override the hereditary defaults. So, it seems to be the ultimate exercise of free will. BTW, the various default operating systems seem to be amalgams of substantially hereditary elements: personality types and presence/absence of Dark Triad traits.
For those that conceptualize such duty, yes. I'll try that approach on my HOA. But seriously, it is a way to connect moral duty with the concept of training = resolute steady effort.
Be prepared for your HOA proving not terribly responsive 🤭 Through no fault of theirs of course, 'tis all for the hostile environment that puts tight limits on feasible options.
"unconscious associative processes triggered by subliminal sensory stimuli can incline us toward certain choices" This is Hubbard's Dianetics. Extend the human experience out to numerous past lives and you get the beginnings of Scientology.
We would all being blabbering fools if this were the ONLY mechanism underlying human behavior. But rationality is its own impulse, stronger or weaker from person to person. Where it is stronger, we are considered "sane" and where it is weaker we are considered "crazy.'
Further, with the discovery of past lives, we see that prior deaths from the full variety of causes can serve as "traumatic events." This also includes injury or death from natural disasters and attacks from predators, not just human abuse or violence. So let's get over the airy-fairy pablum that "being nice to each other" will solve all human problems. It absolutely will not.
You have properly noted that various forms of "punishment" have various results depending mostly on the person being disciplined, not the crime they are being disciplined for. It would be great if we could rehabilitate every person who has resorted to criminal behavior, but it is nearly impossible that any particular pattern of discipline could achieve this for everyone. In particular, we know that psychopaths for the most part are irredeemable and are best kept separated from society when they are caught. (Hubbard recommends putting them in a place with LOTS of space, like a desert setting, in the hopes that they will at least destimulate.)
Of course, totally abandoning punishment does indeed invalidate any rational strength that may be left in a person. Likewise, assuming that every crime is totally a matter of choice neglects the fact that many people need psychological help and social education.
The police - as they are implemented by most communities - are a triggering influence for many people. This should be kept in mind without going so far as to eliminate police work. There are people who, when confronted by an officer, will behave as if they are guilty even if they are not. I suppose this is one reason why liberal societies require an investigative process (trial) for all but the most minor offenses.
Lots of good points in here, Larry. Indeed, there is a LOT mixed up in "unconscious associative processes," and I think past lives are one of them, personally. Jim Carpenter's "First Sight" is a good theoretical framework for looking at all those influences. And Lobaczewski would agree that any particular form of punishment or rehabilitation will not work on everyone.
Jun 8, 2023·edited Jun 8, 2023Liked by Harrison Koehli
>unconscious associative processes triggered by subliminal sensory stimuli can incline us toward certain choices. Abuse can cause trauma, which can affect the brain, emotions, cognition, and behavior. Without the abuse, the problem behaviors and emotional and cognitive difficulties wouldn’t have occurred
Punishment is best understood in terms of game theory. The point of having a pre-commitment to punish criminals is to deter crime. If a crime nevertheless occurs, it is necessary to honor the pre-commitment by punishing the offender.
Yeah. I think I mentioned something like this in my post on Turchin's War and Peace and War where he summarizes some of this research, and the broad categories of moralists (those who punish), saints (those give and give, even when others take), and knaves (the freeloaders and cheaters who need to be punished). Without the moralists, the knaves just steamroll everyone else.
I have a lot of sympathy for the anti-psychology view, not least because of all the overhyped nonsense that has come from that field. However, it has also produced some crucial insights that absolutely need to be part of any well-informed take on human nature. So yes, we should combine the classical worldview with its emphasis on free will with aspects of modern psychology. In other words: Great read!
"Such a therapeutic, utilitarian view can lead to absurdities: “horrible acts will be underpunished in cases where some lesser punishment achieves all that can be achieved in a particular case,” minor crimes may be overpunished (e.g. cutting off the hand of a petty thief),1 and “factual guilt is not even required in cases where punishing the blameless will avert some greater social calamity,” e.g. scapegoating (p. 206)."
Why call these absurdities? I grant that they are highly counter-intuitive, probably more so to you than to me, but with proper contextualization you can make sense of them.
First, this is a summary of Hill's positions, which I may not have made clear. But I still agree, at least in principle. Hill is stressing that the logic does not have moral restraints, because the ultimate criterion is separate from moral concerns. So, for example, it can lead to the absurd position that something as trivial as misspeaking can result in execution of oneself and one's family, while serial murder can result in social advancement, if such things for whatever reason aid in a utilitarian outcome.
"Proper contextualization" would only be proper in the context of actual (not utilitarian) morality, IMO.
Food for thought, thanks. I’m out of my depth, but I would say my “instinct” is to be skeptical of the idea that prison is ineffective at reducing crime. I see your qualifier that if you include crime within prison then in net it causes crime to go up. Perhaps. Yet there’s a Chestertons fence here: afaik nearly every culture has had them, I presume because the alternatives have largely not worked out.
A couple options: it could be that the American system is just particularly bad, as it was the one studied. And it's not just the crime committed within the prison, but the fact that the prisoners learn to be better criminals in jail, and get associated with gangs, which leads to higher rates of crime when they are released.
So I think it's probably possible for there to be a deterrence effect under different conditions. But even if there weren't, the universality of prisons (and I think I read somewhere that prisons weren't as pervasive at various times in the past) could just be a result of the retributive instinct. We feel it is the best way to punish, hope there is a deterrent effect, even when there isn't one.
Well, I’d guess the prison solution is at least locally stable: if a society lets up a little bit the already hardened criminals will exploit that, motivating relaxation back to original situation. If so then hard to escape this solution.
There's one or two prisons in the U.S. whose staff have made trips to Norway to try implementing some of their ideas. Pretty sure I've read that the results are promising. I think perhaps one thing would be to put more effort into separating out inmates into tiers. Try to avoid as much crime grooming as possible. And keep the hardened criminals where they can't influence newbies. I don't know enough about the prison system to be specific though.
That reminds me that the purpose of postmodern, mostmodern, and metamodern governments had been to dismantle 'natural law' - e. i. free will, right to self-defence, natural selection, etc. - and replace it with artificial regulatory, outside rule, and the total oppression of man. We are... no longer that human.
I think that last sentence got put below the share button accidentally. Though doing a mic drop with "And so we do not need to abolish the police," treating it as QED, would be funny.
How strongly does Aquinas define rationality? I've personally always considered rationality mostly an attribute of reasoning - saying nothing for someone's ability to know or remember things that are true or consider things that aren't obvious. In my mind it's a Garbage In = Garbage Out process like doing statistics or math. By analogy, rationality is knowing how to do long division - being really smart is remembering which number goes on the left and which number goes inside.
Whoops, that was supposed to be a footnote. ;)
Found this definition of reason online, allegedly summarizing Aquinas: "Reason is knowledge gained through contemplation of sense experience." (I don't remember Hill giving a succinct definition.) So reason is something like a truth function. It is what lets us think logically, and gain knowledge of things. I know there are some nuanced definitions out there, but I always get the impression most of the classics use it in a very intellectual sense without much emotional content, which is often contrasted to it.
"Refund da po-lice!" *mic drop*
If it's more of just getting measure of things I can see why they found it sufficient - it's a lot easier to weed out unreasonable people when they get exiled/beaten/killed for less than these days. On top of that, probably less likely to encounter people with wildly different acculturation and constitution than today (travel hard without lots of hydrocarbons).
As you said, that doesn't cover things like pride, emotional incontinence, or differing value judgments, which would be something education should beat out of you before experience takes your life as payment. At least the scholar only charges money.
Each person has an "operating system" that evokes his default behavior. My former boss's was "How can I manipulate this situation to best feather my nest?" A homeowners association sociopath's is "How can I get power over another person?" A weakling's is "How can I make myself appear admirable?" My wife's is "How can I make my loved ones happy?" Mine is "How can I design/create something elegant?"
Once you can describe a person's operating system, you can predict their future actions. Therefore, free will, although occasionally inferable, is rarely exercised.
I like the way you framed this. The way I'd conceptualize this is that even with an operating system, you are exercising free will, but only on a very basic level. E.g., you may deliberate on the means used to achieve your largely predetermined end. A higher level of freedom is to upgrade to a new operating system.
💬 Each person has an "operating system" that evokes his default behavior.
Shaped by both hereditary and upbringing components, the default nonetheless presupposes it can be overridden 😏 Not to say easily, without resolute steady effort.
Yes, resolute steady effort is a self-upbringing that may be able to override the hereditary defaults. So, it seems to be the ultimate exercise of free will. BTW, the various default operating systems seem to be amalgams of substantially hereditary elements: personality types and presence/absence of Dark Triad traits.
Self-upbringing (👌!) within the without constraints looks like a fairly fruitful way to conceptualise our human moral duty 🙂
Yep, self-upbringing is good! Dabrowski sometimes called it auto-psychotherapy.
For those that conceptualize such duty, yes. I'll try that approach on my HOA. But seriously, it is a way to connect moral duty with the concept of training = resolute steady effort.
Be prepared for your HOA proving not terribly responsive 🤭 Through no fault of theirs of course, 'tis all for the hostile environment that puts tight limits on feasible options.
"unconscious associative processes triggered by subliminal sensory stimuli can incline us toward certain choices" This is Hubbard's Dianetics. Extend the human experience out to numerous past lives and you get the beginnings of Scientology.
We would all being blabbering fools if this were the ONLY mechanism underlying human behavior. But rationality is its own impulse, stronger or weaker from person to person. Where it is stronger, we are considered "sane" and where it is weaker we are considered "crazy.'
Further, with the discovery of past lives, we see that prior deaths from the full variety of causes can serve as "traumatic events." This also includes injury or death from natural disasters and attacks from predators, not just human abuse or violence. So let's get over the airy-fairy pablum that "being nice to each other" will solve all human problems. It absolutely will not.
You have properly noted that various forms of "punishment" have various results depending mostly on the person being disciplined, not the crime they are being disciplined for. It would be great if we could rehabilitate every person who has resorted to criminal behavior, but it is nearly impossible that any particular pattern of discipline could achieve this for everyone. In particular, we know that psychopaths for the most part are irredeemable and are best kept separated from society when they are caught. (Hubbard recommends putting them in a place with LOTS of space, like a desert setting, in the hopes that they will at least destimulate.)
Of course, totally abandoning punishment does indeed invalidate any rational strength that may be left in a person. Likewise, assuming that every crime is totally a matter of choice neglects the fact that many people need psychological help and social education.
The police - as they are implemented by most communities - are a triggering influence for many people. This should be kept in mind without going so far as to eliminate police work. There are people who, when confronted by an officer, will behave as if they are guilty even if they are not. I suppose this is one reason why liberal societies require an investigative process (trial) for all but the most minor offenses.
Lots of good points in here, Larry. Indeed, there is a LOT mixed up in "unconscious associative processes," and I think past lives are one of them, personally. Jim Carpenter's "First Sight" is a good theoretical framework for looking at all those influences. And Lobaczewski would agree that any particular form of punishment or rehabilitation will not work on everyone.
Absolutly fascinating article
>unconscious associative processes triggered by subliminal sensory stimuli can incline us toward certain choices. Abuse can cause trauma, which can affect the brain, emotions, cognition, and behavior. Without the abuse, the problem behaviors and emotional and cognitive difficulties wouldn’t have occurred
Reminds me how ritual child abuse (infant circumcision, etc.) is often the early experience of adults who later implement pathocracy. See, e.g. Clopper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCuy163srRc and "Babies Under Attack" https://heroesvsvillains.substack.com/p/babies-under-attack
Punishment is best understood in terms of game theory. The point of having a pre-commitment to punish criminals is to deter crime. If a crime nevertheless occurs, it is necessary to honor the pre-commitment by punishing the offender.
Yeah. I think I mentioned something like this in my post on Turchin's War and Peace and War where he summarizes some of this research, and the broad categories of moralists (those who punish), saints (those give and give, even when others take), and knaves (the freeloaders and cheaters who need to be punished). Without the moralists, the knaves just steamroll everyone else.
I have a lot of sympathy for the anti-psychology view, not least because of all the overhyped nonsense that has come from that field. However, it has also produced some crucial insights that absolutely need to be part of any well-informed take on human nature. So yes, we should combine the classical worldview with its emphasis on free will with aspects of modern psychology. In other words: Great read!
You say
"Such a therapeutic, utilitarian view can lead to absurdities: “horrible acts will be underpunished in cases where some lesser punishment achieves all that can be achieved in a particular case,” minor crimes may be overpunished (e.g. cutting off the hand of a petty thief),1 and “factual guilt is not even required in cases where punishing the blameless will avert some greater social calamity,” e.g. scapegoating (p. 206)."
Why call these absurdities? I grant that they are highly counter-intuitive, probably more so to you than to me, but with proper contextualization you can make sense of them.
First, this is a summary of Hill's positions, which I may not have made clear. But I still agree, at least in principle. Hill is stressing that the logic does not have moral restraints, because the ultimate criterion is separate from moral concerns. So, for example, it can lead to the absurd position that something as trivial as misspeaking can result in execution of oneself and one's family, while serial murder can result in social advancement, if such things for whatever reason aid in a utilitarian outcome.
"Proper contextualization" would only be proper in the context of actual (not utilitarian) morality, IMO.
Food for thought, thanks. I’m out of my depth, but I would say my “instinct” is to be skeptical of the idea that prison is ineffective at reducing crime. I see your qualifier that if you include crime within prison then in net it causes crime to go up. Perhaps. Yet there’s a Chestertons fence here: afaik nearly every culture has had them, I presume because the alternatives have largely not worked out.
A couple options: it could be that the American system is just particularly bad, as it was the one studied. And it's not just the crime committed within the prison, but the fact that the prisoners learn to be better criminals in jail, and get associated with gangs, which leads to higher rates of crime when they are released.
So I think it's probably possible for there to be a deterrence effect under different conditions. But even if there weren't, the universality of prisons (and I think I read somewhere that prisons weren't as pervasive at various times in the past) could just be a result of the retributive instinct. We feel it is the best way to punish, hope there is a deterrent effect, even when there isn't one.
Well, I’d guess the prison solution is at least locally stable: if a society lets up a little bit the already hardened criminals will exploit that, motivating relaxation back to original situation. If so then hard to escape this solution.
There's one or two prisons in the U.S. whose staff have made trips to Norway to try implementing some of their ideas. Pretty sure I've read that the results are promising. I think perhaps one thing would be to put more effort into separating out inmates into tiers. Try to avoid as much crime grooming as possible. And keep the hardened criminals where they can't influence newbies. I don't know enough about the prison system to be specific though.
💬 our *art* of understanding human causation 🔥👌
Thanks HK. Interesting indeed.