You don't get to declare by fiat what I support and what I don't. The fact that I can make choices does not make me omnipotent. You are simply failing to recognize the fact that everybody makes choices--including the people who set up our current prison system and who keep it running. If the prisons they are running are abusing people, that is their responsibility, because they are the ones that made those choices.

> you should embrace it like some us do and learn to operate in this new mental paradigm

I don't understand what "new mental paradigm" you are even describing. But even without understanding it, I can still ask an obvious question: has this "new mental paradigm" enabled you to fix the prison problem you describe? If so, how?

"New mental paradigm" means you don't think like you used to. I.E., if you were ever religious, that was one mental paradigm. If you ever lose your religious beliefs, now you have a new mental paradigm to understand the world and operate in it.

As for fixing the prison problem, it absolutely does. It means what we have decided as acceptable public behavior is to be cultivated, and if we can remove the part of your brain that wants to violently subject others your will, we excise it and then you suddenly become a productive member of civilized society again. It's not even your whole being, just a small part of your collection of particles that we annihilate.

Putting a person in prison because, say, they murdered someone, is not dictating how they should behave. It is imposing a consequence on their behavior.

Evidently you are unable to tell the difference between those two things. That doesn't mean there isn't one.

> As for fixing the prison problem, it absolutely does.

You are either extremely ignorant and naive, or trolling. Anyone who has seen One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest has seen an excellent depiction of what happens when people who think the way you describe actually get the power to implement their ideas. No, thanks.

As for your One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest comment, next I expect you to tell me Whote Walkers are headed my way because narrative episodes are so indicative of what happens in the real world. /s

No, I'm not, because the consequence only gets imposed after they have made that choice. Removing their ability to choose murder would mean changing them beforehand so they don't choose to murder in the first place. Which, if it can be done while respecting their right to freedom of choice, would of course be vastly preferable.

If you could prevent the unlawful murder of someone, you don't give a damn about their choice. You are making the choice for them by saying it is not allowed. Your implementation of that forced choice is currently handled by the law. In the future, it might be before they are even able to generate a murderous impulse.

Sorry, but I disagree.

> You actually do not believe what you are saying or are being intentionally obtuse.

No, I just have a viewpoint that you apparently can't understand.

> Your implementation of that forced choice is currently handled by the law.

This is obvious nonsense since having a law against murder does not prevent someone from committing a murder. It just imposes a punishment on them afterwards.

> In the future, it might be before they are even able to generate a murderous impulse.

Which is very, very different from the current scheme of law we have now. And, as I have said elsewhere in this discussion, to me looks like tyranny worse than the worst tyrannies in history.

I understand it fine. It's objectively wrong.

Imposing a punishment is PRIMARILY a preventative action. The threat of being thrown in jail or even executed is not to retroactively deal with the situation, but to give people an incentive to not murder. If it didn't discourage murder, then people would find a different way to dissuade people from murdering.

How is it tyranny to curb a person's ability to murder? Or you trying to argue that allowing people to murder others is a net gain for society?

I have never claimed any such thing.

> Imposing a punishment is PRIMARILY a preventative action.

Punishing murderer A can certainly deter potential murderer B. But punishing murderer A obviously can't change the fact that murderer A committed a murder. And it might not deter potential murderer C, who either thinks they can escape punishment or has what they think is such a good reason to murder that they don't care about the punishment. So if your goal is to prevent all murders, punishment doesn't achieve that goal.

If your goal is simply to decrease the number of murders, then punishment can do that, yes. But you seem to be taking the position that just decreasing the number is not enough; that only preventing all murders is acceptable.

> How is it tyranny to curb a person's ability to murder?

It's not tyranny to put a murderer on trial and imprison them if they are found guilty. (This assumes that the trial is fair, which in our society is often not the case. But I don't want to go off on another tangent.)

It is tyranny to force a person who has not murdered anyone to go through some kind of brain surgery which is claimed to remove their propensity to murder. Which is what you appear to be proposing.

My position is that reducing murder as much as you can is the correct position, to include making that number zero, just like stopping all rape is better than just reducing the number of rapes.

Is it OK for a parent to have their child circumcised? Or have their ears pierced? If thats OK, I don't see why removing your ability to murder someone is seen as so drastic. Would you not elect to have your ability to murder removed?

I should have commented earlier in this discussion that you are presuming an awful lot of certainty about something where I don't think any such level of certainty is even possible. How could you possibly be so confident that some brain procedure would really, truly make a person incapable of murder? And would do so without impairing their capacities in any other respect? I can't even put myself in the position of imagining being in that kind of state of knowledge. So I'm not sure I can even respond to questions about what I would or wouldn't do in such a state.

Furthermore, my comments in this discussion about tyranny are based on historical knowledge about past societies where people have held beliefs like the ones you describe--where they really, truly, honestly believed, with certainty or even with what they thought was a high enough probability, that forcing other people to do something, or forcing some kind of treatment on them, would achieve some obviously desirable social goal. And in every single case in history that I know of, those people were wrong. Not just sort of wrong, not just a little bit off--terribly, horribly wrong; lots and lots of people dying wrong.

So when you describe a scenario in which you say you know, with certainty, or even with high probability (you threw out a figure of 90 percent in another part of this thread--I'll respond more specifically to that there), that you could change a person and make them incapable of murder, by some sort of brain surgery or some secret ray that they can't perceive, or by any means other than convincing that person, through discussion and argument, that murder is wrong, I simply don't believe that's actually possible. So I don't factor such impossibilities into my thinking about what I should or shouldn't do.

> Is it OK for a parent to have their child circumcised? Or have their ears pierced?

Personally, no, I would not force either of those things on a child without their consent.

Circumcision is an edge case because there was a time when circumcision was widely believed to be desirable for health reasons, but that belief is now thought to be false. If a parent sincerely believed it was necessary for health reasons, I would not say they were wrong to have a child circumcised. But such beliefs should be checked very carefully--more carefully than, from what I can gather, people checked the belief about circumcision during the time when that belief was widespread.

> Would you not elect to have your ability to murder removed?

As above, I am unable to even consider this as a real possibility.

So am I. I have already said so multiple times. Continuing to talk as though you are somehow refuting my viewpoint by saying this is ridiculous.

> Nazi Germany believed in capitalism and the doctrine of free will.

No, it didn't. It forcibly sent millions of people to concentration camps. It had the government take over management of all production. It subjected an entire country to the whims of a small group of people in power.

> Or are you trying to tell me every war the US has been involved with was necessary to protect lives and promote less horrendous death and suffering?

Certainly not. I have made no such claim. And I am tired of you continuing to respond to claims I have never made.

At this point I think our discussion has run its course.

Very interesting. I agree with these statements--yet I also think they are perfectly consistent with people making choices. In your ultra-physicalist language, human brains hallucinating "the outside world" and "the internal world" are just part of the causal processes that happen inside those brains. And those causal processes still have effects outside those brains even so.

No, it isn't "only reacting". It is processing the incoming causal events, in a very complex way that "only reacting" doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of describing.

> At no point is there a spontaneous reaction that is unpredictable according to the known laws of physics, therefore, you don't have free will.

This definition of "free will" is pointless. Obviously nobody can violate the laws of physics, so if "free will" means violating the laws of physics, of course it's impossible. But nobody cares about that kind of "free will". The kind of free will people care about is having their right to make choices respected. Your metaphysical claims do not address that at all; and from what I can gather of your image of what society should be, it would be a horror worse than the worst tyrannies in history.

And again, just because you claim my world view would be tyrannical DOES NOT make it true. My definition of free will is the common understanding of free will that you are trying to redefine to fit your world view.

Of course consciousness is a cause and effect system like everything else. I have never claimed otherwise, and the viewpoint I am defending certainly does not require otherwise.

> My definition of free will is the common understanding of free will

The common understanding of free will is that people can make choices and that those choices affect what happens to them. That can be true even in the deterministic universe you say you believe in.

If "spontaneously" means "outside of the laws of physics", then of course I agree. I just don't think that kind of "free will" is the only possible kind of free will, nor do I think that impossible kind of free will is the kind of free will that matters.

> I can choose to eat vanilla yogurt or plain yogurt. That is the narrative my brain hallucinates. The reality behind the illusion is that the choice was made before I even am aware of the "story I tell myself" that I chose one or the other.

Of course this is true in the sense that, as far as we can tell, the brain process of you being aware of your choice happens either at the same time as, or after, the brain process that makes your choice. But so what? All those processes are still happening in your brain.

Compare what you just described with this scenario: you want vanilla yogurt, but I force you to have plain yogurt instead because I believe it's healthier for you. Here there are still processes happening in your brain, which, if I weren't there, might well have led to you eating vanilla yogurt--but because I am there and I force you to eat plain yogurt, your brain processes do not determine what kind of yogurt you eat--instead, my brain processes do.

Do you see any meaningful difference between those scenarios? I sure do. (And note that I think that difference is meaningful even if it is true that the plain yogurt would be healthier.) If you don't, then we have a fundamental disagreement that I don't think any discussion can resolve.

Your scenario is irrelevant because you admit that those processes, which you don't control happening in your brain, are still you. But if they are you, and you don't have control over them, you only become aware of them after the fact, then you JUST ADMITTED you don't have any choice. The choice was already made by something you have no control over, but only watch as a passenger. Your heart beats without your choice. You will pass out and have to breath because your brain will force you to at some point stop holding your breath. You will remove your hand from an external heat source that you did not expect AUTOMATICALLY, and only then become aware that your body moved milliseconds after the stimulus has already short-circuited through your PNS and not your CNS. If you think that the distinction doesn't matter, then you are still willfully lying about the reality, or intentionally want to deceive people about the physical world and how it works by redefining any word you need to to maintain your hallucinated reality.

You proposed a perfectly clear scenario, and I proposed a perfectly clear second scenario. In scenario A, causal processes in your brain determine that you eat vanilla yogurt. In scenario B, causal processes in your brain determine that you want to eat vanilla yogurt, but causal processes in my brain determine that I force you to eat plain yogurt instead.

I see an important difference between these two scenarios: the first allows your brain processes to determine what kind of yogurt you eat; the second does not, it has my brain processes determining what kind of yogurt you eat.

Do you think that difference is important? Yes or no.

You are trying to paint a single scenario in which there is an important distinction and then ignore any other scenario where your reasoning fails.

For instance, if I chose to kill myself, and you stop me, and I later thank you for stopping me from killing myself, is that difference important? Yes or no?

Not by your definition, no. It does by mine. As I have repeatedly remarked in various places in this discussion, please stop getting hung up on that term; I purposely did not use it at all in my description of the two scenarios in order to avoid that.

> I didn't trigger my brain processes, only observed them. Neither did you.

Your brain processes are part of you, just as my brain processes are part of me. So to say "you" didn't trigger your brain processes is nonsense.

> if I chose to kill myself, and you stop me, and I later thank you for stopping me from killing myself, is that difference important?

You mean the difference that you thanked me afterwards? As opposed to telling me you wished I hadn't stopped you? Yes, that difference is important, because it tells me whether or not my choice to stop you was the right one.

However, your implication that my reasoning "fails" in a situation like this is incorrect. I have never claimed that respecting other people's free choice is the only value, or that it should automatically override all other values. One can always find cases where different values clash, and there is no way to resolve any such case without violating some value. So pointing out that my viewpoint is vulnerable to this proves nothing. So is yours. So is anyone's.

Further more, you claim any your reasoning doesn't fail, and yet you also admit your viewpoint is vulnerable? It is an admission outright that your arguments don't withstand rational scrutiny. However, you have yet to articulate a an argument that does make my position vulnerable to scrutiny.

I have responded to this elsewhere. We disagree, and continuing to argue about it is pointless.

> you claim any your reasoning doesn't fail, and yet you also admit your viewpoint is vulnerable?

I say that any viewpoint is vulnerable, so saying a viewpoint "fails" because it is vulnerable is pointless. Your viewpoint is vulnerable too.

> you have yet to articulate a an argument that does make my position vulnerable to scrutiny.

This is laughable. I have done so multiple times. You have not accepted my arguments, but that doesn't mean I haven't made any.

I think our discussion has run its course.