Formerly /u/Zalack on Reddit.e

Also Zalack@kbin.social

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  • 9 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • We really need to start redistributing how we spend money on health care. Public option, lower executive pay. More non-emergency long term facilities for patients with psych issues or rehabilitation, and chronic illness care. Better pay and shorter shifts for doctors and nurses. Subsidies for medical tech companies to offset end-user price. More government-funded research into medical tech.

    Health care should realistically be our biggest industry akin to a military with the social status of being a soldier and the compensation of being a software developer. We have the wealth and technology to help most people live healthy lives. We need the government to incentivize allocating it correctly.




  • I agree with the other poster that you need to define what you even mean when you say free will. IMO, strict determinism is not incompatible with free will. It only provides the mechanism. I posted this in another thread where this came up:

    The implications of quantum mechanics just reframes what it means to not have free will.

    In classical physics, given the exact same setup you make the exact same choice every time.

    In Quantum mechanics, given the same exact setup, you make the same choice some percentage of the time.

    One is you being an automaton while the other is you being a flipped coin. Neither of those really feel like free will.

    Except.

    We are looking at this through an implied assumption that the brain is some mechanism, separate from “us”, which we are forced to think “through”. That the mechanisms of the brain are somehow distorting or restricting what the underlying self can do.

    But there is no deeper “self”. We are the brain. We are the chemical cascade bouncing around through the neurons. We are the kinetic billiard balls of classical physics and the probability curves of quantum mechanics. It doesn’t matter if the universe is deterministic and we would always have the same response to the same input or if it’s statistical and we just have a baked “likelihood” of that response.

    The way we respond or the biases that inform that likelihood is still us making a choice, because we are that underlying mechanism. Whether it’s deterministic or not it’s just an implementation detail of free will, not a counterargument.