I consider myself to be the kind of person who can quite easily imagine myself in someone else’s place. I don’t know if I’m actually any better at it than the average person, but judging by the comment sections on social media and the conversations I’ve had with other people, I really struggle to get angry at strangers like many others do, even for things that anger is an appropriate reaction to.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t condemn their behavior, but that it doesn’t provoke a particularly negative emotional reaction from me. I observe the world from a distance, and when I see someone acting differently, I generally can come up with a charitable story about why they act that way. While it doesn’t usually justify the behavior, it at least helps me imagine why they’re like that and reminds me that if I were in their shoes, I’d likely do the same thing.
This applies to cheating, violence, racism… Name a bad behavior, and I can come up with a story about what a person might be telling themselves to justify it. However, littering is something I simply cannot comprehend. I cannot wrap my mind around what a person is thinking when they’re throwing trash on the ground for someone else to pick up. If it’s something “minor” like a cigarette butt, then okay, I can somewhat understand, but tossing your McDonald’s takeout bag onto the side of the road is completely psychopathic behavior to me. I don’t think even the worst people in the world think of themselves as “bad” because they rationalize their behavior somehow. But if you throw trash into nature, you must know you’re being a massive jerk.
Tl;dr: I want to hear the best justification for littering.
I don’t believe in free will or the self.
Do you not believe in computers or the internet either?
You misunderstand what he’s saying. It’s a very fundamental biology/physiology/brain chemistry, etc. idea that takes some time to understand, if you should so desire. Technically, in the most absolutely biological sense, there is a valid position that states there is no free will. That the precise pattern of the billions or trillions of synaptic connections in the brain form a distinct recipe for a specific behavior in any given scenario.
That being said, despite that it may be valid in one sense, it is just as invalid from the point of view that it is a very simplistic and also arguably not completely informed view. For the most part, therefore, arguing there’s no such thing as free will really is a vapid position, as it eliminates any and all concept of responsibility, of penalty, of society having a framework within which to coexist, and it also stops any discussion in its tracks. I understand the point of view but I find it useless.
I have informally studied this subject for years, and minored in developmental psych, and I’m on the spectrum and human cognition is one of my special interests.
It’s all predicated on a bullshit misinterpreted experiment that has blown out of proportion because ‘publish or die’ is the only law of the land.
In Libet’s experiments he either was unaware of, or actively chose to ignore the existence of visual saccades when interpreting his results, and no one has had the balls to call him out on it because so many fuckdamn academic careers hinge on this being a tenable field of study, which it isn’t.
Your condescension has sent my IED absolutely through the roof and I am very thankful for my own continuing freedom that we were not in the same room as I would have had some well thought out and egregiously unkind things to say about your parentage and education.
The fact that the self exists is self evident, and the fact that I am capable of writing this to you is literal proof. The odds of randomly colliding atoms eventually producing a machine that can lie to itself about being free willed is greater than the number of estimated atoms in the known universe, let alone this tiny speck orbiting a tiny ember dancing in a rather obscure arm of just one of ten trillion galaxies.
NOTE: I am not saying the ‘self’ is a mystical eternal force that exists beyond our death, I’m just saying that every single scholarly work I have seen trying to disprove the self has been some of the most ridiculous navel gazing I have ever seen and I used to be an alt.philosophy usenet user.
I dunno how you felt condescended to; whatever demons you have triggering you, I can sympathize, but rest assured that was never my intention. In fact, I worried I was mangling it and not expressing my thoughts clearly.
I hope you sort out whatever made you so livid over what was at worst a poorly articulated explanation of something that is hardly meaningful enough to bother with. As I said, I find it without utility so who really cares.
Hoping you feel better. Oh, for the record, that sentence was condescension :-)
