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All of JDR's Comments + Replies

Rationality Quotes Thread October 2015
JDR30

He doesn't compel people to do so.

The threat of severe punishment if one goes against the commands seems pretty similar to compulsion to me. If I commanded you to do something on pain of being thrown in an eternal pit of snakes, you could reasonably say I was forcing you to do it.

I would also be interested to know how C.S. Lewis separated righteous divine intervention from omnipotent busybodiness if anyone has the knowledge and a few minutes to save me from the terrible trials of actually looking up this myself!

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4gjm
Not only is it "pretty similar to compulsion"; it's the exact sort of compulsion that we complain of in human tyrants. The problem with Hitler or Stalin or whoever isn't that they somehow make their citizens literally unable to choose for themselves; it's that they hit them with terrible punishments when they choose the "wrong" way. The kind of tyranny God allegedly refrains from exercising is precisely the kind that no human tyrant has ever had the option of exercising. (Though that might change, and plenty of people have worried about the possibility -- see e.g. Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World. For that matter, IIRC the paragraph quoted above is in the context of Lewis worrying about human tyrannies with the ability to mess with their subjects' minds.) I think Lewis's actual response would not be the one VoiceOfRa gives; rather, I think he would say that God doesn't really send people to hell, he merely permits them to send themselves there, and that the awfulness of hell is not a matter of devils with pitchforks or lakes of molten sulphur but of the inhabitants of hell -- who have selected themselves by their refusal to align themselves with God who is the source of all goodness -- living out the freedom-from-God on which they have insisted. I should add that I think that's also a pretty hopeless response, though less obviously hopeless (to me) than the one VoiceOfRa suggests. (But also that it's some time since I read much Lewis and my mental model of him may be less than perfectly accurate; perhaps he could give a better account of his position than I have sketched above.)
Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015
JDR00

Sure, I totally agree with you - in real life, we can really put a person in exactly the same situation twice. If we could, this whole free will argument would be a lot easier to solve.

That said, I do think the toy models are useful. Pretending we can do this experiment gives an answer to the problem I've never managed to pick a hole in (and tbh getting other people's input on it is the hidden motivation for entering this discussion):

If we could let you choose a beer, then rewind the universe - including all particles, forces, and known and unknown elemen... (read more)

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0Lumifer
Within the toy model, yes. In actual reality, you still don't know. The trivial third option is to drink wine :-P On a bit more serious note, if you set up the problem so that the outcomes are X and not-X, there could be no third option.
Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015
JDR20

then I'll get bored and start fucking around with the system, and then I'll get really bored and stop cooperating with you. There won't be much of a convergence over time.

The problem with that model seems to be that as time goes on, the situation in which you are put in becomes increasingly dissimilar to the original one, just because of we've added memories of having had to make this choice x number of times before. If we could run the experiment so that you always felt like it was the first time you were in this situation, perhaps by putting the same ... (read more)

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1Lumifer
Most of my point is that you can not. Among I things, I change over time. As a practical example, I drink beer. Various kinds of. My beer preferences do not converge over time. Instead, they wander over different styles, different hoppiness/maltiness/etc., even different breweries. I have no idea what kind of beer I will like in, say, a year, but it probably will be different from what I like now. Showing that something works in a toy model does not show that the same thing works in actual reality.