>About Alice's case, the individual exists,

Exactly, there is a "coherent thing" Alice, which is what most people actually mean.

>exactly what "self" image this person has or claims to have is irrelevant and unimportant (and arguably doesn't exist except in Alice's head).

Exactly, this Buddhist idea of self, is irrelevant, unimportant and which has no application to reality.

There is no reason to every use this Buddhist definition and every time anyone uses it they will get incoherent conclusions.

If you want to talk about this mental construct then call it consciousness or whatever.

>What do you mean by "fundamentally social"?

You first used it in the context of us being fundamentally social not selfish.

So I took it to be a definition which excludes the real reason being selfish. So I oppose the idea that they are mutually exclusive.

​

>Do you want to say we aren't fundamentally cooperative/altruistic/empathetic towards others? (somewhere along these lines)

It feels like we are getting at psychological egoism.

>Psychological egoism is the view that humans are always motivated by self-interest and selfishness, even in what seem to be acts of altruism. It claims that, when people choose to help others, they do so ultimately because of the personal benefits that they themselves expect to obtain, directly or indirectly, from so doing.
>
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_egoism

> This article is about that "mental construct" guiding your desire,

That mental construct is often know as conscious activity. Once you treat it like, that it makes sense.

The issue with your article is you are confusing conscious activity with self. They are different things and if you confuse them, then things don't make sense and hence you'll think the self is an illusion.

>How about just that "mental image" you think is the "owner" of you?

I am a body, which includes a brain, that brain has conscious and unconscious activity. So mental image is just a process in the brain, that models the body.

I'm not sure what you mean of as owner. It's just the body, most the times it's unconscious activity which drives what I do and say, but with higher level more complex activity there is conscious brain activity involved.

>That internal monologue? Is that really you? Or a heap of past habits and social norms?

The internal monologue is just conscious brain activity. No that's not me, it's a tiny aspect of me.

>Should you give importance to this mental construct?

It's just called consciousness. Just a tiny but important aspect of me.

​

>Even with your definition: "the union of elements (such as body, emotions, thoughts, and sensations) that constitute the individuality and identity of a person", I am arguing exactly these are changing all the time,

So what, pretty much everything in the world is constantly changing all the time.

>this "collection of evolving soup" doesn't form a "coherent thing" i.e., self.

Not even you actually believe this. Let's use a real life example. Lets say Alice rapes and murders one of your relatives. If you catch them and are about to call the police, and Alice says don't, I'm a different person, there is no self, so it's not my fault. Would you look at them and actually think that there is no "coherent thing" called Alice which you can hold responsible for raping and killing your relative? Would you actually let them go or would you think that actually, there is this "coherent thing" called Alice that is meaningfully the same and deserves justice/rehabilitation.

Maybe I should rephrase it. Being social is just a means to be able to pass on more of your own genes.

So I wouldn't say we are fundamentally social.

>This means “me” is never a solid concept or identity, it must actually change to make way for new life to continue through the lens of evolution. Adaptation and plasticity are the defining, and arguably most powerful characteristics of most, if not all life.

It just seems like they haven't properly defined self and have some confused idea of what self is, rather than having any real issue with the concept. It seems to be they are using some kind of Buddhist definition which makes no sense, similar to Sam Harris. Oh wait they do come out and actually say it.

>From the Buddhist perspective, the idea of ‘individual self’ is an illusion.

I agree the Buddhist definition of self is an illusion, incoherent, makes no sense and doesn't really match up with what people actually mean by self. So I just avoid using such definition and lean towards more materialist definitions.

I like to just use a definition of self = body, but I'm also partial to some dictionary definitions

> : the union of elements (such as body, emotions, thoughts, and sensations) that constitute the individuality and identity of a person
>
>https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/self

>Ideas from people like Ayne Rand about selfishness being a virtue runs counter to millions of years of evolutionary history

That doesn't sound right, evolutionary scientists aren't writing books called "the selfish gene" for no reason.

I would argue we have billions of years of selfishly passing on genes, with being social just a tool to selfishly pass on genes.

Yep, I think all of this has already been known/established.

I was hoping by link I was hoping someone established a causal link, but this study is just more correlation.

I think that the visual light/input of your phone or a clock as being the main reason why not to.

What I find useful is to use an alexa and ask it for your time.

>The source is tabloid yellow journalism - no '1,000 families' EVER materialized. The number was a complete lie, you can't google it

How many was it then?

>. You only find that The Times article that originated it, and various rightwing and Christian evangelist op-eds repeating it.

It was in left and right wing papers.

>And the Tavistock clinic was set to be replaced with multiple new gender clinics to handle higher capacity.

It feels like you are trying to rewrite history about why it closed. It was closed due to reviews about it's failing. It wasn't just closed to make room for more centres.

The type of treatement and aproach needed to be completely changed.

>Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust has been told to shut the clinic by spring after it was criticised in an independent review.
>
>Instead, new regional centres will be set up to "ensure the holistic needs" of patients are fully met, the NHS said.
>
>https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-62335665

Pick whatever left wing paper you want and read their articles on Tavistock.

I'm confused.

Did she get surgery done when she was only 13? Is that allowed by the rules or not?

>transgender surgery performed on her when she was 13.

I'm not sure I'm happy with kids getting irreversible surgery done to them. I thought the point of puberty blockers was that they could just take them, and then once they are an adult they can get surgery and other hormones.

>transgender surgery performed on her when she was 13.

No that it, I think the main thing was that she was a kid and that the doctor's scared her parents into agreeing, by talking about how she would be more likely to commit suicide if they didn't.

>Transphobes tell us over and over that detransitioning is all over the place, there's hundreds of thousands or millions of detransitioners - and yet they only know about the one or two

Well obviously your aren't going to have thousands wanting to go on media tours. If you want to get a better gauge then look at how many are suing in class action lawsuits.

In the UK a large number of suing the NHS, plus the Tavistock clinic which was responsible got closed down as a results and reviews are ongoing.

​

>The Tavistock gender clinic is facing mass legal action from youngsters who claim they were rushed into taking life-altering puberty blockers.
>
>Lawyers expect about 1,000 families to join a medical negligence lawsuit alleging vulnerable children have been misdiagnosed and placed on a damaging medical pathway.
>
>https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tavistock-gender-clinic-to-be-sued-by-1-000-families-lbsw6k8zd

​

>There was a negative association between IQ and obesity in the UK population.
>
>https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/lim2.11

The main causal link between intelligence and bmi, is that less intelligent people are more likely to do things that make them overweight/obese.

edit: Here also showing a negative correlation between BMI and years of education.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797329/

Sleep, diet and exercise.

Linking into this study, when you sleep you brain removes waste products. Exercise increases blood flow, also removing waste products. So that might partly be the mechanism for how they help.

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/parkinsons-disease/fighting-parkinson-disease-with-exercise-and-diet

I do wonder if ADHD for many is just a good normal natural condition, but it just doesn't work well in such an unnatural modern society.

You need to exercise for your brain to work properly. So the reason for bad reading and maths scores is partly due to not enough exercise.

There is a meme that you can't out train a bad diet. In terms of calories in/out it makes sense.

While diet's are best in the short term in terms of losing weight, in the long term diets very rarely work. In the long term the only people who lose weight diet and exercise.

>If everyone's actions are predetermined though, can we really put the blame on people for acting the way they did? We would essentially be sentencing people for crimes they had no control over.

Yep it's perfectly fine to sentence those people. We sentence people to act as a deterrent and to protect society.

Edit:2

>we're calling it free will but I might as well call it brain chemistry under incompatiblist determinism

I think you just have two different ways of describing the same thing. One is an emergent descriptions compared to the other. e.g. You could say that humans could be described simply as physics, but higher emergent descriptions using biology are more useful.

Free will is just a higher emergent concept above brain chemistry. Different sides of the same coin

Orig:

>Why do we have to call it "free will"? except to say that this naming might be convenient.

Isn't literally every word/definition just "convenient" naming conventions?

Studies show that most people have compatibilist intuitions, and most professional philosophers are outright compatibilists.

Most lay people, professional philosophers and criminal justice systems, call it "free will".

So it seems like society just calls it "free will". I don't think "should" or "have to" really comes into play.

You don't "have to" call it free will, but it just makes sense to call it free will, since it lines up to what people really mean by the term.

Edit: Some more studies you might be interested in

People have incoherent ideas around free will, but when properly probed the majority have compatibilist intutions.

>https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-moore-48/
>
>In the past decade, a number of empirical researchers have suggested that laypeople have compatibilist intuitions… In one of the first studies, Nahmias et al. (2006) asked participants to imagine that, in the next century, humans build a supercomputer able to accurately predict future human behavior on the basis of the current state of the world. Participants were then asked to imagine that, in this future, an agent has robbed a bank, as the supercomputer had predicted before he was even born. In this case, 76% of participants answered that this agent acted of his own free will, and 83% answered that he was morally blameworthy. These results suggest that most participants have compatibilist intuitions, since most answered that this agent could act freely and be morally responsible, despite living in a deterministic universe.
>
>https://philpapers.org/archive/ANDWCI-3.pdf

​

>Our results highlight some inconsistencies of lay beliefs in the general public, by showing explicit agreement with libertarian concepts of free will (especially in the US) and simultaneously showing behavior that is more consistent with compatibilist theories. If participants behaved in a way that was consistent with their libertarian beliefs, we would have expected a negative relation between free will and determinism, but instead we saw a positive relation that is hard to reconcile with libertarian views
>
>https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0221617
>
>Then when it comes to philosophy professors most are outright compatibilists.
>
>[https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all)

>Why does it have to be described like that, though?

It's a useful and pragmatic way that we have to describe things with our current knowledge and technology.

>If someone commits a murder without coercion, we can decide that it's a problem with their brain chemistry and we can't fix that brain chemistry so we need to remove that brain chemistry from society so that it won't happen again.
>
>If the murder is committed under coercion then maybe the brain is fine it was just external circumstances. So we'd not imprison that brain but we might try to remedy the external circumstances.

We don't even know what the brain is supposed to look like, let alone the technology to do such a brain scan.

Also what if the person was coerced but there was also a chemical imbalance in the brain? Would you punish the person who really didn't do anything wrong?

So in the present day, the test for if the brain is good/bad is basically the compatibilist free will test.

​

>And I described the whole thing without even mentioning free will!

Maybe, I have two thoughts. First as I already mentioned, they aren't practical or might even be impossible alternatives, so in the meantime you have to use compatibilist free will.

Above you've described how to do things that are impossible. Imagine you were a judge in the present day and time, how would you be able to approach things without using the concept of compatibilist free will and coercion?

Secondly, I think you are just looking at the other side of the coin of free will. You could define free will as the concept/test that's useful for justice. So in effect you are just using it's definition even if you don't want to use the word.

​

>We can pretend that free will exists and attribute our justice system to that but we don't need the idea of free will to have the justice system that we already have.

Let's go back to the example above of someone being coerced into committing a crime. Using present day technology how would a justice system determine what to do without referring to the coercive element or the concept of compatibilist free will.

Anyway I just wanted to note, I like your train of thought, I recently had some very similar lines of thought.

>If anything, the idea of free will can remove our empathy. If free will exists then maybe people are choosing to be evil. But if free will doesn't exist then we can have compassion for the people who are unfortunately burdened with having no choice but to do evil acts.

I think most studies suggest the opposite, that reduce belief in free will results in people being more immoral and racist. I expect that also people would be less compassionate, since why be compassionate to someone inherently "bad"?

>These three studies suggest that endorsement of the belief in free will can lead to decreased ethnic/racial prejudice compared to denial of the belief in free will. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0091572#s1>
>
>For example, weakening free will belief led participants to behave less morally and responsibly (Baumeister et al., 2009; Protzko et al., 2016; Vohs & Schooler, 2008)

From https://www.ethicalpsychology.com/search?q=free+will

>A study suggests that when people are encouraged to believe their behavior is predetermined — by genes or by environment — they may be more likely to cheat. The report, in the January issue of Psychological Science, describes two studies by Kathleen D. Vohs of the University of Minnesota and Jonathan W. Schooler of the University of British Columbia.

From https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/health/19beha.html?scp=5&sq=psychology%20jonathan%20schooler&st=cse

>What does voluntary mean?

We just use the medical definition. It's when you deliberately do something. So if you deliberately shake you hand that's voluntary. But if you try and keep you had still but it shakes because you have Parkinson's, that involuntary.

With sufficient technology you could scan someone's brain and differentiate between voluntary and involuntary actions.

>Why do we need free will for justice?

To determine the appropriate action or whether someone should be punished.

If someone commits a crime freely, you want to put them in prison. But if someone if forced or coerced into the crime, then they will probably found not guilty and not put into prison.

Any functional justice system would in practice need to have some kind of concept of compatibilist free will in order to determine whether to find someone guilty and the appropriate punishment.

​

>In the case of R. v. Ruzic
>
>It is a principle of fundamental justice that only voluntary conduct – behaviour that is the product of a free will and controlled body, unhindered by external constraints – should attract the penalty and stigma of criminal liability.
>
>The accused had been coerced by an individual in Colombia to smuggle cocaine into the United States. He was told that if he did not comply, his wife and child in Colombia would be harmed.
>
>https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1861/index.do

Hence they were found not guilty since it wasn't of their own free will.

>By this definition my dresser has freedom to act.

No it doesn't... How did you come to that conclusion.?

Edit: To clarify I define free will as "the ability to make voluntary actions in line with your desires free from external coercion/influence".