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If you dig sufficiently deeply at it, you can attribute everything to luck. Just keep asking "why" and eventually you arrive at something you did not have consc

If you dig sufficiently deeply at it, you can attribute everything to luck. Just keep asking "why" and eventually you arrive at something you did not have conscious control over. E.g. Q. Why do you deserve your money? A. I work hard. Q. Why do you work hard? A. I have a good work ethic. Q. Why do you have a good work ethic? A. My parents raised me that way. Q. Why did you choose for your parents to raise you that way? A. I didn't. I'm not suggesting any conclusions here, just stating that if you keeping asking "why", you will always get to ground at something outside your conscious control. Applying this to my own life, I make good money doing software development. Programming is easy and natural for me. I started programming when I was 12. Why? I thought it was fun. Why did I choose to think it was fun? I didn't consciously choose. This applies even for things that seem to arise within your own mind. You can't choose which thoughts to have. You might think "sure I can, I'm going to think about elephants right now", and that may be, but when did you choose to choose to think about elephants? When did you choose to choose to choose? You can recurse deep, but eventually you arrive at something outside your conscious control.

eyelidlessness 4y ago
You make an excellent case for nihilism, but I must say… > Why did you choose for your parents … you gave in to an abridged “why?” discussion very early in this example.
- gamegoblin 4y ago
  I'm not sure if it's a case for nihilism, but it is definitely a case for humility, patience, and non-hatred (is there a word for this?). Any time I am interacting with someone I feel like is ignorant/stupid/foolish/whatever pejorative, I take a deep breath and remind myself that nobody chooses to be stupid. One might say "well they chose to be ignorant, they could learn about XYZ but they choose not to". But that would require them having the thought "I should learn about XYZ". That thought does not come by choice. And, if it did, the thought to make that choice does not come by choice, et cetera. Once you accept that nobody makes themself the way they are, it removes the punch behind the emotion of hatred. You don't hate fire because it sometimes causes destruction. It's just doing what fire does. You might not like it, but you don't hate it. The same can be said of people.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    People are not just the product of their environments. They make choices; those choices have consequences. People are more constrained by their environment than they often think. They choose less often than they think they do. At the same time, your post goes too far the other direction. People have more choice than that. And they have responsibility for those choices.
    - gamegoblin 4y ago
      Can you provide an example of a choice that one can not keep asking "why" to and get at a cause that was not consciously authored by that person? I have had this conversation many times and have never encountered such an example, but would be interested to hear one.
      - chevman 4y ago
        Why do you love your mother? Because, you do :)
      - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
        Maybe I can. If you start from a materialist position (including from the modern scientific position), then you are inevitably faced with some kind of reductionism, and even far stronger reductionism than you are arguing. If all that exists is matter and the laws of physics, then all you can be is matter that obeys the laws of physics - nothing more. You're just a collection of atoms that obey the laws of atomic physics, assembled into molecules that obey the laws of biochemistry, assembled into neurons that obey the laws of neurology. There is no room for choice in that view. But equally, there is no room for love. (Especially love in the highest sense, of choosing to do what's best for the other, because you can't choose anything. But even in the sense of attraction, that's just neurons and biochemicals doing their thing.) There is no room for beauty as a real thing - it's just what hits our neurons a particular way. There is no room for truth as truth. (There are things that we find convincing, in our hardware that evolved to get a good enough answer fast enough, rather than to find actual truth or to do pure logic correctly.) There is not even room for personality. All you can be is the impersonal plus complexity - that's all "personality" can be. There is nothing more for "personality" to be but the artifact of complexity. But that doesn't match our experience. We all experience love, even though the logic of our position says that love doesn't exist. We all make choices, even though logic says we don't actually choose. We all experience beauty and we all long for truth. And we all long for personal contact - to touch each other as persons, not just as complicated machines. We can try to live within the logic of the materialist position, but it doesn't actually fit who we are as human beings. It's kind of like when you put a t-shirt on backwards. It covers all the places that need to be covered, but it doesn't fit right. And no matter how much you try to wiggle it around and adjust it, it just doesn't fit. I suggest that the materialist position doesn't fit who we are as human beings, and that the lack of fit is telling us something. Either we are the products of random chance, thrown up in and by an impersonal universe, with aspirations of personality that can never be fulfilled, or we are not actually what our philosophy says we are. And I think it's the latter. So I invite you to consider the alternative to the materialist position. If the beginning of it all was someone, rather than something impersonal, then it is possible that we could be truly personal, rather than just the impersonal plus complexity. Then we also could be able to make real choices, and to really love, and to know real truth and beauty. We could be what humans have always thought we were. But you can never have that as long as you hold to the purely materialist view. But if you can't step out of the materialist view and consider the alternative, then no, I can't give you the example that you're asking for. For a much longer and better treatment of this, see the first chapter of He Is There And He Is Not Silent, by Francis Schaeffer.
Gigachad 4y ago
With this line of reasoning, no one does or decides anything. We are all simply running out the simulation that was predetermined long before we were born. Even if this is true, it's not exactly useful. We punish people for doing the wrong things, even though they didn't chose to do them, but the act of punishing them makes them less likely to happen. In the same way, we give rewards to people who worked hard even if they didn't "decide" to work hard. Doesn't matter why they decided to work hard, if we just handed out money evenly to everyone, we wouldn't have these hard workers putting the extra effort in.
- gamegoblin 4y ago
  A few things to unpack here: - People still do things and decide things, they are just not the conscious author of those actions and decisions - This makes no claims about determinism, the universe could still have e.g. quantum randomness and nothing would change about this statement, as we have no conscious control over that randomness. - This also makes no claims about the morality of punishment/reward. My statement is an "is" statement, and, as I agree with Hume, you can't go from an "is" statement to an "ought" statement.
  - Viliam1234 4y ago
    > you can't go from an "is" statement to an "ought" statement. It's funny when you apply this idea to itself. There may be no path from "is" to "ought", but that doesn't imply we shouldn't make it.
  - xerxesaa 4y ago
    Sounds like someone read Sam Harris' essay on free will.
    - pdonis 4y ago
      Which has been rebutted by a number of philosophers in the field. See, for example, this by Daniel Dennett: https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/reflections_on_free_will.pdf https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/reflections_on_...
AmericanChopper 4y ago
I was raised by a drug dealer/drug addict/gang member single mom. One of the reasons I’ve been financially successful is because I never wanted my life to be like the lives of the people I grew up around. Where’s the luck there? Attributing everything to luck is: A) A coping mechanism for people who don’t want to do the work required to succeed. B) A rationalization technique for people who think they should be entitled to the fruits of other people labor.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 4y ago
  You can't see the luck in having a life experience that motivated you to become financially successful? I mean, I know financially successful people and they go around judging poor and middle class people for their bad financial decisions, and I'm just thinking--well, maybe they did not have the education to help them do that, or they did not have a life experience that woke them up, because it is actually possible to be perfectly content with being poor/middle class or for it to never occur to themselves to question their circumstances? Already, we can make an example of you--you can't think beyond your own circumstances, and you think that just because you made a choice to better your life and succeeded in it, then people whom you don't deem successful must simply be choosing to not make the choices that you did. I'm sorry, but even if you come from a painful background, that doesn't give you a pass to say that your path to get where you are is supposed to be the same for everyone.
  - AmericanChopper 4y ago
    Luck determined the circumstances I grew up in, I didn’t control than. My choice to lift myself out of that environment has nothing to do with luck at all, that was explicitly a deliberate choice I made. My mechanism for accomplishing it had nothing to do with luck either, I moved out of home (and subsequently removed myself from that environment) by getting a job as a bartender.
    - kiba 4y ago
      Pretty much at every stage of your life involves luck. You can't merely escape it by exercising any agency, only make some outcome more probable than others.
WalterBright 4y ago
Nobody made you write that post. You chose to.
- gamegoblin 4y ago
  I wrote the post because I wanted to, but I didn't choose to want to.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    You chose to write the post. You're not a hapless victim of your wants.
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      To quote a song I like[1]: "Physics makes us all its bitches". [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isjKlXGSve0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isjKlXGSve0
  - pdonis 4y ago
    Perhaps you didn't choose to want to, but that doesn't mean nobody can ever make choices, or even that nobody can ever make choices that can affect their wants.
    - mbfg 4y ago
      People certainly make choices, and choices are important to you future and to people around you's future. The question is, did your conscience being have control over the choice you made, or did the meat sack make it.
      - pdonis 4y ago
        The conscious being is the meat sack: they are the same thing. So your question is based on a false premise.
lumb63 4y ago
I make the point in your last paragraph often. There is a quote I recall reading somewhere, that contrasts with “I think, therefore I am”. Rather: “the thought chooses the thinker”.
inimino 4y ago
Q. Why do you work hard? A. Because you choose to. Choosing to work means taking action in the world, which is where you can stop looking for a cause outside yourself. How did you choose, you can still ask. But you choose to work because you choose to work. It's because of this that you can say you have a good work ethic. A choice is something that you take responsibility for. Not your parents, or your work ethic, or the way you were raised.
- vidarh 4y ago
  You can ask why you chose, and when you gave the answer that you choose to do so because you choose to do so you're begging the question. What gave you that work ethic? Either nature or nuture, both outside your control. For you to have any kind of real agency rather than being the product of cause and effect beyond any control of yours would upend both logic and physics (in other words: free will is nothing but an illusion).
  - inimino 4y ago
    My point, which you missed, is not that you can't ask why, but that you aren't obligated to ask why. Saying that you made a choice (repeatedly) to work hard is enough of an answer to the question of why you had some benefit in your life accrue to you due to your hard work. If you want to ask why you made those choices, you would have to give an answer for each one, but the fact is that you made them. Free will is no more an illusion than the qualia of red. If what you think is outside your control, then who is the "you" that is not in control? Where is it?
    - Pent 4y ago
      >Free will is no more an illusion than the qualia of red. If what you think is outside your control, then who is the "you" that is not in control? Where is it? If you can't choose to swap the color red to blue, then what makes you think you have any other choice with other things in your mind?
      - 4y ago
b800h 4y ago
This is why Western individualism is stupid. We're constituent parts of families, and operate most effectively in that way, yet all modern taxation, government policy and a lot of culture attempts to break that bond, in favour of an all-powerful state.
adammarples 4y ago
Tell me what Can you claim? Not a thing Not your name.

eyelidlessness 4y ago

You make an excellent case for nihilism, but I must say… > Why did you choose for your parents … you gave in to an abridged “why?” discussion very early in this example.

gamegoblin 4y ago
I'm not sure if it's a case for nihilism, but it is definitely a case for humility, patience, and non-hatred (is there a word for this?). Any time I am interacting with someone I feel like is ignorant/stupid/foolish/whatever pejorative, I take a deep breath and remind myself that nobody chooses to be stupid. One might say "well they chose to be ignorant, they could learn about XYZ but they choose not to". But that would require them having the thought "I should learn about XYZ". That thought does not come by choice. And, if it did, the thought to make that choice does not come by choice, et cetera. Once you accept that nobody makes themself the way they are, it removes the punch behind the emotion of hatred. You don't hate fire because it sometimes causes destruction. It's just doing what fire does. You might not like it, but you don't hate it. The same can be said of people.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  People are not just the product of their environments. They make choices; those choices have consequences. People are more constrained by their environment than they often think. They choose less often than they think they do. At the same time, your post goes too far the other direction. People have more choice than that. And they have responsibility for those choices.
  - gamegoblin 4y ago
    Can you provide an example of a choice that one can not keep asking "why" to and get at a cause that was not consciously authored by that person? I have had this conversation many times and have never encountered such an example, but would be interested to hear one.
    - chevman 4y ago
      Why do you love your mother? Because, you do :)
    - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      Maybe I can. If you start from a materialist position (including from the modern scientific position), then you are inevitably faced with some kind of reductionism, and even far stronger reductionism than you are arguing. If all that exists is matter and the laws of physics, then all you can be is matter that obeys the laws of physics - nothing more. You're just a collection of atoms that obey the laws of atomic physics, assembled into molecules that obey the laws of biochemistry, assembled into neurons that obey the laws of neurology. There is no room for choice in that view. But equally, there is no room for love. (Especially love in the highest sense, of choosing to do what's best for the other, because you can't choose anything. But even in the sense of attraction, that's just neurons and biochemicals doing their thing.) There is no room for beauty as a real thing - it's just what hits our neurons a particular way. There is no room for truth as truth. (There are things that we find convincing, in our hardware that evolved to get a good enough answer fast enough, rather than to find actual truth or to do pure logic correctly.) There is not even room for personality. All you can be is the impersonal plus complexity - that's all "personality" can be. There is nothing more for "personality" to be but the artifact of complexity. But that doesn't match our experience. We all experience love, even though the logic of our position says that love doesn't exist. We all make choices, even though logic says we don't actually choose. We all experience beauty and we all long for truth. And we all long for personal contact - to touch each other as persons, not just as complicated machines. We can try to live within the logic of the materialist position, but it doesn't actually fit who we are as human beings. It's kind of like when you put a t-shirt on backwards. It covers all the places that need to be covered, but it doesn't fit right. And no matter how much you try to wiggle it around and adjust it, it just doesn't fit. I suggest that the materialist position doesn't fit who we are as human beings, and that the lack of fit is telling us something. Either we are the products of random chance, thrown up in and by an impersonal universe, with aspirations of personality that can never be fulfilled, or we are not actually what our philosophy says we are. And I think it's the latter. So I invite you to consider the alternative to the materialist position. If the beginning of it all was someone, rather than something impersonal, then it is possible that we could be truly personal, rather than just the impersonal plus complexity. Then we also could be able to make real choices, and to really love, and to know real truth and beauty. We could be what humans have always thought we were. But you can never have that as long as you hold to the purely materialist view. But if you can't step out of the materialist view and consider the alternative, then no, I can't give you the example that you're asking for. For a much longer and better treatment of this, see the first chapter of He Is There And He Is Not Silent, by Francis Schaeffer.

Gigachad 4y ago

With this line of reasoning, no one does or decides anything. We are all simply running out the simulation that was predetermined long before we were born. Even if this is true, it's not exactly useful. We punish people for doing the wrong things, even though they didn't chose to do them, but the act of punishing them makes them less likely to happen. In the same way, we give rewards to people who worked hard even if they didn't "decide" to work hard. Doesn't matter why they decided to work hard, if we just handed out money evenly to everyone, we wouldn't have these hard workers putting the extra effort in.

gamegoblin 4y ago
A few things to unpack here: - People still do things and decide things, they are just not the conscious author of those actions and decisions - This makes no claims about determinism, the universe could still have e.g. quantum randomness and nothing would change about this statement, as we have no conscious control over that randomness. - This also makes no claims about the morality of punishment/reward. My statement is an "is" statement, and, as I agree with Hume, you can't go from an "is" statement to an "ought" statement.
- Viliam1234 4y ago
  > you can't go from an "is" statement to an "ought" statement. It's funny when you apply this idea to itself. There may be no path from "is" to "ought", but that doesn't imply we shouldn't make it.
- xerxesaa 4y ago
  Sounds like someone read Sam Harris' essay on free will.
  - pdonis 4y ago
    Which has been rebutted by a number of philosophers in the field. See, for example, this by Daniel Dennett: https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/reflections_on_free_will.pdf https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/reflections_on_...

AmericanChopper 4y ago

I was raised by a drug dealer/drug addict/gang member single mom. One of the reasons I’ve been financially successful is because I never wanted my life to be like the lives of the people I grew up around. Where’s the luck there? Attributing everything to luck is: A) A coping mechanism for people who don’t want to do the work required to succeed. B) A rationalization technique for people who think they should be entitled to the fruits of other people labor.

rTX5CMRXIfFG 4y ago
You can't see the luck in having a life experience that motivated you to become financially successful? I mean, I know financially successful people and they go around judging poor and middle class people for their bad financial decisions, and I'm just thinking--well, maybe they did not have the education to help them do that, or they did not have a life experience that woke them up, because it is actually possible to be perfectly content with being poor/middle class or for it to never occur to themselves to question their circumstances? Already, we can make an example of you--you can't think beyond your own circumstances, and you think that just because you made a choice to better your life and succeeded in it, then people whom you don't deem successful must simply be choosing to not make the choices that you did. I'm sorry, but even if you come from a painful background, that doesn't give you a pass to say that your path to get where you are is supposed to be the same for everyone.
- AmericanChopper 4y ago
  Luck determined the circumstances I grew up in, I didn’t control than. My choice to lift myself out of that environment has nothing to do with luck at all, that was explicitly a deliberate choice I made. My mechanism for accomplishing it had nothing to do with luck either, I moved out of home (and subsequently removed myself from that environment) by getting a job as a bartender.
  - kiba 4y ago
    Pretty much at every stage of your life involves luck. You can't merely escape it by exercising any agency, only make some outcome more probable than others.

WalterBright 4y ago

Nobody made you write that post. You chose to.

gamegoblin 4y ago
I wrote the post because I wanted to, but I didn't choose to want to.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  You chose to write the post. You're not a hapless victim of your wants.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    To quote a song I like[1]: "Physics makes us all its bitches". [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isjKlXGSve0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isjKlXGSve0
- pdonis 4y ago
  Perhaps you didn't choose to want to, but that doesn't mean nobody can ever make choices, or even that nobody can ever make choices that can affect their wants.
  - mbfg 4y ago
    People certainly make choices, and choices are important to you future and to people around you's future. The question is, did your conscience being have control over the choice you made, or did the meat sack make it.
    - pdonis 4y ago
      The conscious being is the meat sack: they are the same thing. So your question is based on a false premise.

lumb63 4y ago

I make the point in your last paragraph often. There is a quote I recall reading somewhere, that contrasts with “I think, therefore I am”. Rather: “the thought chooses the thinker”.

inimino 4y ago

Q. Why do you work hard? A. Because you choose to. Choosing to work means taking action in the world, which is where you can stop looking for a cause outside yourself. How did you choose, you can still ask. But you choose to work because you choose to work. It's because of this that you can say you have a good work ethic. A choice is something that you take responsibility for. Not your parents, or your work ethic, or the way you were raised.

vidarh 4y ago
You can ask why you chose, and when you gave the answer that you choose to do so because you choose to do so you're begging the question. What gave you that work ethic? Either nature or nuture, both outside your control. For you to have any kind of real agency rather than being the product of cause and effect beyond any control of yours would upend both logic and physics (in other words: free will is nothing but an illusion).
- inimino 4y ago
  My point, which you missed, is not that you can't ask why, but that you aren't obligated to ask why. Saying that you made a choice (repeatedly) to work hard is enough of an answer to the question of why you had some benefit in your life accrue to you due to your hard work. If you want to ask why you made those choices, you would have to give an answer for each one, but the fact is that you made them. Free will is no more an illusion than the qualia of red. If what you think is outside your control, then who is the "you" that is not in control? Where is it?
  - Pent 4y ago
    >Free will is no more an illusion than the qualia of red. If what you think is outside your control, then who is the "you" that is not in control? Where is it? If you can't choose to swap the color red to blue, then what makes you think you have any other choice with other things in your mind?
    - 4y ago

b800h 4y ago

This is why Western individualism is stupid. We're constituent parts of families, and operate most effectively in that way, yet all modern taxation, government policy and a lot of culture attempts to break that bond, in favour of an all-powerful state.

adammarples 4y ago

Tell me what Can you claim? Not a thing Not your name.