44
Is it weird that I have to resort the idea of "Determinism" to be able to move on?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
44 points (94.0% liked)
No Stupid Questions
36612 readers
1322 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Invoking determinism is fine, just be aware it rarely solves the problem you think it does.
Saying 'some bad thing happened - the universe made it happen, it's not my fault' - what are you really wanting to achieve with that? If it was beyond your ability to do otherwise, then you probably want to process this some other way (mindfulness / therapy / talking it out with someone) until your emotions align with the facts. Because you don't have a "responsibility" problem you have a "thinking it was my responsibility when it wasn't" problem. And appealing to determinism isn't going to change your habit of doing that.
On the other hand, if you actually could have made a difference / prevented it but knowingly didn't (or were sufficiently careless that your culpability is real) then appealing to fate might be a short term plaster but it's a bad long term fix.
And this is because rather than dealing with a feeling of guilt or dealing with how you make choices you are masking these things by making yourself out to be a passive object that life happens to. Again, as a short term cope that can be fine, but do you see how making a habit of that just undermines your ability to believe you can grow and be better?
At its extreme appealing to determinism can remove your perception of everyone's responsibility. "Everything's inevitable"... "We're all just biological machines".. "I couldn't help it"... And while, from a certain point of view, physics can lend evidence to determinism. It doesn't actually affect how life works because even if we are all biological machines, we still need to ascribe what we call 'responsibility' to the biological machine through which something undesirable came. People will still want to avoid people who hurt them. The law will still have to segregate the wrongdoer. Even if everything is now "deterministic". (The Amazon warehouse sorting robots will isolate a misbehaving robot even if that robot has not one jot of control over its programming - if you see what I mean).
So all I'm saying is belief in "fate" has an illusory power. Where it makes us feel less bad about something. But taken to its extreme it makes us not feel responsible for anything, while life carries on as normal and inevitably penalises us for that.
So it's better for you to expose yourself to the pain of "yes it was my fault" (if indeed it was). But then in that pain not to give way to hopelessness, but rather realise pain (if based on truth) is a fuel by which to change yourself. Get other's help if necessary. But don't give up the opportunity to grow. The pain is actually a sign you care, don't deaden that. It's the stuff of life.
There are many many ways to slice up this problem but a common division of camps is
Free Will
Hard determinism
Soft determinism
Your comment is touching on a lot of the arguments between soft and hard determinism but hard determinism has really fallen out of favor recently due to (imo) a better comprehension of the definition of self.
Hard determinism relied on an understanding that the actor being "forced" into their actions lacked agency and thus any responsibility for their actions (which is a generally internally consistent statement - we don't consider actors responsible for actions taken under duress for certain values of responsible and duress)... however, that comprehension relied on (imo from here on out) an acceptance that the actor that lived in the deterministic world and the actor we were passing judgement on were in some way distinct - in essence that we are something more than our role in existence. Again imo, that leans into some of the same difficulties most free will models have - that there is something able to effect existence that is itself unaffected (in some significant way) by existence. (I am skimping on why this is important. Feel free to ask me to expand on it)
It seems much more logical that everything in existence can be affected and affect everything else in existence and if that's the case, much like a defective gear in a simple machine, we may judge an actor to be responsible for the outcomes they materialize.
So in response to your comment I'd stress that living in a deterministic world doesn't necessarily divorce us from responsibility for our actions and understanding why can actually be quite empowering.
Yes, i believe the answer is in this. Believing in a given definition of self is part of the definition of self.
Such a belief can be :
(that one was from : @[email protected] )