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. To me, there’s effectively no-one for me to be judgemental of. Wether it be littering, racism or violence, these people didn’t choose to act this way, they just do and couldn’t have done otherwise. If I was them, I’d be doing the exact same thing.
I’m just as non-accepting of their behaviour as everybody else. In my case there’s just little to none negative emotions involved in it. Me getting angry about someone littering, to me, is the same as getting angry at the weather.
And yes, I agree. If I were a smoker I wouldn’t want to throw cigarette butts in the ground either for the same reason you just mentioned. My point was that I have theory of mind for such people. I can imagine how someone could naively imagine there’s no harm to it. This just no longer holds true when we’re talking about trash that’s bigger; I can’t imagine what they could be thinking.
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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.
You can stop punching him, you made your point. 🙂
Yeah I don’t have a clue what triggered him but now that I look again at his username, I think he acknowledges he’s just always angry? I don’t know. All I was doing was trying to be helpful but as the saying goes “no good deed goes unpunished.”
It’s medical, windowlicker.
Get bent in multidimensional ways and write a book about it.
I bet it’s a bestseller.
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 :-)
Do I have to break out the crayons for you?
Dr. Benjamin Libet in the 80s did a series of tests on human cognition, involving people reporting when a certain configuration of a clock face occurred. This experiment is literally the watershed moment when psychologists and neurologists misinterpreted the results to be that “Humans actually act before they consciously choose to act” which is what started this entire faddish exploration of a nonexistent corner of the neurology and psychology fields.
Saccades are moments when your brain fills in your visual experience with false and blending data, usually during rapid eye movement. This is why sometimes when you look at a clock the second hand may seem to tick backwards one tick. It is your brain filling in the places where the movement of your eyes or other interruptions (like the hole in your vision your optic nerve makes but you almost never experience).
All of Libet’s ‘surprising’ findings are more reasonably and experimentally explained by saccades during the measurement steps than the explanation being that we are all deterministic self-modifying chemical cascades that can make more of ourselves and bear the illusion of selfhood. This concern was brought up before he published but never again and never since.
The reason why it makes me SO BLINDINGLY INFURIATED is that YOU ARE RIGHT NOW EXPERIENCING THE PROOF OF YOUR SENSE OF SELF’S EXISTENCE!
But because so many self-satisfied academics and rottube ‘surprising facts’ content creator’s careers now depend on that avenue of research being a valid path of study, all based on a near-as-self-disproving-interpretation as could possibly exist, no serious criticism of his methodology or interpretations is allowed in ANY level, academic, layman, or even just a fucking chat over a beer.
And it’s always some knowlessman making calming gestures while having zero basis of understanding other than that it’s the new edgy topic that comes in to quell discussions and both sidesism the whole thread to irrelevance.
Congrats for doing your job, I guess.
150 years from now when we really start to get a firm grasp on consciousness, the academics of that future (if we survive) will consider the denial of consciousness as a curious and misguided fad that led so many bright minds astray.
You understand condescension, and yet you still do it yourself.
If you punch me, you get punched back. It’s a pretty simple math.
Have you ever heard the story of the snake?
One evening, a man walks along a dimly lit path. He suddenly halts, his heart pounding with fear. Before him, on the ground, lies what appears to be a venomous snake. He freezes, paralyzed with dread. Only when a friend comes by with a lantern does the true nature of the object come to light: it is merely a piece of rope.
I learned this story from Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist author. He would indicate with stories like this that our perceptions shape our reality. Often, we react out of fear and misunderstanding, seeing snakes where there are none. He said that mindfulness and deeper understanding can act like the lantern, illuminating the true nature of our experiences.
Jesus, dude, you’re blowing everything I said way out of proportion and also completely missing my point.
I think you just wanted to give someone a lecture while also grinding an axe or two. Have at it, enjoy.
You’ve already completely disregarded what I was talking about and have gone on to just unload whatever crap you’ve been wanting to.
Glad you got the opportunity to vent. I am way beyond done with this because it has never been a conversation. Feel free to keep going, I’m sure some readers will find it entertaining.
P.S. I think you’d benefit from therapy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_explosive_disorder
I’m pretty much the same way. You gotta remember though that anger is not a negative emotion. An irrational amount of an emotion is a negative emotion.
An emotion is just a driving force of your behavior. “Angry” is mostly there for us to take action about unacceptable situations. Thus getting angry at the weather doesn’t make sense, since you can’t change it.
However, someone littering is in a limited way under your control. Like you said in another comment, you can confront them and use your power for them to pick up after themselves. Saying you’re not getting angry/irritated at all is the equivalent of not doing anything about it to most people. And I do think you’re at least getting irritated (which is a low form of anger) at people littering, which is why you do something about it or post this topic.
It seems to me a bit that you see any kind of anger, including being irritated, as bad, and thus show no sign of it/deny it even though you have it.
It’s obviously a negative feeling in my view. It can be used as motivation for changing things to the better but I can’t see it as anything else as negative. It’s not a pleasant feeling.
Ofcourse I’m not immune to it myself either but being such a strong emotion it’s nearly impossible to not notice and thus it acts as a kind of mindfulness alarm. When I catch myself getting angry at something I immediately realize how that is in conflict with how I see the world and then the anger basically dissapears. It’s kind of like waking up at the morning and being irritated that it’s raining outside but then at the same moment realizing that I can’t change the weather and I’ll rather just be wet than wet and angry. It’s the so called second arrow.
Unlike weather I can affect other people however, and I do. No disagreement there. I simply just don’t see the need to feel anger while doing so. It’s done and can’t be undone. They couldn’t have done otherwise so no need to get angry and pretend as if they could have. My intention is to encourage them to not act that way in the future.
I guess it depends on how much trouble you have with too much anger. Very often, anger is counterproductive, not only for yourself, but for actually effecting the change in others you desire.
In that case, it’s often good to “overcorrect” and rather try to feel less anger than appropriate, so that your troubles get reduced.
However, I still think it’s an overreaction and an appropriate amount of anger at the appropriate things is healthy, as in the end it’s actually a conflict within yourself to have less anger than appropriate - you’re forcing yourself to spend more energy suppressing/letting go of the anger, and then having less energy to effect the change you desire.