Free will and obesity

I don’t think going this route with personal responsibility does anything good for our society.

Leaving aside the motivations of various commercial enterprises (i.e., big pharma), this common refrain regarding obesity is easily debunkable.  All one has to do is look at the huge percentage of men, women and children in the western world who are classified as obese.  We are to assume the entire lot are just mentally lazy or personally irresponsible when just 50 years ago this percentage was fractional?  Greatest generation kids just had bad DNA huh?

No, there's a systematic problem here with food.  GLP-1 inhibitors are probably life saving.  The longer term solution is to reduce the additive nature and increase the poor nutritional value of our food systems.

Surely there is a vast difference between claiming that we have no free will - as in the materialist conception of reality, and claiming that everything we do is under conscious control.

From the materialist concept of no free will, even if you perform an experiment and report the results in a paper, you had no control of that process!

We clearly function with a mixture of free will and automatic actions which we don't control -e.g. pulling away if you touch something hot. In between those two extremes are things like eating less.

David

We need to distinguish between the active or operant free will where choices are manifested in the physical world, and the mental but impotent free will to make a decision or choice despite other factors preventing physically manifesting that inner mental choice. Both types exist in abundance, and constitute the total degree of free will enjoyed by humans. Unfortunately this is not complete, because when the spirit is embodied, brain states can drastically affect choices from within, in accordance with the transmitter/receiver model of the spirit/brain relationship.

Leaving aside the motivations of various commercial enterprises (i.e., big pharma), this common refrain regarding obesity is easily debunkable.  All one has to do is look at the huge percentage of men, women and children in the western world who are classified as obese.  We are to assume the entire lot are just mentally lazy or personally irresponsible when just 50 years ago this percentage was fractional?  Greatest generation kids just had bad DNA huh?

No, there's a systematic problem here with food.  GLP-1 inhibitors are probably life saving.  The longer term solution is to reduce the additive nature and increase the poor nutritional value of our food systems.

I would agree, and I think @sbu would as well, that there is definitely some aspect here that goes beyond mere willpower.

It's less the drug, IMO at least, than the narrative that wants to chip away at the idea of responsibility. This isn't to say there aren't massive issues with food distribution - such as food deserts - and questions of why even lab mice have gotten fatter.

We need to distinguish between the active or operant free will where choices are manifested in the physical world, and the mental but impotent free will to make a decision or choice despite other factors preventing physically manifesting that inner mental choice. Both types exist in abundance, and constitute the total degree of free will enjoyed by humans. Unfortunately this is not complete, because when the spirit is embodied, brain states can drastically affect choices from within, in accordance with the transmitter/receiver model of the spirit/brain relationship.

If you can dumb that reply down I might be able to reply, but it is hard if I don't know exactly what you mean 

David

Are there any tests that can falsify the transmitter theory in your opinion or is it infalsifiable? As previously discussed I believe it’s already falsified by violating the laws of thermodynamics but I would like to know your position.

If the non-physical realm operates without time, or in some other way in which time is altered, doesn't that make thermodynamical arguments tricky if not impossible?

It seems to me that if you don't use the trick of reinterpreting one type of paranormal phenomenon in terms of others (e.g. superpsi) there is plenty of evidence for something akin to the transmitter theory. For example, any case in which a medium obtains information from a dead person you have evidence that the source of that person's consciousness was not in the physical realm.

David

If you can dumb that reply down I might be able to reply, but it is hard if I don't know exactly what you mean 

David

Free will seems to be able to be broken down into at least three kinds. For example, 

(1) Say that you like books about NDEs and go to the library and check one out to read it. That was an active unimpeded free will choice. 

(2) Say that you have that desire but have had an accident and are in a hospital bed, preventing you from doing that. This is mental but impotent free will, where the free will choice is prevented from being manifested physically. 

(3) Say that you are not in the hospital but are overweight, unhealthy and have a craving for sweets originating in some sort of unbalanced brain state, and somebody puts a plate of chocolate cake in front of you. You still want to go get the NDE book, but even though you know intellectually that you are exacerbating your overweight and unhealthy condition and are bringing closer demise from heart disease or some other malady, you override the desire for the NDE book, and instead reach for the cake and eat it. In this case a chemical or neuronal imbalance has influenced your consciousness so as to override a healthy choice and instead cause an unhealthy one despite an intellectual knowing that it is a mistake. This is not a totally free will choice. Here, an abnormal brain state has drastically affected consciousness from within, in accordance with the transmitter/receiver model of the spirit/brain relationship.

Free will seems to be able to be broken down into at least three kinds. For example, 

(1) Say that you like books about NDEs and go to the library and check one out to read it. That was an active unimpeded free will choice. 

(2) Say that you have that desire but have had an accident and are in a hospital bed, preventing you from doing that. This is mental but impotent free will, where the free will choice is prevented from being manifested physically. 

(3) Say that you are not in the hospital but are overweight, unhealthy and have a craving for sweets originating in some sort of unbalanced brain state, and somebody puts a plate of chocolate cake in front of you. You still want to go get the NDE book, but even though you know intellectually that you are exacerbating your overweight and unhealthy condition and are bringing closer demise from heart disease or some other malady, you override the desire for the NDE book, and instead reach for the cake and eat it. In this case a chemical or neuronal imbalance has influenced your consciousness so as to override a healthy choice and instead cause an unhealthy one despite an intellectual knowing that it is a mistake. This is not a totally free will choice. Here, an abnormal brain state has drastically affected consciousness from within, in accordance with the transmitter/receiver model of the spirit/brain relationship.

Well nobody claims that we have total free will, but that we do have some finite amount of free will.

David

If the non-physical realm operates without time, or in some other way in which time is altered, doesn't that make thermodynamical arguments tricky if not impossible?

It seems to me that if you don't use the trick of reinterpreting one type of paranormal phenomenon in terms of others (e.g. superpsi) there is plenty of evidence for something akin to the transmitter theory. For example, any case in which a medium obtains information from a dead person you have evidence that the source of that person's consciousness was not in the physical realm.

David

Lots of "ifs" here.  Occam's razor???

Well nobody claims that we have total free will, but that we do have some finite amount of free will.

David

Yeah IMO this question of bodily influence goes far back, with texts of the ancients discussing these questions all the way up to the modern day.

But we also have shyness, flaring tempers, infatuation, and so on. It isn't clear to me why addictions are some proof that we have no free will, at best it would seem the argument to be made is that there are situations that are akin to a sort of possession where simply exercising willpower will not be enough.

However there are other considerations here - for example there are times I give into my craving for some food item because I know the happiness from eating a cake or whatever will help carry me through the work day. Similarly if you have an itch after a point you may want to scratch simply to rid yourself of the distraction.

What if children were raised in a way that bloomed their mental and even spiritual states, rather than the vast majority funneled into a rat race? If you could genuinely tend your self, and not have to be part of the "machine", would managing addiction give us a different picture?

We likely would still have cases where a person needs medication to help with addiction, but we might also find this is less common that is presented by the people selling us drugs in the same marketplace as the people selling us on sugar/fat/etc. 

And we should also consider that for some the drugs won't work, and something else is needed - for example "Primagen" turned to God to get over meth & porn to work at Netflix.

It seems to me that if you don't use the trick of reinterpreting one type of paranormal phenomenon in terms of others (e.g. superpsi) there is plenty of evidence for something akin to the transmitter theory. For example, any case in which a medium obtains information from a dead person you have evidence that the source of that person's consciousness was not in the physical realm.

David

The problem with "evidence" is that it can be interpreted in a way that supports different hypothesis. To overcome this problem Karl Popper proposed proper science to incorporate the "falsification" methodology. Popper’s falsificationist methodology holds that scientific theories are characterized by entailing predictions that future observations might reveal to be false. The idea is that no number of experiments can ever prove a theory, but a reproducible experiment or observation can refute one.