Then I still wouldn’t say there is a justification for valuing’s someone freedom at 0, given the status of freedom as an agency creating asset, rather than dependent on personal agency. So any claim that “X is valuable because it’s mine” isn’t justifiable since X’s value doesn’t rely on that persons personal agency.

Ah ok. I think my argument still works if you substitute valuing the same for valuing at all but at least I understand you better now.

Not valuing the same, but valuing at all. Only in the former question can you can get into issues of degrees. But the latter is binary.

>If we both have possession X, and I value my X for itself, then I can’t say that your exact possession X isn’t valuable because I am me. It’s not a reason that can’t be reasonably rejected.

Since the question is whether I should value you you having freedom as much as I value me having freedom the proper analogy would be the question of whether I should value you you possessing X as much as I value me possessing X. In that case, again, the obvious reasonable reason for someone to prefer themselves having X more than someone else having X is because they are themselves and other people are other people. What's unreasonable about this?

>Children meanwhile are valued through an agent-relative relationship, unique between child and parent. But agency isn’t agent-relative but it’s agency itself. It’s a possession which everyone has in equal capacity and no justifiable difference exists (you can’t say that one is more free than others).

I'll give you that freedom is not an entity whose value is agent-relative so in that sense my example falls down here. However, as I've said above, the question is not whether my freedom is more valuable than someone else's it's whether there is any reasonable justification for me to value myself having freedom more than I value someone else having freedom and there the obvious reason is that I am me and they are them. In this sense all values are agent-relative. I don't value things from a third-person perspective.

If we both have possession X, and I value my X for itself, then I can’t say that your exact possession X isn’t valuable because I am me. It’s not a reason that can’t be reasonably rejected.

Children meanwhile are valued through an agent-relative relationship, unique between child and parent. But agency isn’t agent-relative but it’s agency itself. It’s a possession which everyone has in equal capacity and no justifiable difference exists (you can’t say that one is more free than others).

What’s being valued isn’t living status or welfare but the power of agency. Agency isn’t agent-relative but it’s agency itself. It’s a possession which everyone has in equal capacity and no justifiable difference exists (you can’t say that one is more free than others).

But it’s because the skeptic values reason as well, that they would have to have a justification to value their own freedom. They would have to have a non-arbitrary difference between their freedom and others’ freedom for them to justify valuing only their own. And because freedom is equal, in that a difference is not possible, then the skeptic would have to value freedom generally.

This is intuitive as well. We understand that free beings have value compared to non-free beings (inanimate objects). We wouldn’t have a reasonable justification to prioritize only our own freedom is freedom is equal.

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Most of this article revolves around how to pay attention to negative thoughts. He repeats a very silly tautology: bad thoughts are bad. He inserts random information with little explanation or understanding of what he's saying. He cites the following quote from Rousseau to support the misconception that negative thoughts are built upon oneself.
[It] is based on a series of historical ideas, which may have developed one after another and were not created all at once in the human mind.
This story is about the development of personal and global wealth (especially when people developed complex social organizations, they lost their individuality but became stronger in another way). It says that there are some "bad thoughts that pile up on top of each other." This is his one of many examples of the author's ignorance of the cited literature.
This article was not worth my time.

I have to agree with others that the writing is very bad. After reading it twice, I have no idea what the author is trying to do. Although he seems to be strongly opposed to "globalization", he criticizes Wakism's critics as "power-hungry". It's like a high school essay. It is difficult to deny facts because they do not exist.
He combines cool, often irrelevant quotes like an alum trying to exceed word count.
I'm really surprised that this steamy pile got 300 votes.

“The questioner has no reasonable basis to only value only his own freedom”

Of course they have a basis. Placing oneself above those around you is pretty much the rule for all living things. Self-preservation/selfishness over others is a very valid basis. It’s the most fundamental of basis.

I don't know very much about this kind of stuff but, free will could be argued rather about the existence of your mind, but the predetermination of all of your actions. There have been studies done that show when someone is faced with a choice your brain actually makes the decision prior to you actually commiting and thinking about it. This means that your "mind" makes the decision instead of "you", but what "you" are is an entirely different question. Also in your definition of freedom, couldn't animals be considered to be more free. A monkey for example, capable of doing anything it wants, me or you on the other hand cannot. At least without the threat of jailtime.

Nope no difference, that's why we will come to accept them at face value as the same but many will hold the underlying value assumption that it is different because its parts are different. Still, others won't lean on that value assumption, and due to the lack of strong evidence the belief that they aren't sentient will likely erode over time.

This article is not worth the pixels I read it through. Incoherent, deluded, and and actively dishonest.

What a bloviating load of bollocks.

Nonsense. We don't even have a clear criteria for sentience.

A rambling and boring article written from the sidelines of souring culture wars to lament 'wokeism'...

> A pissed off Serbian with a revolver could destroy civilizations.

Yes, but why was he pissed off? Nationalism had to be invented somewhere.

The reasonable basis for valuing ones own freedom over others is that the questioner is himself and other people are not. You generally are not making decisions about what to value from an external reference point otherwise I'd be just as motivated to raise other people's kids as my own.

> What the painting has is sentimental value

To the person.

> Yet freedom, on the other hand, is agency itself. It can be thought of instead as a possession. It doesn't depend on an agent's perspective because that's what freedom is, an agent's perspective.

This seems a bit spurious. An agent can quite coherently take freedom to a form of capacity, and they can value their capacity. Moreover, I don't see what relevance here is for reflexivity. A self-conscious being valuing their self-conscious is valuing, in a sense, that which they are reflexively, but that doesn't make the valuing ~agent-relative. Even if we accept the freedom is an agent's perspective itself (which is a very weird phrasing), there is no clear incoherency in an agent reflexively valuing their own perspective/or their own agency -- in relation to their own agent-perspective itself.

If we say that kind of valuing is "illegal", it's not clear to me what kind of "value" any freedom is even left with.

Moreover, there is a trivial sense, in which freedom can be differentiated. For example, one agent can be free to act in different ways, and another agent can be barred (perhaps imprisoned; shackeled). Freedom in concrete instantiation, is then tied to particular agents.

Although, you could make a case if the skeptic valued freedom as such (in that case, the skeptic to be consistent may need to value freedom for all if we assume everyone shares the relevant kind of potential for freedom), but the skeptic may start with valuing "own-freedom" (the specific freedom that exists in the specific relation to oneself) rather than "freedom as such". The reason to move towards valuing freedom as such opposed to the particular capacity of freedom existing in the specific relation to oneself seems to be still missing.

What the painting has is sentimental value, so if the person said that they valued sentimental value, they would have to value the sentimental value of the painting.

Although no one would normally say that they valued sentimental value itself since its agent-relative. Yet freedom, on the other hand, is agency itself. It can be thought of instead as a possession. It doesn't depend on an agent's perspective because that's what freedom is, an agent's perspective. Our freedom is identical to one another as an asset. There is no basis on which it can be differentiated like utility can be (since its also agent-relative).

Thanks for the engagement, let me know if this addresses your concern.

>No one would want to bind their freedom to that specific reason.

By that, do you mean: That specific reason (assuming you're talking about the reddit account name condition) is easy enough to change (by, say, someone hacking one's account or something), and no one is willing to lose their freedom over that (their account being hacked) so it's not a good condition?

Then is the condition just about how easy something is to change? i.e. the value of a person's freedom shouldn't change very easily under realistic circumstances? That does sound like a decent functional definition, it can work.

>If you value reason, then you can't deny that people's freedom are equal, since there is no basis for stating otherwise.

That paragraph is hard to understand, but at the end, do you just mean that qualitative/discrete properties of a person's freedom should be equal? A good argument for that is that there are a continuous spectrum of people and any discrete cut we introduce in that continuity would necessarily be arbitrary.

So on one hand, it's can make sense to restrict people's freedom of action in the sense of giving them varying amounts of income because income is a continuous property, but it doesn't make sense to restrict people's freedom of action by allowing or disallowing specific actions because it's a discrete property and would introduce an arbitrary cut?

i.e. your central argument is basically a topological one? That's an interesting idea and something I could get behind.

Edit: or more specifically, in the case of two continuous properties, any map/dependence would have some arbitrary parameters, so we can't really "reduce" it by making everyone equal. But when you map a continuous space to a discrete space, there's a clear preference there.

-------------------

My own framework isn't really important to this conversation, but to explain some things:

>If morality is just rational interest, subject to game theoretic stability,

No, that's not quite what I mean. Morality has the property of (approximate) stability, but it is not uniquely defined by stability. There are many distinct systems with the property of stability and some of them can be called "morality" while calling others morality would be ridiculous.

>Why not be a free rider if there are no consequences to being so?

In any realistic situation, no one is able to tell ahead of time whether there are consequences or not, and just assuming there are consequences tends to lead to better results than constantly worrying about whether there are consequences.

But yeah, I get it, I tend to treat morality descriptively rather than prescriptively, which is a slightly different question. It's a matter of my interests; I always find the descriptive problem more interesting. Same thing happens when I talk about the problem of induction, it's more interesting to me to talk about when we can induct and not if we can induct.

> If someone were to say that a valued sentimental value, they wouldn’t be acting according to that value if they ripped up that painting. The painting has sentimental value, regardless of who imposes that value onto it.

Can you elaborate what you mean? If someone were to say that they have a sentimental value towards a painting; then yes, given no good overriding reasons, they wouldn't rip the painting because that would go against them valuing the painting.

But that example only demonstrates that the paining has sentimental value for the particular subject who values them.

That doesn't say anything, however, whether the value exists for others as /u/timbgray was concerned about. It may but it doesn't seem like it need to.

In fact, the example makes more sense if we think of the "valuing" as a relational-functional orientation of the subject towards an object that induces certain behaviorial dispositions which allows folk-psychological predictions (like the subject will be resistent to ripping the painting apart, the subject will be upset if the painting is ripped etc.).

Instead you seemed to be making the "value" intrinsic to the painting itself as if values can be "imposed" to objects by subjects, and the values remain imposed even after the death of all subjects. A skeptic can easily resist this move. The same move is also made in the article where value of freedom valuable by some objective standard, thus self-freedom is made as valuable as other-freedom.

I agree that imitating humans is a crapshoot. I think artificial consciousness and general intelligence is possible, even if it be well below the level of humans.

Yeah, maybe an AI could have some form of an ego or emotions. AI already demonstrates creativity. But your point is taken that it does NOT look like human feelings and creativity at this time.

I'm gonna answer in terms of mass automation and machine intelligence instead of consciousness specifically. I think artificial consciousness is already a part of AI to a small extent, and will propel automation.

Whether mass AI automation helps or hurts people will, I think, depend almost entirely on how it is adopted, by whom, when, and for what. That's the story with technology: it's a crapshoot whether a new tech is adopted, whether it's useful or not. For instance, in England, they used gas lanterns instead of electric lanterns for quite a long time because that is what the infrastructure had been built to support, and it costs money to change - despite that elecrric lights take less labor, are safer, leave the air cleaner for the city's people, etc.

Likely, if artificial general intelligence becomes widespread, it'll be controlled by the people who own tech companies. Some of these people are beholden to morals and ethics, some are not. Who specifically ends up with some relevant patent may well shape how this technology develops. If someone who is interested in military and security gets a hold of this sort of tech, expect synthetic super-soldiers at first. If a philanthropist gets it, expect robots to do dangerous or humanitarian work. Those initial uses will probably shape how the technology develops in the future: people usually optimize technology for its determined uses.

Source: my ass and a Tech & Society class I took some years ago.

Why's that? I'm guessing because bio materials have computing properties that we have a very difficult time mimicking (brains in particular)?