When you look around your local world, how do you assign responsibility for the creation of its various features? How do you discern the parts of it that result from your own actions, the parts that result from the actions of another agent very much alike to you, the parts that result from an agent unlike you, and the parts that are not from any agent at all?
The weather today is not created by any agent’s plan. The wind is not from a wind spirit and the thunder is not from a thunder god. But the climate change is the result of many agents like me doing agenty things; burning fuels and making CO2. And the reason that my bedroom is windy is that I turned on the fan; I might not remember doing it today, but nobody else would have come in to do that.
But, to the superstitious, the wind today is made by the government, the climate change is God’s will, and if I don’t remember turning on the fan, it must have been the house-spirits who did it.
When you look around your local world, how do you assign responsibility for the creation of its various features?
You may note that there is no such thing as a fully self-contained “agent”. Any “thing”, including an “agent”, is a convenient container invented by beings with minds like us when we notice a process that produces similar results on each iteration of its loop in time.
Given that, we may notice that every “thing”, including agents, are products of not only their internal churning, but also the churning of the parts outside of themselves. Each small machine, together, makes up one very large machine(the universe).
I think in a way that you can see a truth in the concept of the wind being a wind spirit, and the thunder being a thunder god. They are each distinguishable processes, just as we are, in the larger machine. They may not exhibit Agency in their loops, but they are the same sort of thing that I am, in a different form.
This is all to say, that like the idea of a “thing”, which is a leaky abstraction, “responsibility” is also a leaky abstraction. When I throw a softball, the entire universe throws a softball through me. You, as part of the universe and thus part of an infinite causal chain, are throwing that ball through me, even without the information of the ball being thrown having ever been stored in your own neurons.
When my body throws the ball, you can identify the “thing” that is me as being a recurring part of the universe most closely related to that event.
If that ball however flies into my neighbor’s glass window, I may shift responsibility to my parents for not watching me while playing with softballs outside. They may in turn shift that responsibility to their jobs, which are overbearing and don’t allow them time to spend with their children. Their employers may shift responsibility to the deadlines that need to be met to meet shareholder demands, etc etc going on forever.
We’re all under pressure from the parts around us.
When you look around your local world, how do you assign responsibility for the creation of its various features? How do you discern the parts of it that result from your own actions, the parts that result from the actions of another agent very much alike to you, the parts that result from an agent unlike you, and the parts that are not from any agent at all?
The weather today is not created by any agent’s plan. The wind is not from a wind spirit and the thunder is not from a thunder god. But the climate change is the result of many agents like me doing agenty things; burning fuels and making CO2. And the reason that my bedroom is windy is that I turned on the fan; I might not remember doing it today, but nobody else would have come in to do that.
But, to the superstitious, the wind today is made by the government, the climate change is God’s will, and if I don’t remember turning on the fan, it must have been the house-spirits who did it.
You may note that there is no such thing as a fully self-contained “agent”. Any “thing”, including an “agent”, is a convenient container invented by beings with minds like us when we notice a process that produces similar results on each iteration of its loop in time.
Given that, we may notice that every “thing”, including agents, are products of not only their internal churning, but also the churning of the parts outside of themselves. Each small machine, together, makes up one very large machine(the universe).
I think in a way that you can see a truth in the concept of the wind being a wind spirit, and the thunder being a thunder god. They are each distinguishable processes, just as we are, in the larger machine. They may not exhibit Agency in their loops, but they are the same sort of thing that I am, in a different form.
This is all to say, that like the idea of a “thing”, which is a leaky abstraction, “responsibility” is also a leaky abstraction. When I throw a softball, the entire universe throws a softball through me. You, as part of the universe and thus part of an infinite causal chain, are throwing that ball through me, even without the information of the ball being thrown having ever been stored in your own neurons.
When my body throws the ball, you can identify the “thing” that is me as being a recurring part of the universe most closely related to that event.
If that ball however flies into my neighbor’s glass window, I may shift responsibility to my parents for not watching me while playing with softballs outside. They may in turn shift that responsibility to their jobs, which are overbearing and don’t allow them time to spend with their children. Their employers may shift responsibility to the deadlines that need to be met to meet shareholder demands, etc etc going on forever.
We’re all under pressure from the parts around us.