absolute individual sovereignty: we are solely responsible for our actions. we can choose to observe social conventions, or not. there's nothing stopping anyone from unilaterally taking any action they wish. social systems are only real to the extent that individuals adopt them.
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when I said "any action they wish" I did't mean to include actions which violate the laws of physics.
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in the same way that an apple is merely quarks, sure. but there are many complex layers of emergence between them that render one unintelligible in terms of the other. human social systems are not intelligible in terms of physics.
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Replying to @plantimals @gplewis
The social domain is a subset of the physical. It needs its own languages and models, but not its own epistemology. That's part of the reason why the social sciences are so broken.
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agreed that the social is nested inside the physical. however, the chain of reason is lost when we pass through the human brain. not lost in principle, just in practice. causality doesn't currently help us at this scale, and we have to revert to teleology.
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Replying to @plantimals @gplewis
It seems to me that there is a small subset of the population that thinks about the world in causal patterns, and a large one that thinks in terms of teleology and is ruled by the former.
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this steps wide of the point though. it can be true that the human brain is ultimately ruled by causality, as I believe it is, and also that it is far too complicated for our current knowledge to grasp in a useful way.
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if the causes are beyond our ability to disentangle, then we have to come up with another system for talking about the system, or refrain from talking about it.
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There is a difference between the realization that your causal models are barely good enough to predict your local universe neighborhood, and the idea that truth is a revelation imparted according to one’s moral status.
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