u/Willis_3401_3401

Riot police tend to work as a phalanx. The Phalanx was defeated in real military history using long poles (very long poles, in excess of twenty feet) It’s very difficult to push a group of people around if you can’t close distance on them because they have a bunch of large poles sticking towards you.

My brainstorm is that this could be an effective tactic against Riot police. We’ve already established protest techniques to render rubber bullets and tear gas ineffective, you also prevent the police from being able to close ground on you, call me crazy, the police will be either forced to retreat or use excessive force, neither of which benefits their interest.

This is difficult because it requires coordination and training. Also the poles themselves will be framed as weapons; however if they’re effective im not sure it matters, shields are also considered weapons but it doesn’t matter if they fail to arrest you. It’s not a gun, it’s not “weapon enough” to justify highly excessive force in the public mind. Especially if you don’t put a tip on it.

Basically im trying to think out what would practically happen if a large enough group of people tried to occupy a public space with poles and shields.

Using Ayn Rands philosophical framework, why should I care about a dying child? I’m not asking if I have the freedom to, I’m asking why OUGHT I? In an objective framework if I watched my own child starve to death, is that fine? And if it’s not fine, why isn’t it fine? Based on objective criteria.

Free Will is neither an exemption from causality, nor an illusion. It’s based in structure.

It’s essentially the recognition that values, goals, and models are represented interiorly, not exteriorly; and that the exterior system can represent that collection of processes in a grander, iterative, self referential process that exists both interiorly and exteriorly we call the “self”, which itself is a process that can reshape the constraints of said interior models, goals, and values.

You might otherwise call this view “co-determinism”, the idea that the self is a pro-actively deterministic agent. This behavior occurs in complex systems.

Traditionally, determinism argues for inevitability, the idea that there is only one possible future. This is scientifically problematic because stochastic models currently describe reality better than rigidly deterministic ones (at least with our current knowledge, it’s technically possible this could change in the future).

Traditionally, the problem with the counter argument is that it relies on either “souls” (vague), or “randomness” (eliminative of agency).

The Participatory Agency view rejects rigid determinism, randomness, and “souls”; arguing that freedom is structured, self directed modulation of self constraints.

Freedom emerges when a system represents itself relative to uncertainty, and is forced to evaluate possible outcomes of its own behavior, then act in ways that reshape the following measurement (of self representation relative to uncertainty).

To be clear this is not an escape from determinism, it’s a subsumption of it. This view is adjacent to compatibilism, but is different in that it argues future trajectories are structured (not random), but simultaneously not fixed. Reality, as a complex system, really does have multiple different possible future trajectories that smaller complex systems genuinely have to navigate.

Agency is direction of causality from within. Freedom exists in the structured openness of process. Freedom is an effect of complex systems; even systems more simple than humans display it, including other life, and yes, AI.