To suppose that a universe devoid of consciousness can be molded so as to make consciousness arise, is to inject consciousness from outside the universe. — leo

This assumes consciousness is something fundamentally different that the stuff the rest of the universe is made of.

Consider this, a universe devoid of stars and planets gave rise to stars and planets, even though stars and planets weren't injected from outside of the universe. This doesn't seem like it's a problem in this case... why would consciousness be any different?

This is going to be about my interpretation of the Tao, and not necessarily what is or was meant with it traditionally…. and I’m coming at this from a predominately western physicalist/naturalist perspective, so be warned!

The Tao de Jing is meant to be a book about how to live life as a human being. Therefore I want to look what the concepts do for us humans, what they seeks to convey in terms of living our lives… their utility in short.

The book starts with the famous phrases about the Tao, translated as the way, that cannot be named. Far more than telling us something about the Tao, I think this seeks to tell us something about that human thing we do, namely about naming things.

We use language to conceptualize certain aspects of the world we experience all around us. The thing to note here about concepts is that they are necessarily partial, a-temporal and idealized. They are partial because they delignate some part about the world, as opposed to the whole. They are a-temporal because concepts don’t change with time, or at least don’t have to if we don’t want them to. And they are idealized or abstracted because we turn the particulars we experience into universals which we can use and re-use for thinking and communicating about the world.

The concept of Tao is there to offset it to the ‘mere’ ideas we have about the world, to put them into their proper perspective and valuation. You can think about the Tao, I think, as the whole physical universe past, present and future, which in cosmological terms flows from a orderly low entropy state to an ultimately disorderly high entropy state. With ideas we can at best hope to capture some tiny parts of that, and only in an idealized and a-temporal way. So, this is about recognizing the primacy of the physical universe over ideas we have about it.

In short, we should realize that the Tao is the source, and ideas only a clumsy tool we use to try to capture some of that. If you recognize this general principle of valuation, and see a general lack of recognition in other people, then you can sort of work out the ramifications this has for all sorts of things we try to do with ideas, like personal ambitions and plans, morality, law, religion and generally the societies we built.

One thing I want to try to tackle is the whole inward looking, ‘intuitive’ part of the Tao that is supposedly in us. At first glance this maybe seems hard to reconcile with the principle of primacy of the physical over the ideal. To me it makes sense if you think about it in terms of a re-evaluation of conscious thinking versus intuitions and instincts. From an evolutionary perspective, we evolved millions of years before conscious thinking finally became a thing. Somewhat blinded by an inflated sense of our monkey selves we came to see it, especially in the west, as the crowing jewel of evolution (or God’s creation) and our biggest asset. Although it certainly has it’s uses, especially for organizing into bigger groups, there’s a lot of work being done under the hood by our brain modeling the world unconsciously and generating instincts, emotions and intuitions. So again, this seems like a correction to the over-valuation of conscious thinking.

To tie this back to the Tao, in evolutionary terms the selecting principle for all of these unconscious processes was the environment. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they are tuned to the world and give us something that is useful, if our goal is to to live in harmony with this world. We literally sprung out of and are still part of the world… of the Tao. So doubting is fine and all, it makes for good philosophers afterall… but also trust yourself a little.

Edit: I messed up in tying to edit my previous post, can be deleted.

For my part, I believe the only rights we have are those recognized by the law, that is to say, legal rights. Certainly those are the only rights which are enforceable. Legal rights, though sometimes conceived of as possessory, in fact result from restrictions imposed particularly on governmental power. We have no right of free speech, for example, in the law. We have the First Amendment, though, which prohibits the government from restricting free speech. Legal rights therefore often exist purely because the law prohibits certain conduct by others. I can speak freely in the sense that the government is unable to prevent me from doing so. — Ciceronianus the White

If - and maybe that's a big if - you view morality as social contractarian, then rights as you describe here could make sense in morality too.... i.e. as a society we all agree to refrain from certain harmful behaviors. So in a social contract sense, morality would be akin to prohibiting certain conduct by others, and yourself.

In other words, we have the right to be wrong, bad, immoral as long as we don't infringe directly on the rights of others. This is an ethics which sanctions, if it doesn't actually encourage, the disregard of the suffering of others. — Ciceronianus the White

Not all behavior need be a matter of ethics it seems to me, or law for that matter. It's not because you are not ethically obliged to alleviate the suffering of others, that you can't choice to do so.

For law at least it makes sense, if only for practical reasons, not to legislate every little detail of how we should act.... even if you think behavior could be better in some ways. It seems to me that morality are also rules regulating behavior, and so they need some appropriate level of abstraction and generality, which makes it difficult to have them do to much... because the world is messy and changing.

Maybe the idea that morality is predominately about alleviating the suffering of others is a relatively new development in ethics? I'm not sure.

Edit: I'm not sure what my point exactly was... It wasn't very clear in any case.

Maybe it was this. Assuming not everything we do is and needs to be directed by ethics or morality, i.e. we just do stuff for whatever reason, love, friendship, greed, lust, ambition etc.. If you find yourself in this kind of world and want to better human behaviour, maybe it makes sense that ethics ends up being rules which restrict only certain types of harmfull behaviour.

Edit 2: And to answer more on topic, we get rights out of the social contract, which are the flip-side of the obligation we have from it.

I agreed with you. It also think some kind of perspective-taking is baked into the concept of emergence. That's not to say there not something there regardless of our perception of it which we capture with the concept. Just that it doesn't make sense to try to look at it completely divorced from any perspective... because the concept is invented so that we - who necessarily view things from a certain perspective - could make sense of the world.

Why try following the stoic way though? Epictetus was a slave, and let's just say it shines through in his philosophy.

If you have no choice, which is the case for some suffering, then sure, try the stoic way. But in this case, you have two people, the behaviour of one of which is treated as an unchangeable law of nature and the other one is expected to adapt to it like water. Does that seem like a fair and balanced relation to you?

If his or her behaviour is out of line, and you suffer from it, call him or her out on it. If he or she doesn't want or can change his or her behaviour, talk to the others and see if you can get him or her out of the house.

Do not just adapt to unreasonable behaviour from others, you're setting a precedent for the rest of your life.

It implies - me think - a capacity for small emerging events to build up to something bigger, hence emergence needs to be somewhat cumulative and self-sustaining over long periods of time. — Olivier5

Ok, I wouldn't limit emergence to that just yet... but fair enough.

Yeah, probably better to start a new thread. I've only skimmed to first few pages to see if I would commit to reading it.

When we talk about emergence, aren't we talking about something more general than only emergent forms?

From the earlier posted Chalmers definition :

"If we were pressed to give a definition of emergence, we could say that a property is emergent if it is a novel property of a system or an entity that arises when that system or entity has reached a certain level of complexity and that, even though it exists only insofar as the system or entity exists, it is distinct from the properties of the parts of the system from which it emerges."

From wiki :

"In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors which emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole."

I feel like something need not necessarily be self-sustaining to be called emergent. Or put another way self-sustaining emergent forms seem only a subset of emergence in general, an important subset no doubt, as life would fall under that, but not all emergence.

I don't disagree. But rather than reasons or arguments, I think the appeal is predominatly an aesthetic of extreme tribalism, which speaks not necessarily to our rational faculties, but to instincts we have from living in pre-agrarian societies where the group was literally everything.

Things go bad - as in Germany and Italy before the rise of fascism - and peoples instincts tells them that they need to tighten up the social order so that the group can function more as a unit to increase chances of survival.

So what I think would be the most effective way of combatting the idea, is to make things better.

First thing I wonder is: do physical sciences not deal with absence? Why is a vacuum not a case of an influential absence? — frank

Vacuum is never really nothing right? There's always the vacuum-energy and fluctuations, and so there is something "physical" going on which is why I suspect (I'm only a few page far) it wouldn't qualify as absence like he wants to use it.

Yeah I've started reading the intro of the book too. Like Schopenhauer1, I not entirely sure I'll buy into it, but it looks interesting. And I remember seeing the author on some discussion panel a while back, and he looked like he knew what he was talking about, at least... so i'm willing to give it a try.

I'd be willing to join. And I can get an e-version of book too.

Problem is i'm not so sure there is something like strong emergence. From what i've gathered, part of the problem here is i'm no scientist, at least a good part of them doesn't believe in strong emergence. It's seems part of the controversy, so I don't know if we should just assume it.

I believe in some circles, the term "view from nowhere" and "view from everywhere" is discussed. Now discuss haha. — schopenhauer1

Haha, I scrambled my brain trying to think about this.

No. Our limits of cognition are irrelevant to the world of emergence.
Levels are there whether we exist or not. There were no atoms before we discovered them? Before Kant there was no universe outside the Milky Way? — magritte

Alright, what is a level disconnected from our cognition and use? What do you exactly mean with the word 'to exist' entirely separated from any kind of viewer?

I'm also not saying nothing exists before we discovered it, i'm saying our descriptions and the languages we use (which includes words like exist) are (partly) influenced by us and our needs.

At what epistemic level do tornados exist? — schopenhauer1

Everything we know about emergence happens within the epistemic framework of a "viewer". Without the viewer, what is it from something to move from one level to another? — schopenhauer1

I'm not sure what is meant by something moving from one level to another. but I think I agree that emergence implies a viewer, because it seems like it's a consequence of limits of our cognition.

If we were omniscient, with unlimited cognitive powers, there doesn't seem to be a reason why we would use higher level emergent descriptions. Everything in a fluid could in theory be described in terms of particles moving (and probably more complete), we just prefer using fluid dynamics because it is to complex 'for us' to describe it in terms of moving particles.

People may not like where this is going, but I think words like "real", "reality", "to exist" all necessarily have some link to what kind of beings we are, to how we view the world and try to understand it. You get into trouble quickly if you think we are capturing something like a thing-in-itself with our descriptions.

So, let's just say tornados exist [period].... because they are relevant to us.

Stoicism is more going the therapeutic/acceptance route, which can probably work to some extend I suppose.

I'd suggest you first look for a possible source of that anger, and see if you can do something about that.

Anger is often a result of lack of control, powerlessness over certain circumstances in your life... Maybe if you can do something about that, and direct some of that anger to the source of the problem, it will become less of a problem.

Not all anger is bad, it can be motivating if you manage to direct it in a constructive direction.

So to answer your question, you're an anarchist and don't believe in legitimacy right? Well I don't think they ever really deserve it either... they stay in power because of fear mostly and secondly because of some people having vested interests in the powerstructure .

I was just trying to answer your post and it had me think of the last speech of Nicolae Ceausescu where people finally started booing him, eventhough he had lost majority support by a lot probably years before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWIbCtz_Xwk

So yes why do we let them? Public opinion is a funny thing, it can already be enough that people merely think other people believe in the powers that be, eventhough nobody really does.

That's an answer to why we are required, not why we should be. — Pfhorrest

I don't think you should in a moral sense... but there likely will be consequences, so that does seem like an answer to the question of compulsory participation, i.e. because they can make you do it.

There are all kinds of specific reasons for specific structures -- again, in the real world. It's up to us to ask if we accept them or not. — Xtrix

My point is you or I do not know what the real reasons are. Doesn't it seems strange to you to judge something you only have partial knowledge about at best?

The only one talking about a "zero-option" is you. — Xtrix

No you did, in asking for a justification for something to exist. Things exist first, without justification, like governments and rulers, oppressing people... and then we try to make things better. I think you can only make a good evaluation of organisations if you take into account where they come from, what progress has already been made, what can reasonably be expected given that history etc etc...

That was my point, that you seemed to advocate some kind of flat a-historical evaluation via the principles set out in the OP. If that's not what you are advocating, than my point is moot and I apologize for the trouble.

When you tell someone else that they must do (or think) something, it absolutely does call for justification. Xtrix isn’t saying that people need justification for voluntarily participating in the social structures we have, but that the compulsive participation in them needs justification.

E.g. why shouldn’t I just be allowed to keep living where I live unless I pay someone to “let” me? Why should they get to decide that? Not why I should have the permission to pay them to let me, but why I should be obligated to do so. — Pfhorrest

Because they have the power and you have not, is the short of it.

Why should they let you live there if they could just take your property?

History has been one long struggle to secure more rights for people.

If we are to make abstraction of all of history and pretend like there is a world in which power relations between people don't exist, then I don't think we will get anywhere.

There is no zero-option, I don't know why this is so hard to understand.

Let's look to the political and economic structure of our society. Let's look to the structures of our workplaces, where we, in the real world, work for a salary or a wage. Then let's ask if these structures should remain in place or not. If we find that they have no real justification for existing, then we should discuss alternatives. — Xtrix

See I'd like to have this conversation, but I think you are asking the wrong question... and I just can't get past that because i think it skews the dialogue. I think you are making the philosophers mistake (also not meant as an insult btw) that everything can and needs to be justified. I don't think it works like that because any given culture is an ongoing dialogue where things get decided for various reasons over large periods of time, by a lot of different people. Maybe it's a political compromise that an organisation is the way it is, maybe there are practical reasons that aren't readily visible to someone viewing it from the outside, maybe there are reasons long forgotten... or maybe there is indeed no apparent reason at all. In any case, no one persons can possibly know the full reason for how the way things are... and so it's not really a fair question.

I don't think you can really judge these things outside of their particular socio-political context, nor will thinking about or discussing alternatives yield good results without extensively trying them out and seeing what works in practice.

If we take goverment as an example to illustrate the point, the question there is I think not whether or not there is justification to exist or not, or whether or not it should be overthrown because it is oppressive or lacks legitimacy... I think it will exist no matter what, with or without legitimization, and will always be oppressive to some extend. The question for me is rather, and this is more of a republican notion, how can we minimize the oppression? There is no non-existing zero-option which it can be compared to.

So yeah, I don't know how to argue this point any better, it just seems obvious to me that this is not the way to be approaching these issues.

You've read all my posts on that topic, and still don't understand anything I've said. No worries. — Hippyhead

Why do you think I don't understand? I think I do, but maybe I don't... trying to be humble here ;-).

I think there could be many reasonable solutions for the particular problems we face, but it takes questioning and working together to discover and implement them. The concept of "legitimacy" you're hung up on is a simple one: asking if this power structure is a legitimate one says is it justified, is it earned, are the decisions being made and actions being undertaken rational ones? etc. If you can justify to someone why you make a decision or take an action, then do so. Orders should be questioned. If you can't, you shouldn't be in power, take that action, etc. Who's the judge and jury? The people are -- namely the people who have to abide by the judgments and decisions of another. The ones who take the orders from above should question not only the orders, but why it is we're listening to this person (or these people) in the first place. Call it whatever you like, but to say you don't think it "does anything" is pretty strange. You do it all the time. Or should, anyway, — Xtrix

Ok, let me specify that I don't think it does anything philosophically. I don't think you get there by referring back to the concept of justification either. It's not as if there is agreement on what counts as proper justification. 'The people' is an abstraction, there's no such thing. Individual people object to it because they don't like being subject to power or don't like a particular decision for whatever reason. And they can be successful if they can convince enough other people. It's a form of politics in the end. And yes, if I do it, I do it for those same reasons.... if i'm being honest with myself.

The ones who take the orders from above should question not only the orders, but why it is we're listening to this person (or these people) in the first place. — Xtrix

I just want to add that this is a very modern and recent notion, and not something that really plays out like you might think in practice, even today. Very rarely do orders get questioned. In fact I would say in most organisations it is tacitly understood that this is precisely something you do not do.... even if they may pay lip-service to the idea outwardly. And I think the reason for this is a very straightforward one. An organisation where everybody is some kind of philosopher that questions everything all the time (and so also has to be informed enough to be able to judge) just doesn't work as well.

When will science end? When will the scientists hold a news conference to announce they've finished their work? Thousands of years? Never?

Even in the realm of what we can know, very long way to go yet I suspect.

And then there's all the stuff beyond what we are capable of knowing. — Hippyhead

Hey Hippy, contrary to what you'd probably rather hear, this was not meant to discourage trying to know. Just that we probably should have some humility when it comes to our ability to know things for certain... and so that we should always remain engaged with the world around us, precisely because we can't know everything once and for all.

And I may add to that, if that could please you, that it probably also wouldn't be a bad thing to have some humility when it comes to our ability to control the effects of our inventions.

A solution for what? Where do I say I think that? If I had a magic, general solution, I assure you I would have given it by now. — Xtrix

In conclusion, if one accepts the principles mentioned above and uses them as guides for interpreting our current situation, one cannot help but wonder if we're long overdue for the overthrowing of plutocracy and the system which sustains it: capitalism. The more we clearly see the problem, the better we can see the solution, formulate appropriate goals towards a solution, and generate corresponding local, individual and collective actions to this end. — Xtrix

I was under the impression that you were advocating overthrowing plutocracy because of it's lack of legitimacy.... and so the solution was some sort of legitimate power.

If you were to say I want to overthrow plutocracy because I don't like it, or because it's bad for me and a lot of people, I'd be fine with that. I just don't think the concept of legitimacy does anything really.

Says who? This is just a lack of imagination, really. It's been beaten out of people's heads for years, but there are plenty of ways to organize people. Take corporations. There's no reason why it has to be a top-down, un-democratic structure. But people don't even consider questioning that because an alternative is unimaginable. But alternatives do indeed exist. Take a look at the Spanish Revolution. — Xtrix

I don't think this is a matter of lack of imagination. There are plenty of alternatives in imagination. I think this is an empirical question. And i've read about it, and have actually seen it happen time and again, no matter what intentions one may have initially, it more or less ends up in the same place.

In that case, go to sleep. — Xtrix

No, you misunderstand. In that case, take power yourself... which is the opposite of going to sleep. The thing I take issue with is that you think there is a solution, not the fact that you question legitimacy.

In conclusion, if one accepts the principles mentioned above and uses them as guides for interpreting our current situation, one cannot help but wonder if we're long overdue for the overthrowing of plutocracy and the system which sustains it: capitalism. The more we clearly see the problem, the better we can see the solution, formulate appropriate goals towards a solution, and generate corresponding local, individual and collective actions to this end. — Xtrix

The things is, there never has been a "legitimate" legitimatization. It's not as if Gods or lineage where anything other than a story some people told to give their rule legitimacy.

To put it bluntly, the truth is that ultimately there never has been another legitimisation than holding power. One has the mandate of heaven, until one has not... which is essentially the same as saying one can be in power, until one loses that power.

Our current situation isn't any different from times past. Those in power want to keep it and tell stories to that that effect, and those that don't believe those stories want the ones in power gone because.... well, they want some of that power too.

Questioning legitimacy is fine and all, because there really is no reason to just accept any of it, but i'm not sure what kind of 'solution' you expect? If we ever would manage to overthrow the current rulers you will invariably get a new class of rulers, which will effectively only be legitimized by the fact that they managed to overthrow the previous rules, by power in short... rinse repeat.

If we are well aware of the dangers, why do we continue down the same path as fast as we possibly can? What is pragmatic about largely ignoring thousands of hydrogen bombs aimed down our own throats? Seems like the definition of insanity to me. — Hippyhead

Like I said, because it follows market and geopolitical logic. Countries and large companies need to invest into this because otherwise the become economically irrelevant. And scientist need to go where the money is, otherwise they are out of a job...

If I had to bet money on this right now I would lay my bet on the notion that we are trying to build a
highly globalized technological civilization for the first time, and getting such huge things right on the first try is typically unlikely. If one takes a long enough view, everything may work out in the end. — Hippyhead

Yeah agreed, unfortunately five years term democracies typically are not very conductive to taking a long view on things.

I hear you. Not arguing with that, except the "if it happens" part. Doing anything about this may very well be impossible, agreed. But we are great philosophers :-), so we're supposed to try. — Hippyhead

As a great philosopher I have tried :-). I identified the source of the problem in geopolitical and market dynamics, which surpas the national level at which things usually get deciced. Therefor you need to have a dialogue and agreements on it at an international level. Not that this will be easy, but that's where you need to look for a solution I think.

That said, I find this interesting largely because it may illustrate how the group consensus, even that of the very brightest and most highly educated people, could be horribly wrong. — Hippyhead

Sure some may have it wrong, but most are probably well aware of the dangers... and take a pragmatic attitude on it :

What I'm ignorant of is the pointlessness of worrying about things which are probably inevitable and beyond anyone's control. — Hippyhead

It's not one or even a group of scientists driving this process. It's countries locked in geopolitical struggles and companies in market struggles with eachother who pump huge amounts of money in these things... the rest follows. This is beyond anyone's control and probably inevitable... if it happens ;-).

I am not necessarily referring to the mind-body problem, my question could have been ''can we understand everything understandable?''. Some would say no. It is like an ant can't understand maths, we would be like an ant in comparison with another species, that species would look like a worm compared to a more evolved one, and so on. How plausible is that, why/not? — Eugen

The reason the ant analogy doesn't really work is because we have language and so can build up knowledge and pass it on to next generations. Some things that would have seem unfathomable to understand two thousand years ago, a teenager today could understand in a couple of hours/days. Ants never surpass their biology in the same way.

There doesn't seem to be a clear intellectual limit to understanding things, just that understanding new things requires more effort progressively. There are other limits than intellectual limits though, like the fact that we can only access the world via our senses.

9) If the logical outcome is eventual chaos, what would be the point of developing more new knowledge, given that it would likely be swept away in that chaos? — Hippyhead

The point is what you state in 2), it give us more control over our environment.

We don't know with any kind of certainty that the logical outcome is eventual chaos.

Even if that would be the eventual outcome of "the process of knowledge accumulation", knowledge is not a singular thing. Some types may be dangerous, some not so much etc... I feel drawing conclusions at this kind of high level of abstraction is kind of meaningless.

And even if we were to assume that such a general conclusion can be meaningful, it doesn't follow that this should be the only perspective a human being living here and now should take. The universe will eventually end in extreme chaos because of entropy regardless of what we do, that doesn't mean that nothing we do now has any point. Meaning shouldn't necessarily be measured by ultimate outcomes only.

No probably not.

When you are young you have a lot of energy, and little experience of how the world works. Adding to that you are, just by virtue of not having had a lot of time to build up a something in the world, usually not in a situation where you stand to lose much... and so among the youth the conditions are right for developing a culture that wants to change things.

Maybe, but by saying "we can't not", I was actually aiming to be much broader than that. In the context of this discussion, I think it extends out to simply that we make assumptions about how changes we make to the environment affect the behaviour of others. The very premise of criminal punishment is just such an assumption - that an environment in which criminals are punished will alter the behavior of would-be criminals to deter them from such activities.

All psychology is, when it gets involved, is a more formalised and better tested collection of these assumptions. Not perhaps the strength with which Geologists can tell us the earth is round, but significantly better (I hope) than whatever some random judge happens to reckon. — Isaac

I want to say I certainly applaud these efforts, just to make that clear.

So when I say "X's free choice was constrained by his circumstances such that he should not be punished for his actions to the same extent as someone less constrained" I'm not really saying anything about morality. I think the moral intuition is already assumed (that someone with less free-choice is more deserving of leniency - think gun-to-the-head). I'm just making the case about the existence and strength of such constraints. — Isaac

But, and this is maybe more nitpicking than anything else, I don't think the gun-to-head analogy works here. If it were a matter of free choice that would have to lead to acquittal it seems to me, and not leniency which already implies some guilt... which leads me back to my initial intuition that leniency is not so much a matter of free choice.

I could give other examples, like age-exemptions to responsibility, which also don't necessarily align with the self/non-self distinction and free choice.... but seem to be more a matter of an assumed lack of knowledge of the consequences etc.

There are a lot of different moral intuitions at play here, which you probably don't disagree with.... I guess my qualms are not so much with the methods of testing, but more with these moral intuitions themselves, or rather with the lack of clarity of which moral intuitions are applicable when.

So assessing the origin of constraints on choice as self/non-self is just run-of-the-mill practice. It may be shaky, but we're going to do it anyway (we can't not) so we either do it with some attempt at scientific-style objectivity, or we just make it up. — Isaac

Maybe this question is born out of ignorance, but what is the attempt at scientific-style objectivity here?

I wonder if "we can't not" because we have some kind of a priori moral intuition that this is the right way to judge these matters... or if this moral intuition comes from our notions of identity and agency. If it's the former, maybe there is some merit to just calling it what it is, a moral intuition, and not to try to fabricate some theoretical post hoc justification.

To me the distinction of self/non-self seems problematic as a basis for attributing responsibility because identity is such a fluid concept. Maybe it works in this case, but it seems like we would run into trouble quite quickly if we were to try to apply it consistently across the board... I could be wrong.

I think my word choice has caused some confusion. I introduced the notion of preferred simply to be clear that there aren't any objective measures of selfhood we can use to distinguish external (non-self) constraints on choice from internal ones (like preference). In some cases it will be obvious (a gun to the head is obviously an external constraint) but in some cases we have to take a clients subjective judgment into account (anything from feeling depressed without cause to actually hearing voices which do not feel part of oneself).

So one's environment creates external constraints in obviously external ways, but also in ways which are subjectively external - mental processes which are not identified with the self, which one would prefer not to have, but are present nonetheless. — Isaac

Thx for the clarification, this makes more sense... though I'm still left wondering why identification with self would be taken as a criterium for being lenient in court, or for attributing responsibility more generally.

It's not that I can't see some arc or rationale behind it, in the sense that the concept of responsibility seems to be tied to some agency necessarily. And so if something can be said to not be caused by the self, the agency is lacking for attributing responsibility... But this all seems build on very shaky grounds, because there is no objective measure for selfhood as you said... but more than that, identity is also ever changing and not entirely disconnected from how the world will react to certain presentations of self.

I mean, it seems one could expect an accused to present himself in court as someone who didn't want to do what he is accused of, and indeed even come to believe and convince himself that he didn't want to do it, after he realizes what the consequences are.

That's the point. Given a full notion of free-choice we would not be able to make such an argument as, upbringing or not, the person was completely free to choose their behaviour and so can be held entirely responsible for it. — Isaac

But my point is that I don't see on what basis you are going make that argument even if we don't assume a full notion of free-choice. What is the argument then? Some parts of our upbringing contribute to our preferred choice, and some parts that seems to influence our choices (in a bad way in this case) can be considered outside of our preferred choice because ...? What does 'preferred' mean?

I'm sometimes required to help plead for judicial leniency on the grounds of a person's upbringing or environment. The basis for such action is that somewhere in this muddle we (those involved at the time) can agree that such influences were outside of the person's preferred choices. — Isaac

The basis for such an action seem more like mercy to me... i.e. the poor fellow couldn't help but turn out that way given his upbringing and has it already bad enough as it is without the extra punishment.

Considering upbringing as something outside of one's preferred choices seems like a strange notion given that, I would assume, one's upbringing is always to some extend part of what determines one's will or preferred choices.