Re: Are online Pranks real?
Posted: October 3rd, 2019, 10:50 am
LuckyR, from reading your comments, I think we're still quite far apart as far as understanding each other on this subject of responsibility. Your concept of Black Box is imaginary and is clearly not what I was trying to convey here.LuckyR wrote: ↑October 2nd, 2019, 3:05 pmOK, now we're getting somewhere. If I understand you correctly, you limit responsibility to a single step. I point gun at victim and pull trigger, I am responsible for death. However, if there is a Black Box of "other stuff" in between me and the outcome (the dynamo between your legs and the light, in your example, or the police in the OP) then the original person (prankster) escapes responsibility, which falls on the contents of the Black Box (say, the police).Empiricist-Bruno wrote: ↑October 2nd, 2019, 1:04 pm
Right on. I'll go down that path anywhere with you with pleasure. I feel complimented that you show interest in the source of what it is that I take issue with here.
If there is something wrong with pranking, it will probably have to do with the fact that it is associated with juvenile behavior. But now a days, the grown up behavior is often worse. And sentencing someone for 20 years for a prank looks to me like definitely a bad grown up behavior.
I don't do dirty work in the sense you are suggesting but yes, I have been the subject of a criminal police investigation because someone reached out to them and tried to use them to get me out of his way. What is acceptable behavior to me is what you can tolerate. Through their investigation, the police promptly figured out what was going on and stopped letting that guy use them to harass me. I could still go to the police station today and complain about his attempt to use the police with false accusation on me but no, I don't want to go that route. I do not hate anyone if I don't have to. I am ready to go through something like that again if need be. It is life. I think that trying to get even is a sign of weakness as if you need to hit back because it hurts. But it does not hurt so there is no point in seeking "justice." Being able to laugh at my cowardly aggressor is very heart warming and if he were hurt back, it wouldn't be as fun by my standards.
Finally, your most interesting question from my perspective, about the most critical factor you need to use to assign responsibility is that you need to be held responsible for something that is of the world and not of the imagination.
You are not always responsible for your own thoughts (imagination) but you need to be responsible for what you do with them.
The second part of responsibility would be that you have to power the deeds for which you are being held responsible through energy that you get from your own heart beat that pushes your blood and oxygen to your real cells. So, if you pedal your bike and there is a dynamo on it lighting up your bike light, you are not responsible for the light: the dynamo is the source of its electric energy and is the one responsible for harnessing the electricity of the light ; it is at the heart of the creation of this electric energy. The energy of your pedaling was just used by it. In this scenario, you were just a resource when you pedal and the light appears: you bear no responsibility for it. You can turn the circuit on and off on your dynamo and this you are responsible for because the break or turn on of the connection is achieved by you with your muscles connected to your heart. If you start pedaling a bike that you know is tied to a dynamo that has the connection on, then you know that the light will come on if you pedal the bike but you are still not responsible for that light. You are only responsible for knowing what the dynamo is bound to do by the laws of physics if you start pedaling. And if you know, you are responsible for what you do with this knowledge but it isn't because you know how to create certain situations for which you are not responsible that you are not responsible for having created them. The responsibility for creating situations that you aren't responsible for is something that "society" is still very much grappling with, and this is sort of my attempt to suggest some directions as to how to deal with these awkward situations.
If true, in your world all any enterprising criminal needs to do to ply their trade with impunity is create such a Black Box. Hate your ex-wife? No problem, SWAT them and maybe you'll get lucky and she'll answer the door carrying her cell phone, which might look like a weapon to a cop and she'll get killed for you. Cool. Darn police should have perfect vision, damn them, how irresponsible.
Second, you are starting to ask me interesting questions that touches on my unique understanding of machines, instruments and technology. My understanding isn't that complicated and if you bear with me a few seconds, you should get it easily.
When you say that if you point a gun at victim and pull the trigger, you are responsible for death, we are not in agreement.
I generally fake agreeing with this point because it is possible to view a gun like a knife for instance and if you were to use a knife in this scenario, I would agree that you are responsible. So, the issue is to be clear about why and how a knife and a gun differ and whether guns kill people or only people kill other people as the gun is presumed to be nothing more than another type of instrument.
Well, to make it short, the difference between a gun and a knife, when it comes to damage responsibility, is that the energy in use with the blow from the bullet of the gun is not coming from the heart of the gun person that pulls the trigger; it comes from the gun's powder case that ignites. My conclusion is that here the gun kills and not the person that pulls the trigger. The person who pulls the trigger is a gun enabler.
In the case of the use of the knife to kill another, the blow of the blade is entirely supported by the arm of the person that stabs and that arm can do what it does because the person who stabs has a heart to power the arm and so the responsibility for the stabbing is the person that stabs and not with the knife. It's not a black box concept; it is just a matter of following or tracing back the energy behind the dirty deed to its source to establish the responsibility for the deed. Don't you appreciate the logic of this? I am not pulling rabbits--or black boxes-- out of a hat here.
So, at this point, if you follow my line of thought, you will realize that I don't really hold the police responsible for the gun death in this case but had the police used a knife (or even a police club) , I would have considered them responsible. But with society's appreciation of guns and knives as being nothing more than means to an end and so comparable, I generally go in discussions with the view that everyone --as far as I know-- mistakenly presume to be correct although I categorically deny that it makes any sense to myself. (Thanks for your scrutiny here giving me a chance to elaborate.)
It is just for the purpose of being understood and making a sensible point that I make the superficial claim the police is responsible for this death. The police could have been responsible had they used a knife and my point would have been valid there had that means been used to kill the innocent person.
If you hate your wife, tell her to cross the streets where she risks being run over or give her free tickets to a baseball game where she risks being hit by a foul ball or even better give her tickets to a car racing event. In life, you will always be in a position to force or make people take risks. If you create lots of green house gases you put everyone at risk. Should you be immediately arrested by police then? If calls to police that can be completely mistaken --as happened once at my house-- and then end up in death, then calling the police should be made illegal if I am following your logic and the caller is responsible for what the police do. We are going down the lane of utter non-sense!