kind of surprised that, for as much as cohost wants to eradicate/discourage "the cohost global feed" tags, there is no sort of actual advisory against using it

even as simple as "using 'the cohost global feed' tags is discouraged. instead of using 'the cohost global feed (dogs)', consider using just 'dogs'."

Back in college, during my days studying philosophy, I had a professor whose personal area of interest involved the concept of Radical Personal Responsibility - the idea that we are 100% responsible for everything we see, think, feel, the choices we make, and notably, even the things that happen to us. (Most people, when first encountering this notion, immediately think, "Surely not..." Yes. It means even that. In this school of thought, if it happened to you, it was your fault.) The concept is that by taking personal responsibility for everything you've ever experienced, you take back control of how you respond. You shift your perspective from one of being a victim of fate, at the mercy of the winds of fortune, to a perspective where you have and have always had choices and control. We didn't call it Radical Personal Responsibility then, of course, but as a concept, it has stuck with me through the years.

Mostly because I completely disagree, and lately it's become clearer to me why.

It is logical, I suppose, that if I believe I have free will in my current moment of existence, and I believe that I will have free will in the future, then I probably had free will at all moments in my past. That means that at any point in my past, I had choices and agency at my disposal. Logically, I had choices the day some "bad thing" happened, any of which could possibly have resulted in the "bad thing" not happening. Is it logical then, that I bear at least some responsibility for the occurrence of the bad thing? Or complete responsibility?

The flaw in the argument for me, I think, is an increasing understanding of how much my free will is influenced by my existence as... well, a living creature. An animal. A human being is not a machine that reasons at all times in a world of unlimited possibilities - at any given moment, we are constrained by the reality of being a finite living creature whose decisions are highly influenced by our biological state. We might be hungry. We might be tired. We might have hormone fluctuations that day. We are not a simple state machine where identical inputs will produce identical outputs at the macro level - we are a complex emergent phenomenon of ultimately chaotic processes that recede into a fractal infinity of possible states, none of which are fully under our control despite the overwhelming illusion that we alone pilot ourselves through decisions.

As far as we know, sentient thought has never emerged in anything but such a creature with its myriad potential variables. Thoughts and the experience of free will, logically, are inseparable from the experience of being a large squishy bag of water and genetic material hurtling through space on the film-thin surface of a rock.

How can I bear responsibility for every choice I've made, when those choices are and were ultimately made under the influence of conditions far beyond my control?

the opposite of a maze is a field, and yet we plant maize in fields