Given what we know about brains so far, doesn't it need to be proven, rather than disproven? Surely the burden of proof here is on people claiming a non-biological and non-predictable basis for brain function?
Perhaps someone can reframe that in terms of types of error, and people prone to more serious types of error (road rage) face different consequences. But that gets real complicated real quick.
I dunno. I suspect the majority of the time i'm on autopilot. Alarm goes off, get up, brush teeth, shower. I pretend i'm capable of not doing that. i just don't choose the other way.
Myself, I do not even know what the will is, or what it could possibly be free from. The influence of the universe?
Fear sounds like an implicit assertion of choice, but i think you mean something more subtle.
Let my try to put it another way. People are complex systems that can be influenced. Water tends to flow downhill, we can set up troughs to control the flow of water. The flow is complex, and some water will splash out, but generally the water does follows the system. Likewise, we can set up legal troughs to guide people to the behavior we want. (I know argument by analogy is crappy, i'm just hoping we can agree on this point, and i think we do.) There's a whole other argument about why we would set up those legal rules, but i'd like to set that aside for a moment (if it's a big deal, or fundamental in some way, i'd like to hear your side. I'm not sure i can meaningfully engage that point)
It seems like, punishment would need to be interpreted purely as societal cost. So you tally up the wreckage from the car accident example above, say $25,000 and 2 lives.
I don't really see how we can have both manslaughter and murder, without free will. What extra thing did the angry guy do? He didn't make a choice, because (for the sake of argument) he has no free will. What is the characteristic that makes what he did worse? The cost to society is the same.
> Myself, I do not even know what the will is, or what it could possibly be free from. The influence of the universe?
My personal interpretation (which is probably wrong, but something i'm willing to go back and forth on to come to consensus) Free will the mind having a choice in taking action, rather than the body just doing whatever, and the mind rationalizing it after the fact. Perhaps every action we take is just like a heartbeat. I have no control over that. Perhaps when i hold my breath, i'm not actually choosing to hold my breath, but the complex system that is my body holds it's breath and my mind is claims that it was responsible for that holding of breath. Or typing this comment, or whatever. I don't think there's any way i can know. It feels like my mind is in control, but my mind gets all of its information from (and the software runs on!) my body. my mind seems to control the hardware, but maybe i'm just rationalizing after the fact.
That doesn't require the concept of free will. Because for manslaughter and murder the reasons are different for the death. One is deliberate, one isn't.
> It seems like, punishment would need to be interpreted purely as societal cost. So you tally up the wreckage from the car accident example above, say $25,000 and 2 lives.
You would also want to calculate predicted future costs from that person, mainly from the point of view of harm to other people. If someone like them is likely to kill on average one or more people in the rest of their life then they aren't going to be allowed to interact with general society again. This doesn't need the concept of free will to implement. It only needs a sufficiently sophisticated way of determining of what harm a person like them will likely cause. This is in addition to the harm they have already caused, so there is no reason for someone to become a one time killer. And yes, getting the predictions right may be really tricky, and the way the courts currently sentence people may be a good as or better than trying to predict what people do on average. But the way courts sentence at the moment doesn't require the concept of free will anyway, because people do what they do because of reasons, human reasons, and they can differentiate there.
I don't think so. I think determinism makes "punishment" as a concept, completely nonsensical--you can't punish someone for something they didn't choose to do. I think determinism pushes the focus to rehabilitation rather than punishment, which for many types of crimes (i.e. drug use, computer hacking, nonviolent robbery) is clearly more effective in preventing recidivism (and I'd argue that for crimes where it's not effective, that we haven't really explored rehabilititation because of the widespread belief in free will).
> I don't really see how we can have both manslaughter and murder, without free will. What extra thing did the angry guy do? He didn't make a choice, because (for the sake of argument) he has no free will. What is the characteristic that makes what he did worse? The cost to society is the same.
Agreed. But does this highlight a problem with a deterministic world view, or does it highlight a problem with the distinction between manslaughter and murder?
That is a really interesting point. I'm not convinced, but you've given me a ton to think about.
> There are a lot of people
> who will not commit crime
> only because they fear the
> consequences
Punishments from crime have decreased substantially - nobody gets transported or hung for sheep theft anymore. The world has never been a safer place. States with the death penalty are no safer than those without. Fewer people genuinely believe in a Christian (or whatever) hell than in years past. At the same time, religion has faltered as a source in many people's lives.
I would argue this means that circumstances that lead people in to crime have decreased rather than a suggestion that people are making choices to commit crime but don't based on deterrence. I appreciate there exist counter arguments to this too, but also feel that if we treated crime as a function of situation rather than morality, we'd find ways to decrease it more cheaply.
With no notion of free will, how do we distinguish between manslaughter and murder? When someone dies, the cost to society is the same either way. A consequence of no free will seems to be it's a distinction without difference. I disagree, but it might just be deeply embedded beliefs that are wrong.
I'd argue that the distinction is not indicative of a phenomenon that exists.
I think a much better model would be predictive and preventive rather than punitive--the level assignment to rehabilitation should be based on the probability and severity of recidivism, rather than the level of punishment being based on the severity of the crime.
The distinction still matters without free will, because it's still a predictor of future behavior. A driver who crashes because of a preventable cause shouldn't be allowed to drive until the problem is resolved. If the problem is falling asleep, the solution may be simple (get more sleep?) or hard (narcolepsy), while anger issues are probably pretty difficult to provably solve.
Belief in free will has some seriously harmful effects on the way we deal with these situations. Most notably, it's the basis for a focus on punishment rather than rehabilitation. Deterrents don't work, largely because they don't fix the causes for bad behavior. Rehabilitation is the only sensible approach if you don't believe in free will, whereas punishment makes a bit more sense if you believe that people have free will.
> Perhaps someone can reframe that in terms of types of error, and people prone to more serious types of error (road rage) face different consequences. But that gets real complicated real quick.
This is fundamentally a free-will-based way of seeing the problem. "Consequences" are completely irrelevant in a deterministic worldview unless you can prove that they act as a deterrent (that is, that they are part of the cause). Since consequences are provably not significant deterrents for many crimes, I don't think that works.
Your argument basically that "this idea of punishment/consequences (which only makes sense in a free-will-based ideology) doesn't work in a deterministic ideology, and punishment/consequences are good in my free-will-based ideology, therefore deterministic ideologies are wrong". But you have to hold a free-will-based ideology for the preconditions of your argument to make sense.
Very insightful. Thank you.
I guess you could argue that we generally assume a deterministic model exists and try to find it, but I hadn't considered that before.
> I don't see how
> That means that a Turing Machine would be able to
> produce them
> the scientific community is very opposed to talking
> about it
Further, my big problem is with people trying to ignore the problem completely by claiming that there is no Hard Problem or even suggesting that consciousness is not real. It's a total head-in-the-sand position to take but it's the dominant stance.
How do you know there is a qualitative difference?
Yes. What's not to see? I think appealing to something other than Turing machines shows a lack of imagination; it takes a lot of thought to even scratch the surface of how profound Turing machines are.
> I'm not suggesting anything supernatural. I'm suggesting that there's possibly physical phenomenon that do not fit our current materialist model.
Absolutely. Sure, there are of course physical phenomenon that do not fit our current materialist model.
Let's say we discover those additional phenomenon. Ultimately, we'd want to build a machine to model that phenomenon. Perhaps encode a model of that phenomenon in software. Once that happens, scribbling numbers on a piece of paper indeed could give rise to a conscious being.
If it's some system that can't be covered by scientific understanding, isn't that what supernatural means? It's either some internally consistent (but possibly very complicated) set of rules, or it's supernatural.
Rather than 'possessing' an infinite tape and infinite time, I prefer to think of turing machines as always being allowed to perform one more step, and always being allowed to use one more tape cell. I find this characterisation of time quite intuitive as-is, whilst the tape can be made intuitive by imagining tape factories on each end, which produce more cells whenever the read/write head gets close.
In fact, such "tape factories" have been used to build universal turing machines in the game of life http://rendell-attic.org/gol/fullutm/index.htm
Yes. I find that no less plausible than a warm sack of meat giving rise to a conscious being.
Not without input data, they couldn't. You can produce a model, but unless you collect data to validate your model against, you're just speculating in a void.
> There's something fundamental that we don't understand and the scientific community is very opposed to talking about it, dismissing any and all speculation as quackery.
We're talking about it right now, and I haven't heard anyone opposed to talking about it.
However, I'll fully dismiss opinions as quackery if they clearly misrepresent the facts, i.e. claims that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle or Bell's Inequalities prove free will are quackery. This isn't because the ideas are taboo or because I'm opposed to talking about them, it's because they're misrepresentations or misunderstandings of facts which are clearly established.
In my experience, when people claim that scientists are opposed to talking about their hypothesis, it's because their hypothesis has been thoroughly and concretely disproven.