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I don't see how personal responsibility wouldn't be possible without free will.

Society decides the consequences for wrongdoing (and positive reinforcement). Free will or not an entity is affected by the consequences of ones action (if it is able to realize those consequences).

The desire to live in a society where people don't solely act in their own interests is by itself a driving force (not necessarily fueled by free will). There are other species that more or less do only act in their own interest but humans would not have survived if we did, our strength comes from collaboration.

Even our own, well behaved, developed software "understand" the concept of consequences and personal responsibility - because we program in that behavior. Just as evolution has programmed us not to be destructive (with varying success).

>I don't see how personal responsibility wouldn't be possible without free will.

Responsibility is not about punishment or lack thereof. That is just a mechanism to encourage responsibility, not its manifestation.

Responsibility is about being able to do X or Y and choosing right.

A rock is not considered responsible because we don't think it has free will. If a rock falls on one's head and kills them, that's it. We don't jail it.

In most jurisdictions we don't even hold people that are mad as responsible for something they committed for the same reason (the US is kind of Old Testament backwater legally so this might be different there). They don't go to jail etc.

>Society decides the consequences for wrongdoing (and positive reinforcement). Free will or not an entity is affected by the consequences of ones action (if it is able to realize those consequences).

Without free will there is no "decides".

Everything is pre-decided.

It doesn't even matter if one is guilty or not -- the decision to jail them or not is already made before they committed anything and is independent of their actions.

> In most jurisdictions we don't even hold people that are mad as responsible for something they committed for the same reason (the US is kind of Old Testament backwater legally so this might be different there). They don't go to jail etc.

It depends on your viewpoint, but the reason for why they don't go to jail etc. is because it doesn't match the intent with jail. Jail is meant as a deterrence as well as shielding the society. If it doesn't work as a deterrence and we have better ways to shield the society from it happening again (which is "easy" to argue in regards to a mad person) then it doesn't make sense to force it upon people where it will do more harm than good (we still do it do a large extent, but society also benefits from its inhabitants believing that the system is fair and that is a difficult balance).

> Without free will there is no "decides".

This also depends on your viewpoint. A computer takes tons of decisions but they are all based on a given set of inputs, as will society (regardless of whether free will exist or not).

A computer doesn't take any "free will" decision of its own -- everything is determined at the time the program is written/loaded.

"Doing X if Y" is not a free will decision if it's already encoded. In a sense it's not a decision at all. When X, the computer will do Y, period.

(And this also applies if we add some stohastic elements in the mix).

> everything is determined at the time the program is written/loaded

Computer can measure random event and do something basing on that.

> is not a free will decision if it's already encoded

Most probably so is our "free will".

A computer doesn't take any "free will" decisions. But it does make decisions, based on rules that the programmer gave it. Everything about the program is determined, but the inputs to the program is not necessarily deterministic and is also completely orthogonal to free will. We can still have true random events, that doesn't imply that free will exist.

The actions of a computer making decisions based on a noisy, nondeterministic source, can not be predicted.

From your previous post: It doesn't even matter if one is guilty or not -- the decision to jail them or not is already made before they committed anything and is independent of their actions.

The decision to jail them depends on whether they are found guilty. Whether they are found guilty depends on the information available at that time. What information is available is not deterministic even in a world lacking free will.

>I don't see how personal responsibility wouldn't be possible without free will.

It's still possible to reward and punish people for their actions. The point is that the absence of free will seems to give everyone a rock solid excuse for anything bad that they do: "I could not have done otherwise". Thus, while you can still punish people, you can't actually hold them responsible.

The free will equivalent of that rock solid excuse also exist: "Because I wanted to".

The the incentives are identical and the consequences are identical, why can't we hold one of the scenarios responsible?

Now if you subscribe to the lack of free will idea, you might come to the conclusion that. Okay, it isn't this individual that performed this action, it is the history led up to this point. But in the end nothing has changed. Given that belief you might adjust and realize that hey, maybe we could have prevented this. And we probably could.

But nothing in this reasoning is any different with or without free will. Our societies would most likely be much better if we had good techniques for detecting signs for bad behavior early and encouraging change (no force required), and I'm positive that would be the case both in a free will and in a lack of free will scenario.

I don't see how "because I wanted to" is an excuse at all. If you shouldn't have, and you needn't have, then it doesn't matter if you wanted to.

I mean, I am just talking about excuses as we ordinarily understand them here. Try using "because I wanted to" as an excuse in your daily life and see how that goes.

> Try using "because I wanted to" as an excuse in your daily life and see how that goes.

Try using "I could not have done otherwise" as an excuse in your daily life and see how that goes.

The consequences will be equally bad, thus with or without free will you will be equally motivated to avoid it. And even if it doesn't hold up to some definition of being "held responsible" the outcomes are identical.

EDIT: Nothing stops you from, even in a free-will world, believing that free will doesn't exist (as many do). But I bet you don't see them using that excuse.

"I could not have done otherwise" is a great excuse when people agree that you could, indeed, not have done otherwise. Conversely, "because I wanted to" is a terrible excuse, even if people agree that you did indeed want to.

I'm not meaning the excuse to be interpreted literally with all the social context it implies. I'm saying that whether the action is performed because of free will or not doesn't matter.

We as a society has come up with ways to direct the responsibility and the answer will be different depending on the viewpoint of who is asking it. But this is arbitrary, just something we as a society has decided is "fair", you have responsibility for your actions and the consequences you face should be in proportion to that responsibility.

You can argue that this reasoning is all based on the assumption that everyone has free will, because if you don't then the blame should be directed further up the chain (the hammer isn't responsible for the actions performed with it).

We still do this plenty today though, even with humans. If a rocket crashes because of one person installing a gyro the wrong way you don't necessarily put the blame squarely on him/her, the processes involved should have prevented that from being undetected and thus the responsibility and blame goes further.

(EDIT: the gyro example was a bad example as the person installed it didn't want to do it in the wrong direction. A better example would be the engineer implementing the code to cheat emission tests. But that is also a point, we do still blame people even when there is no intent (or will) to base it on)

But the reasoning is still arbitraty. A human would, free will or not, still react to the consequences (direct as well as risk assesment) of its actions. The concept of responsibility still works and doesn't need to change.

We don't as a society respond the same way when someone involuntarily does something harmful and when someone voluntarily does someone harmful. If all acts are in fact involuntary, it's hard to justify that. (We could of course keep acting as we do now but without the justification.)

No we don't, and neither would a society without free will.

Whether something was done by accident or intent has nothing to do with free will or not. An entity without free will can still compare two options, realize the consequence for both and choose an action.

If that action is illegal in the eyes of society that signifies intent. But if the action was a mistake (perhaps the entity miscalculated or didn't have enough information to do it correctly) it will then be treated as a mistake or carelessness.

You're conflating unintentional actions with involuntary actions, but the two are distinct. It's unfair to punish someone for an intentional but involuntary action. And all actions are involuntary if people do not have free will.

From societies perspective there is no difference between someone with free will choosing bad (illegal) decisions from a bad entity programmed to make bad decisions. The society will have the exact same incentives to take exactly the same actions to prevent such behavior. Nothing about free will or lackthereof makes it unfair.

Someone making involuntarily actions that harms others are a danger to society and should be dealt with. If it is coupled with intent that is very bad, but if not it is unfortunate - but still needs to be dealt with. No reason to involve free will in this reasoning at all.

It's unfair to punish someone for an intentional but involuntary action.

Intent is exactly what is fair to punish someone for. What can be fairer?

>From societies perspective there is no difference between someone with free will choosing bad (illegal) decisions from a bad entity programmed to make bad decisions.

Says who? Those strike me as different. Society could certainly choose to recognize them as different.

>Intent is exactly what is fair to punish someone for. What can be fairer?

It isn't fair if people have no control over their intentions, which they don't if they don't have free will.

An entity making bad decisions because its whole history and current environment made it that way (no free will) and an entity making identical decisions because it has an out-of-universe-outside-of-physics control unit that merely takes history and current environment into consideration (free will) while making those decisions -- are identical when viewed as a black box from outside.

In fact if you start asking questions on what makes the out-of-universe control unit lean this way or that, you can arrive at it either having that inherent property (it just choses right more often than left) or it is a result of some outside influence. And we are at the square one again.

It's p-zombies all the way down.

From society perspective the goal is to minimize or encourage certain behaviors. The only lever available in either scenario is to change the history (by reducing harmful events in general for example) and current environment (by promising punishment or reward and affecting risk assessment for example).

Whether you have a free will or not, the only way to influence your decisions is by affecting your history and current environment. Assigning blame and holding people responsible is a lever that works the same. Doesn't mean you can't look at exactly how effective it is comparing to other methods though.

Right, but we don't actually view people as block boxes, and neither does 'society', as far as I can see. We care about whether or not someone freely chose to do what they did.

We do? We might pretend we would like to. But we can't even distinguish whether a decision was made with free will or not and we don't even attempt to try and find out.

This is a great point. Maybe there is a moral argument to be made here that we shouldn't punish people for actions they could not have prevented (since they don't have free will), but I see, my implicit assumption that transgression of social rules must be responded to by punishment that causes suffering for the offender is probably harmful as well.

>An individual believing it has free will, will certainly act different to an individual that believes all actions are predetermined

Sure, but then you still have this loop the parent talks about: if there's no free will then the insight that you have it or not is also completely predetermined. This discussion is predetermined. The reply that you may or may not write to this comment is predetermined. We're just in a movie and one of the character says "What if we don't have free will? Maybe that'll change the end of the movie." No it won't, it's already set in stone, just fast-forward a bit.

> We're just in a movie and one of the character says "What if we don't have free will? Maybe that'll change the end of the movie." No it won't, it's already set in stone, just fast-forward a bit.

That's mixing in-universe time (and change), and out-of-universe time (and change).

For characters in the movie stuff changes. One of them was alive and then died. It's objectively a change in state of that universe.

For us looking from outside the story is constant, so nothing really changes.

So, returning to the subject - beliefs of people in predetermined universe can have measurable effects in that universe, so they influence stuff. The way they influence stuff is predetermined, but so what?

If the beliefs were different (for example because of different inital conditions), then the universe would be and develop differently. That's enough IMHO to say that beliefs influence stuff in that universe.

I see what you mean but in the absence of free will "beliefs" changing are just yet an other event steering your course. It's like a rock tumbling down a mountain and changing path as it hits a tree, sure the tree changed the course of the rock and therefore influenced the state of the universe by existing at this location at this given moment but that doesn't really get us anywhere. If you can't choose to believe in something then the whole concept of belief is just yet an other consequence of external stimuli and the chemical and physical reactions in your brain. You deciding to believe something is no different than you getting a flat tire and getting late to work. It's happening to you, not by you.

As far as I can tell the only way for free will to exist is if consciousness somehow transcends the physical existence and is more than a series of physical reactions. An other poster mentioned randomness but that doesn't really help, if there are absolutely random events occurring in the universe (for instance at the quantum scale) that means that the universe is effectively unpredictable but that doesn't grant us free will. Free will requires unpredictability but it must be the consequence of the conscious choice, not God rolling the dice while playing DnD.

> As far as I can tell the only way for free will to exist is if consciousness somehow transcends the physical existence and is more than a series of physical reactions

Yep, that's why I don't think there is a free will. Removing it from the model simplifies everything and doesn't change any predictions.

Not necessarily, there could still be effects of true randomness that are not influenced by previous causes.

That doesn't really give us free will, otherwise the NPCs in videogames would have free will (since they experience and react to events in-universe which are effectively absolutely unpredictable since they come from outside the universe).

Maybe the universe is a simulation and the randomness we observe when we look at quantum fluctuations comes from /dev/urandom in God's computer. That doesn't really get us anywhere when it comes to the nature of consciousness and free will.

True randomness is also beyond the control of the individual so it's not a "will".

Our all current social structures, norms and concepts evolved on the basis of the illusion of the free will.

When we look from this perspective, we put so much emphasis on the concept of personal responsibility. We assign points of success or failure to people based on their personal responsibility and our lives depend on it, in many cases it's even a matter of life and death. That's why we are so heavility invested in the concept of personal responsibility and think that it's so important.

But in the culture without the belief in free will, the concept of personal responsibility wouldn't even exist. It would be meaningless. The society without the free will would look at life from completely different perspectives, have different values and would organize itself in different ways.

I think that the illusion of free will is just a one step in our consciouscness. Sooner or later we will move forward and leave it behind.

> An individual believing it has free will, will certainly act different to an individual that believes all actions are predetermined.

Just because all actions are predetermined does not mean I don't (or can't) make any choices. It may be not "my" choice, but I for sure experience it as one (thus the "illusion of free will"). I like to believe that everything is predetermined and yet this has no effect on my behavior (except me writing this post right now ;) )

As Sam Harris told in his talk (linked in my other post here): Not making a choice is also a choice.

>The experience of free will can be real, without free will being real. An individual believing it has free will, will certainly act different to an individual that believes all actions are predetermined.

Without free will that's not up to the individual.

So it's not "certain" at all.

Individuals programmed to behave differently depending on X will act differently depending on X. It's irrelevant whether they have a choice, or are programmed.