You're advocating for "stopping" them by having someone else rearrange their brain so they won't be violent any more. And you refuse to acknowledge the fact that that someone else is making a choice that has consequences; to you it's all just particles reacting to their environment. Yet you also seem to think suffering is bad--but if it's all just particles reacting to their environment, there is no such thing as suffering, any more than there is such a thing as choice. So you are the one who is being inconsistent, not me.
> If it affects someone else, well, do you really care? From your answers, you seem not to care in the slightest.
You clearly don't understand my actual position, and I don't know how to explain it any better than I already have.
And it is all just particles moving around, but that doesn't mean we have to ignore what is very likely an unpleasant experience from your subjective, internal point of view. I don't dismiss your personal experience of reality, just your rational understanding of what's going on.
And I do, I really do, but you are inconsistent. You say you should be free to make your choices, but then also want to put people in jail fornmaking their free choices. You call it consequences, and yet that doesn't eliminate the fact that you then want to LIMIT THEIR FREEDOM TO CHOOSE to do it again. You are self contradictory. At best, you are picking what choices people are and aren't allowed to make.
No, I have a problem with that process being done without the consent of the person, even in cases where there the person has not harmed anyone else. I have asked you about that elsewhere in this discussion; your response will tell me whether it actually is an fundamental difference in our viewpoints or whether you are just describing things using very different terminology than I would use.
In cases where a person has harmed someone else, it's the fact that they have harmed someone else (more precisely, that they have harmed someone else without an extremely good reason, such as self-defense, for doing so) that creates the consequences I have talked about. There are consequences for people's choices regardless of whether we have a society or not. Sometimes, as a society, we alter the consequences from what they would be in a state of nature (for example, we put murderers on trial and then imprison them if they are found guilty, instead of just letting the families and friends of the murder victim take private vengeance, which is what would happen in a state of nature with no society). But it is simply ridiculous to say that respecting people's freedom of choice is inconsistent with there being consequences for people's choices. If you choose to jump off a cliff, you will die. If you choose to harm other people for no good reason, they will retaliate. Calling that "limiting freedom to choose" is just sophistry.
No, it isn't. The definition of free will that I am using is common in the literature on free will and cognitive science, i.e., among people who have actually worked on understanding how human brains work based on exactly the same physicalist principles that you say you believe. I also have disagreed several times with your claims about what "anyone coming along and reading this conversation" would understand.
As for your blatant attempt to misrepresent the cognitive science communities belief on the subject, again, put up or shut up by linking to anything that backs up your claim that current cognitive scientists support your point of view. I know for a FACT, that you can't because papers and talks on the subject are FREELY available to watch and/or read!
I have made no such claim. You keep attacking straw men instead of addressing what I'm actually saying.
> Removing a foot ok though?
I have made no such claim.
> What about the death penalty?
I have already pointed out that the natural consequence (i.e., in a state of nature if there is no society) of attacking someone else for no good reason can be death. So imposing death as a penalty for a sufficiently heinous crime seems to me to be justifiable in principle, if you are sure to a moral certainty that the person did the crime.
Where our current system falls down horribly is in that last part: we impose the death penalty when we are not even close to meeting the strict standard of moral certainty that I just stated.
By your whole argument, this person shouldn't be held criminally responsible UNTIL murder has actually occurred.