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Comment by alecst | Hacker News Reader

I identify with Sapolsky's position. Plus, there's a shift in perspective which comes from adopting it. For example, instead of blaming someone for "freely making a bad choice" you can shift your attention to the circumstances that allowed for those bad choices to arise in the first place, and try to tackle those. I think it makes for a less blameful world.

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I think you'd have to believe in something like an omniscient and omnipotent force (e.g. God) to really accept a fully deterministic universe. You'd have to believe that the initial conditions of the universe were just so that all of history would happen to lead to you typing that message, and me responding to it, solely by the physical interactions of particles. It just seems so unlikely to me. It's a bullet I'm not willing to bite. It's actually less ridiculous to me to believe in God determining every action, which I also can't bring myself to do either. All that's left is some form of free will or compatibilism, neither of which are fully satisfying.

> universe were just so that all of history would happen to lead to you typing that message, and me responding to it, solely by the physical interactions of particles.

You're kinda committing a conjunctive fallacy w/ some anthropic bias. The thing you're not seeing is the infinite similar multiverses that would look indistinguishable to you and you need to remember that the known universe is, very big and the rest of it could be infinite. I don't know how big that number is, but its a lot more complicated than 'this is the only way this could have happened'.

I certainly thought about that, but it seems a lot more believable to me that there's something missing from our current understanding than that this impossibly large number of interactions happened resulting in the just so universe we live in. That we live in the most absurd of all possible universes, the one where pre-determined clumps of matter post on Hacker News, typing each character one by one without choosing to do so, is harder to conceive of than that we just have free will at some level. And it's not at all hard for me to imagine that any supposed evidence, scientific or philosophical, is more than likely just flawed or limited in some way, so I have trouble buying in to arguments like this.

You're just kicking the can down the road. Where does the "god entity" come from?

It's the exact same question as "why did the universe have such and such initial conditions?". We've added a new variable, "God", to the mix, but have gained no explanatory power.

Heh, I want to disagree but I can't!

I get a similar intuition from ethology. No matter how crazy someone acts, all I can do is think "Yup, this organism is most definitely exhibiting a form of behavior" .

This gives you a level of objective detachment towards people and their words, which helps with keeping a cool head and resolving the actual underlying issues.

No, this is naive. See game theory, the "tit-for-tat" problem. Can't empower agents who would later betray you, or society would stop functioning. Punishing those to exploit the system is in the interest of everyone else.

Would you set free a raper or killer (it wasn't his fault, it's society, culture, etc) and let the next victim pay the price?

You're misunderstanding. You can hold that the killer isn't 'morally' responsible, ie: deserves to be tortured for their crime, but still imprison them indefinitely for the good of everyone else.

This is more or less already the case in the western judicial systems, where punishment is not meant to be a revenge. The harsher punishments (like executions) are meant to deter.

I think there are exceptions like Nuremberg trials where the executions were more of a revenge.

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