Comment by vectorpush | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vectorpush | Hacker News Reader

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I think the interesting and more important questions that stem from this are around the consequences of not having free will.

I don't think that question is more interesting or important because I don't think it makes a tangible inquiry. A universe with free will looks exactly the same as one without. What do we care about when we ask "are we truly responsible for our actions?" What is the distinction between true responsibility and deterministic responsibility? Whether you freely decided to reply to my comment or were determined to do so based on an unbroken chain of physical events since the beginning of the universe, the logic behind your locomotion remains the same, a decision was calculated based on data stored in your physical/non-corporeal brain; if you had a choice, you would have done the same thing, if you didn't have a choice, you would have done the same thing.

If we have no free will, then a human killer is as much to 'blame' for killing as the crocodile is.

To me, the idea that moral culpability might hinge on the true nature of free will seems flawed since morality is a construct defined within the scope of physical consequences that arise from human behavior.

We ascribe moral culpability to the human killer not because of their choice to kill, but because of our own perception that the killer understands what it means to take another life. You might say "more precisely, because of their choice to kill within the context of that understanding", but human morality is not equipped to consider the absolute nature of our choices. Be it a truly free decision or a determined one, the human killer's programming matches our description of morally wrong i.e. "understands what it means to take an innocent life, but does so anyway".

While I agree that "free will" is meaningless, there is value in experimentally confirming we live in a fully deterministic world, at least when it comes to peoples actions. It hopefully allows society to respond more rationally to undesirable behaviour, for one thing.

For instance, clearly, in such a world, punishment only has value if we model that the outcome of punishment steers the offender away from the undesirable behaviour in future -- since there is no "free will" (whatever that is), if punishment doesn't work, we can stop wasting time on it and expend our energy on more constructive responses to undesirable behaviour (e.g. rehabiliation, and if that is also deemed impossible, at least agree to extract useful output from the transgressor rather than waste energy punishing them, which is a net loss for society).

if punishment doesn't work, we can stop wasting time on it and expend our energy on more constructive responses to undesirable behaviour

I think this is the crux of my disagreement.

I don't see how the validity of determinism has any bearing on the efficacy of punishment. Determined or not, people react to punishment in measurable and generally predictable ways, if we discover that all human actions are determined, nothing has changed, all the same motivations for punishment remain in place; it (ostensibly) continues to discourage undesirable behavior, communicates society's disapproval of that behavior, and provides victims with a sense of justice. If anything, determinism only underscores the notion that individuals will react to stimuli, a fact that is equally true if those reactions were "freely" chosen by the individual.

> if punishment doesn't work, we can stop wasting time on it and expend our energy on more constructive responses

You assume we can choose which direction to go towards. With no free will, we have as much choice in expending our energy as offenders had in committing offenses. It's absurd to state 'we can' or 'we should' while assuming a fully deterministic world.

> We ascribe moral culpability to the human killer not because of their choice to kill, but because of our own perception that the killer understands what it means to take another life.

Choice is most definitely a factor determining moral culpability. Consider a driver who drives into a pedestrian killing him, because at an unfortunate moment, the driver was paralyzed by an unexpected stroke. The driver witnessed the entire event with full understanding of what it means to take a life. Is he morally culpable? I would say no, because he was not in control. You can also imagine similar scenarios involving coercion or accidents.

The key point is whether we are in control of our actions, or merely witnesses with the illusion of control. I don't see how this can be separated from moral culpability.

Consider a driver who drives into a pedestrian killing him, because at an unfortunate moment, the driver was paralyzed by an unexpected stroke. The driver witnessed the entire event with full understanding of what it means to take a life. Is he morally culpable? I would say no, because he was not in control. You can also imagine similar scenarios involving coercion or accidents.

Right, but in that example, the question of choice doesn't come into play. The paralyzed driver knows what it means to take a life, but they cannot act, regardless of determinism's validity.

The key point is whether we are in control of our actions, or merely witnesses with the illusion of control. I don't see how this can be separated from moral culpability.

In my view, it doesn't matter. From a moral perspective, there is no distinction between the illusion of control and actual control, the variables used to calculate a moral judgement (behavior and the intent driving that behavior) remain unchanged, even if the actor didn't have a choice regarding their intent.

> Right, but in that example, the question of choice doesn't come into play. The paralyzed driver knows what it means to take a life, but they cannot act, regardless of determinism's validity.

Yes, but doesn't determinism mean that all of us 'cannot act'?

> From a moral perspective, there is no distinction between the illusion of control and actual control

Are you saying a fully capable driver would be culpable if he was under the illusion of full control while he drove over a pedestrian? Consider a vehicle malfunction, which goes unnoticed by the driver, leading him to believe he didn't brake or steer fast enough. Is the driver still at fault or is it the car? Doesn't actual control matter?

Yes, but doesn't determinism mean that all of us 'cannot act'?

Let's say, yes. Now what? If all of us 'cannot act' then from a moral perspective there is nothing left to consider. Instead, we ought to shift our concerns to a system that we at least have the illusion of control over (especially since that illusion also encompasses everything we think we really care about in life), which in our reality brings us right back to where we started. If determinism is true, then our morality is part of the deterministic chain, just because we cannot control it doesn't mean that the rules don't have consequences for our reality, in fact, that is the only context in which they have any meaningful consequences at all.

Everyone will continue to behave exactly as if they could act, and we can make predictions about their behavior exactly as if they had the power to make choices, and our system of morals will continue to handle illusory intentions and behaviors just as well as it handles real ones, because at the very moment that a choice bubbles up into our reality, it's already absorbed into the apparent perception that we are making choices. That apparent reality is the only reality as far as we can tell, and certainly the only one where we can actually think about taking actions. Even if its just an illusion, the illusion is the reality we experience.

Are you saying a fully capable driver would be culpable if he was under the illusion of full control while he drove over a pedestrian? Consider a vehicle malfunction, which goes unnoticed by the driver, leading him to believe he didn't brake or steer fast enough. Is the driver still at fault or is it the car? Doesn't actual control matter?

That thought experiment misses the point because the unnoticed malfunction is literally the physical explanation for the accident. We wouldn't consider the driver culpable because he wouldn't have crashed had the malfunction not occurred. On the other hand, a driver that deliberately runs down a person because they enjoy murdering pedestrians is the physical cause of the event, even if they didn't choose to enjoy murdering pedestrians, they in fact do enjoy it, and will continue to do so unmitigated as long as our moral constructs do not react to it. This scenario plays out the same whether the driver truly makes the choice to run over pedestrians or if he just thinks he made the choice. In this case, determinism didn't make the driver a murderer against his will, determinism defined what that will would be, and the physical consequences are put into motion based on that will.

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