Comment by ryanjshaw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanjshaw | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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