I feel almost sheepish after watching the final episode of the 3rd season of BSG that I had to get hit over the head with an anvil before I realized that one of the reasons the show is so compelling is it’s a long, often elegant (but occasionally clunky) dismantling of the hazy concept of free will. As much as I hated the set-up of Lee Adama’s speech (why bother with the mistrial crap and not just let it be his closing arguments?), I found the speech itself very compelling—to allow yourself to pass judgment on Baltar, you have to believe that anyone else in his position would have done the right thing, or followed the rules, or whatever you think he did wrong, and deep down inside you know that’s bullshit. And the reason it’s bullshit is because over and over on the show, people have done “wrong”, but been forgiven because in the tight circumstances, it’s easy to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and see why they made the decisions they did—and how other decisions might not be possible.
Most sci-fi examinations of AI robots go at it with the sense that free will is part of being human, and thus the tension in the story is what happens when robots get smart enough to have free will. And this series started off that way, with all the struggling of Boomer over her various urges, but then at a certain point, the writers appeared to realize that to create the tension around the question of how to tell robot from human, it was more interesting to examine not how robots could have free will—but how humans cannot. I put the time the show changed focus to the episodes involving the Pegasus, where you really see how the Admiral was a product of her own personality and circumstance, and how Starbuck at least grasped that there was no way the Pegasus’ journey could have ever been different.
The fact that religion is a big deal on the show bolsters the sense that it’s dismantling the illusion of free will. People and Cylons both sense they are at the mercy of omniscient deities, and the fact that they have oracles and visions only confirms this. Destiny is unavoidable on the show; what’s happening now has happened before doesn’t have to be taken literally, it could just mean that the path ahead has no branches, no alternate possibilities, that the future was written literally (by the gods) or metaphorically (by the convergence of forces that necessitate certain outcomes). Omniscient gods pretty much preclude the possibility of free will, and while there’s plenty of strained attempts to argue otherwise, they’re just the result of hope trumping logic. Religion is a projection of ego—I feel my life is meaningful, so there must be an outside force validating that—and the stubborn insistence on free will is a projection of ego. The two are wed together out of human egotism, but they don’t really make sense together logically.
But free will is a problem from an atheist point of view, too. Every person is a bundle of environmental factors and personality traits, and this means their decisions have a cast of inevitability to them. Even the selection of a sandwich in the shop is constrained so much by environmental factors that it’s hard to say that free will is a factor—you’re a mix of internal desires (I like ham more than salami) and environmental constraints (peanut butter, which I like best, is not on the menu), and you’re going to pick the ham every time. If you pick the salami, it’s probably because of a subtle change in environment (I had ham yesterday, so I want variety). There’s a sense of “free will”, but it’s kind of meaningless—where do you locate the will that is free of personality or environmental factors? You don’t.
This informs the sense of justice on the show significantly, because the illusion of free will is one of the myths that allows the justice system to function, and the precarious situation they’re in shows how much free will just doesn’t exist—which was the point of Lee Adama’s speech. At least in terms of the crimes that the humans know about, there’s nothing that Gaius Baltar did that they wouldn’t have done in his position. On a deeper level, there’s nothing he’s done that transcends time and personality, so again, the fundamental injustice of justice pervades the show. The Cylons drive this home—can we call them evil when it seems that all their decisions are a mish-mash of chance and programming? Are we any different? None of this is to say that in a stable world, the justice system is wrong, but it’s clear from the show’s perspective that “justice” is a tool used to change the environment and therefore people’s decisions, and has nothing to do with free will. Adama will shoot a mutineer, not because it’s fair, but because it’s the way that you shuffle environmental factors to make sure that no one has more reason to commit mutiny than not. Justice as a mechanism of social control is justified, but not as a tool of retribution, because retribution requires some sense of free will and no one has yet to make a case that someone has managed to behave in a way that truly and freely transcends personality and environment.
Which is why the blanket pardon of the fleet made sense. There’s no gain when humanity is trying to survive in punishing people for behaving in ways that they never will again. Cooperating with the Cylons is off the table as an option now, so punishing people for it doesn’t send a signal but is just petty revenge and for what? You can’t be convinced that someone else was wrong when they use the same “programming” to make decisions as you do. Their decisions were different, but that’s because their circumstances were slightly different and because the eyes they look at the world are different ones than yours. You can’t say, if you were them, you would act differently. You know you would not.
This is why Adama’s speech about Baltar’s lack of guilt is wed to the revelation of the four Cylons. I found the scene where they realized they are Cylons, but then decide to do their jobs anyway as if nothing had changed, very moving. The crushing realization that you don’t have “free will”, that you’re a robot and functioning on some programming seems very distressing, but if you think about it, it’s not. How does that really change anything? Can you actually say that there’s something about you that is free from “programming”, a part of you that’s independent from internal and external pressures that is there to make decisions for you? And if it’s there, isn’t that just another part of your programming? Our brains are computers, constantly weighing different priorities and factors, but the algorithm being used is out of your control, and if you sense you control it, another step back and you’ll see the algorithm of priorities directing your controls.
Life is a stage and we all play parts—the four Cylons were activated by a song that mocks our pretensions and illusions of control. They are victims of forces beyond their control. And with that knowledge, they shrug and return to life, because in a fundamental way, nothing has changed.
216 Responses to “Thoughts on the last episode of Battlestar Galactica and the illusion of free will”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
I’m exercising my freewill to ask what telepathy is it that I come so often to Pandagon exactly when Amanda has just posted something and the comment count is zero? I usually refrain from commenting, but not this time.
I will add, and this will probably sound very cryptic, but the essay above is one first tiny tentative step towards moksha, in my opinion.
…no one has yet to make a case that someone has managed to behave in a way that truly and freely transcends personality and environment. is a statement truly worth many days of meditation.
The quest for moksha is driven by the hope that it is indeed possible for a human to transcend personality and environment. It is believed to be possible, but the path is like traversing the razor’s edge.
So, you discount Boomer/Sharon as an example of the exercise of free will?
Related to this, as the “final five” are fundamentally different cylons (as Ron Moore has stated all along), what *IS* that fundamental difference? Because up until now, I reckoned part of it was the exercise of free will. That going back to business as usual was a choice.
Adding, if there is no “free will,” sucks to be Judas Ascariot.
The difference of the Five Cylons is that they’ve chosen to be Cylons, again and again, even though they could escape the cycle of recurrence. They’re like Bodhisattva, Enlightened but choosing to continue to reincarnate in order to help others achieve enlightenment. They don’t choose to go back to doing their job because they realize they’ve been doing their job all along and that’s why they exist.
OK, I will admit this is going to be an overly political response to this post, but I think it is dangerous to repeatedly assert that we should all know that we would have acted just like Baltar in that situation.
I can’t tell, Amanda, if you are outlining the show’s approach to free-will or your own. Either way I totally agree that the vast majority of our “choices” are constrained by a million factors (memories, existing beliefs, socialization, the environment, etc). But I think it is very, very scary to suggest that our personal decisions are determined by those factors. Constrained but not determined.
So yeah, 9 times out of 10 people are going to unthinkingly follow orders of someone in authority, they are going to protect their own skin before they go out on a limb to protect strangers. But I also know for a fact (thanks to people like Paul Rusesabagina in Rwanda or the thousands of “Rescuers” across Europe during WWII) that many people can and do risk themselves for what is right. As a progressive person, part of what we have to ask of people is to step outside those constraints and pursue the ethical/moral choice even if it puts our own lives at risk.
To me that is the issue at the heart of BSG, how is it possible to do what is right no matter what the existing conditions are? Part of the issue being that, in the moment, it is often hard to even know what the right thing is. But Baltar always knew on some level that he was doing something wrong. Chief is a great example of someone who doesn’t cave into fear, he repeatedly risks himself and his family for what he believes is right. And even the fact that he is a cylon means nothing to him, he’s going to keep doing what he thinks is the right course. (Though as an aside I’m not sure he’s a “normal” cylon.)
So anyway, that’s why it is compelling to me – I feel like it is a very accurate depiction of how hard it is to constantly look outside the constraints of a situation to evaluate the right thing to do.
Baltar s a special case, Fizgig. Like Judus, he has a role to play and all of his circumstances force him to play that role. If any of us, or the other characters where in his role, they would do the exact same things he did, because that would then be their role.
And yeah, it sucks to be Judus/Baltar because you have to be the hated but necessary hand of God in all these events.
At work and running behind as usual, and also crippled by the fact that I have zero access to current cable “broadcasts” and so have not seen a single ep of Season 3. Nor have I caught up to the comments on the previous BSG thread today. But I have been intrigued by the “free will” discussions.
I think the argument that “free will” is an illusion is an error related to the much more obvious blunder of the Creationists who argue that evolution by natural selection must be false, because mutation is a random therefore meaningless process. What these Creationists overlook is that while mutations do arise at random (and so prove overwhelmingly deleterious or even fatal) the information that is obviously being built up in an evolving ecosystem, with ever-more-elaborate ecological webs and finely-tuned organisms, actually comes from the implications of the underlying structure of the Universe. The laws of nature are just so, and life explores possibilities under those constraints–this is where the interesting unity of diversity comes from, not the randomness of the mutations. There are mathematical descriptions of what is going on in terms of evolutionary mechanisms “exploring” the spaces of possible configurations of matter, explaining also why and how it is useful to design evolving algorithms to solve problems on computers. It has to do with chaos theory.
So far the only kind of consciousness we know of for sure is that of human beings, and of animals to the extent we recognize the similarity. The thing is, Western philosophy when it takes up arguing these issues generally begins by imagining an ideal, abstract individual Mind and trying to make deductions from that. But actually we evolved as animals, and continue to be biologically as well as psychologically dependent on human community. We don’t get born without some woman devoting at least 9 months to each of us–abstract away from that by imagining artificial wombs or by just doing as the patriarchy does and forgetting about the woman; still, we don’t continue to draw breath without being fed, cleaned, kept warm. And our minds do not develop at all sanely without a certain amount of affectionate human contact. OK–we can imagine all this is just the stamp of our peculiar evolutionary heritage, and dismiss it to get to the abstract meat of the question of what a mind is…
…or can we? What I’m trying to suggest here, in a sketchy way, is that mind is all about relating to the larger, potentially infinite, material universe. I think it’s a mistake to draw conclusions about what a mind, or its free will, are, without keeping that inherent interaction foremost.
When I do that, it seems to me that it is no longer so unreasonable to assume meaningful coherence. It is on this reciprocal relationship between individual and the larger world that identity, purpose, hope, and morality rest.
The point is, there is something unknown but real out there; not knowing what it is does not reduce it to meaningless noise but rather gives everything meaning. We bother to go on living because we don’t know what might happen next; we’re like kids that don’t want to go to sleep at our bedtimes because the grownups are still awake and partying downstairs.
Suppose then that our brains are probabilistic, as seems quite certain to me they must be. It may be that in any particular case, we choose action from a range of possibilites at random though guided by a kind of potential field of inclination. In many cases, biology or social conditioning might narrow that “potential field” down to just one conditioned reaction. But that doesn’t prove that our actions integrated over time are therefore fundamentally random nor mechanically determined, for our interaction with the rest of the Universe over time shapes that “potential field.” It doesn’t arise by accident; it reflects hard facts about the world we live in. For each of us at any moment, the notion that we choose freely and are therefore responsible is perhaps an illusion, but I think it is no illusion that we are responsible for how we re-evaluate the meaning of what we have learned and re-shape our reactions accordingly.
I dunno what Baltar did in the third season; it seems absurd to me to suggest that he “had no choice” in the stuff he did in the first two. I think he’s an interesting, even fun character to watch (give or take the occasional nuked starship)–but I sure don’t think I would have done as he did in the many situations we saw him in. Many times I have swallowed my pride (which is still considerable, believe it or not, and was bloody monstrous when I was younger), sucked it up, and gone to people who often reacted badly, with painful truths about what I had actually done. I had to take consequences for it too–very often not nearly as awful as I feared, sometimes worse than I imagined. So I have some reason to think I really would at some early point in the series gone to someone–Roslin, most likely, perhaps Adama–and spilled my guts about Caprica Six and still having visions of her. If they didn’t space me on the spot, good things for the fleet and ultimately me would probably come of it, and if they did space me–we all die someday.
So no, I hardly think the notion of free will is conclusively disproven. What I think is questionable is the egotistical idea of ideal individuals in an essentially dead Universe, which seems to me to be a half-baked secularization of the Christian/Muslim notion of God and a created Universe wholly dependent on God’s will. For me, a much more appealing model of Divinity is the image of the Goddess giving birth to the Universe, which lives with its own life, or is permeated with the great life force. It’s Taoist in that I believe that ultimate reality is everywhere and immediate, but inherently indescribable, and it is that quest to grasp the ungraspable that our lives are all about.
Examined logically, the notion that there is some purpose to our lives seems absurd, I won’t deny that. This is why I think the thing that we live and breathe for is beyond logic. And it is in our intimate, I believe loving, relationship with that Ultimate, that our free will and our morality lies. Attempting to reduce it to a straightjacket of codified law leads us to the valley of dry bones, but recognizing that justice must be tempered with mercy and sympathy to be justice enables us to use reason and logic to the fullest extent without fear that we will reason ourselves into suicide.
Okay. So in thinking about it some more, Boomer might not have free will either. Without Hera, Rosalind is already dead. And we all know that Moses sees the land of milk and honey, but is forbidden to go there.
So, you discount Boomer/Sharon as an example of the exercise of free will?
Yes, and no. No, because I think that storyline was written when they were still thinking about this from a traditional perspective (intelligent robots would have free will). Yes, because even then they began to see the problem with the very concept of “free will”—Six notes that the model has always been “weak”, i.e. from the beginning her personality has made this inevitable.
The question I’m asking is, “Could Sharon/Boomer have behaved differently in the same circumstances with the same personality if it all happened again?” I think the answer is a firm no. And it’s becoming clear that Sharon is a pawn in this game; her loyalty to humans is necessary for Hera’s protection, and thus her loyalty to humans could be considered inevitable and fated as part of the prophecy of Hera’s very existence.
I think Sharon’s dilemma shows that free will is a shorthand we use to explain away variances in behavior, but the idea that there’s some extra part of us separate from personality and environment is discounted with her.
Adding, if there is no “free will,” sucks to be Judas Ascariot.
It sucks either way—but a good example of why “free will” is such a troubling concept in religion. It seems to me that Judas can’t be taken as having free will, since the betrayal was necessary in the chain of events that led to Jesus’ death, then Judas had to do what he did, and god ordained it that way. If god had not made Judas to betray Jesus, Jesus would not have been crucified, and salvation wouldn’t have happened. Judas is taken as the great villain of the Bible, but in my eyes, he’s just a pawn in god’s game.
Like Keith said, Baltar is the Judas. Which is why I find his belief that he’s the Chosen One interesting, because in a sense, those chosen to do evil are just as critical as the saviors. Without Adam to sin and Judas to betray, Christ’s glory was for not. Without Baltar the Destructor, we wouldn’t have (I suspect) Starbuck the Savior. They are doubled and echo each other on the show; their one bout in bed with each other was no accident. Judas kisses Jesus for poetic reasons and thus Baltar must touch his mirror image.
OK, I will admit this is going to be an overly political response to this post, but I think it is dangerous to repeatedly assert that we should all know that we would have acted just like Baltar in that situation.
No, not just “we” would have acted like Baltar. If we were Baltar, and had his exact mix of personality traits and memories, would “we” have been different? It seems unlikely that Baltar could be a different Baltar than he was.
But I think it is very, very scary to suggest that our personal decisions are determined by those factors.
That it’s scary doesn’t make it untrue.
But what is the part of you that you feel is outside of your being that makes you special, the part that is “free” from the other parts? What would you call it? How did it go so long being unshaped by your personality?
The notion that there’s a “me” outside of “me” that’s the real “me” is a constant and unsupported hope of humanity. Call it “free will” or a “soul”, the notion that there’s a part of you outside of the body and the neurons firing inside is a constant hope. But if you let go of that hope, you realize it never mattered outside of a salve to your ego. That’s why I found the Cylons returning to work so moving. The realization that you are just a bunch of neurons firing is always portrayed as too scary a truth to face, but when you do face it, you find it changes nothing. Your loves are not less loving, your fears not less fearful. At best your ego is humbled a little, but in a good way. I do think the people capable of the worst evil are those who have convinced themselves that they are special.
I agree with the basic thrust of your argument. The only thing I would add is the contributions of Chaos Theory, which to me lend far more weight to the randomness of the Universe than any idea of predestination.
These topics are fun to discuss and argue about.
BTW, this is all good fun as long as long as the Cheney/Bush Administration, unlike Baltar, is held responsible for their acts in war crimes trials at The Hague, and then imprisoned for the rest of their lives. (If not, then there must really be a god and s/he hates us)
I don’t want to hear about any cute defense tactics claiming that it was impossible for them to behave any other way and that we would all have made the same decisions under the same circumstances…
I’ll be very interested to see what they do with the Pegasus storyline this November.
As for what I think personally, my real sense is that the concern over free will is mostly a religious one, that its importance as a concept is magnified by the fear of living under an omniscient god who sits in judgment on your sins. I don’t believe in god or the metaphysical idea of sin, so I find the concept of free will to be intellectually interesting but irrelevant in the real world. I think it’s the same thing as a soul, actually, and a manifestation of ego and not actually a useful idea in any way.
As for the 1 out of 10 does the right thing dilemma, that means that 9 out of 10 people prioritize obedience to empathy and 1 out of 10 the opposite. Instead of wringing my hands over free will, I ask, “What can we do to change that?” One thing that comes to mind is dissuading the human tendency to think we are special and pure and chosen as good people, because that stops self-examination and the unexamined self is the one likelier to stupidly follow authority. Nine believers in the soul and free will and one atheist in the room, and only one rebels against the experiment—odds are slightly tipped in favor of the atheist being the rebel.
Yeah, that wouldn’t get very far. The importance of holding people accountable in the real world isn’t much of a factor, because it’s about setting standards and therefore changing the environment to predispose more people towards the right behavior. But that aside, there was a certain….inevitability to Bush/Cheney’s reaction, wasn’t there? I think part of the despair on BSG comes from the zeitgeist, this sense that events are spiraling out of control because we live in a nation where people with certain horrible beliefs and attitudes were dominant when 9/11 happened. We knew that BushCo would react badly; it had a cast of inevitability to it. The idea that Bush would have a sudden moral awakening strains all credulity.
“I don’t believe in god or the metaphysical idea of sin, so I find the concept of free will to be intellectually interesting but irrelevant in the real world.”
I just KNEW you’d say that!…
:)
“She knew from the start
Deep down in her heart
That she and Tommy were worlds apart,
But her Mother said never mind your part…
Is to be what you’ll be.”
“Sally Simpson” - Tommy - The Who
…
I do think the people capable of the worst evil are those who have convinced themselves that they are special.
That’s a very succinct and efficient way of describing the problem of hubris. This is, to me, the first cause or the generative source of all evil: once I convince myself that god/destiny/the great cat has touched me or blessed me or singled me out as its actor (or whatever other way deites can make one “special”), I become essentially amoral. The normal rules of good and evil–social mores, personal ethics, civic laws, etc.–no longer apply to me. My “specialness” trumps any attempt to constrain my behavior. At that point, only my personal proclivities dictate whether I am seen as “good” or “evil”.
In a literary sense, this is the problem that the tragic hero faces: if the hero’s sense of greatness overwhelms his humanity, he becomes a villain. If he maintains or eventually reclaims his humanity, he remains (or becomes redeemed as) a hero.
In ancient legal documents, “hubris” is specifically an unprovoked assault or an attack with no discernible motive. Basically, it applies to the attitude of the sociopath or the serial killer: I do something for no other reason than because I can.
We get a watered-down version of hubris in translation. “Overweening pride” or “arrogance” doesn’t carry the same connotations these days, and “putting oneself equal to or above the gods” is so specific that most people can’t really grasp the concept. This “sense of specialness” you talk about here is pretty darn close, really, and I think it better describes the large number of people who believe that the rules weren’t actually meant for them.
“I dunno what Baltar did in the third season; it seems absurd to me to suggest that he “had no choice” in the stuff he did in the first two. ”
In the sense Amanda’s talking about, he really didn’t. The thing that makes Baltar such a great character is the tension between his self image as a great, noble man, and the reality that he always “chooses” self preservation over any other principle or option.
“In ancient legal documents, “hubris” is specifically an unprovoked assault or an attack with no discernible motive. Basically, it applies to the attitude of the sociopath or the serial killer: I do something for no other reason than because I can.”
That SO describes the Bushites. I wonder if any of them are self-aware enough to see this, or if they are too caught up in their own specialness to see anything beyond themselves?…
I feel like if you define “free will” so narrowly as to dismiss by definition any and all previous possible examples, then, yes, you have proven that free will doesn’t exist.
On the other hand, your conclusion would then be contained within your premise, and the Disco Ball Church would be just so much closer to attaining tax-free status and stumping for Hillary.
In all seriousness, I would appreciate it if you could unpack what you think the “self” is aside from some combination of inputs and outputs. You said that “personal accountability” is the wrong focus because “it” is “about setting standards and therefore changing the environment to predispose more people towards the right behavior.” But whence the justification for “right behavior?” Without some idea that people can choose, how do you justify any one outcome over another?
Instead of wringing my hands over free will, I ask, “What can we do to change that?”
Why should we change that? It makes empathy a concept completely free of any moral content whatsoever. I think in short order we would wind up with you, and a bunch of people who feel the same way as you, versus me and a bunch of people who feel the same way as me (assuming opposition on some issue) and no reason for either side not to wipe out the other.
Something has to give us an option other than tribalism, don’t you think?
I don’t watch BSG, but on the topic of free will, I could recommend Daniel Dennet’s fascinating Elbow Room. I’m sure many people would enjoy it. In that book, Dennet makes a case for free will and also discusses, as the title suggests, “the varieties of free will worth wanting.”
Every person is a bundle of environmental factors and personality traits, and this means their decisions have a cast of inevitability to them.
Among the bundle of environmental factors that go into the deterministic process that will actually make the decision is the content of your own brain.
You don’t have complete control over the content of your own brain. Outside forces can cause thoughts or “content creation”. GOATSE! There, I just put a picture in your head that you’d probably just as soon not have. (Sorry.) We don’t really have much ability to stop that process.
But you do have control over the additive process. That is, you may not be able to avoid thinking of pink elephants, but you can think of pink elephants anytime you want to. And - subject to the limitations of our own knowledge - we can add thoughts to the content of our brain however we like. I’m thinking about how much I love salami on occasion (and increasing its prevalence in my deterministic decision-making computer). I’m thinking about how I would rather have ice cream than meat. I’m thinking about how I need to save money, and adding “skip lunch” to the menu of possible decisions. And so forth.
So where you do have free will, or something very much like it, is the positive cognitive component of your thoughts. You can decide what to think about, and thus change the contents of your brain, and thus change some of the environmental factors that control you.
Changing the controlling factors -> changing the decision -> approximating free will, at least well enough for government work.
But, Quiet Truth, who’s to say that what we “choose” to think of at any given time isn’t itself a result of mechanistic processes?
I happen to agree with you, just want to play Devil’s Advocate.
On some level this is like arguing utilitarianism…absolutely any good can be rationalized away as being the result of a cost-benefit analysis, but only if you assume before argument that this is so.
“Free will” is a useful shorthand for “understanding of social responsibility”, Petey, but unfortunately it’s all conflated with strange religious and egotistical concepts, permanently tainted as it were, and I find it better to discard it and start speaking directly about issues instead of endlessly worrying about souls we don’t have.
In all seriousness, I would appreciate it if you could unpack what you think the “self” is aside from some combination of inputs and outputs.
In made it clear—the notion of the “self” outside of body, mind, and external factors is a fairy tale we tell ourselves that functions like “god”, to make us believe we are special. I think it’s a dangerous fairy tale. I think that if people were more interested in reality-based outcomes and less in ego-mollifying religious concepts and grand-standing, we’d be better for it. Bush sleeps well at night no matter how many innocent people he’s killed, because his soul/free will/whatever is right with “god”. That sickens me. I think the entire exercise of trying to appeal to mystical entities outside or inside is the cause of needless suffering. We should look at ourselves as is, and stop being so afraid that without magic we’re nothing.
Another way that the illusion of “free will” is problematic is that in order for person X to feel that he is transcendent and has free will, he traditionally has to believe person Y is animalistic and more constrained by body and environment than he. Which is why that people who cling to ego-mollifying beliefs about sin and god have a misogynist streak—to believe that man if of Mind, it helps to believe that woman is a different animal, is the Body. Women are to be controlled to mollify the sense that men are not controlled, women have to be tethered to the physical (forced to bear children against their will for one) for men to feel more transcendent and free in comparison.
The show really showed well how scapegoating is a necessity for ego to survive. For the survivors to believe they deserved to be forgiven, they had to believe Baltar is less and is not forgiven—how Christians must believe Judas rots in hell even though it’s clear god preordained him and in fact created him to sin. Again, it puts you in a situation where god is evil, that he treats people like toys. The show accepts this; I choose to abandon the whole thing and the agonizing over god, free will, and sin.
Hmm, apparently my comment didn’t go through or something. Anyway, I’d like to suggest to everyone Daniel Dennet’s Elbow Room, his book on free will.
To deny “free will” is to ipso facto deny the rational faculty. It is to, at it’s root, to deny critical thinking and critical analysis. It is difficult to argue against determinism because when you do you get the “yes, but it turles all the way down” argument.
Most people do not engage in critical thinking and generally do not have what most people would call free will. For those that do, however, one continually weighs the rightness and decency of our own acts. We weigh or options against crieteria that are outside of us and external to our own self-interest. I would guess that describes the large majority of Pandagonians. Come now, have you never run into something that you felt, at first blush, morally neutral towards? That you had to “weigh.”
It is best and easiest to consider the question of free will sans any reference to God or spirituality. There are days we eat the devils food cake and there are days we don’t. Free will is simply choosing between alternatives and doing so in the light of self interest v. group interest. The duality comes simply from the fact that we must have both the self and the group to survive.
To say that our actions are inevitable is to abandon ourselves to our own worst inclinations; to eschew any attempt to better ourselves. It is to abandon ourselves to “God’s Will.”
Another way that the illusion of “free will” is problematic is that in order for person X to feel that he is transcendent and has free will, he traditionally has to believe person Y is animalistic and more constrained by body and environment than he.
I thought because you were writing of a galactic culture, you wouldn’t also confuse “tradition” with just one human tradition.
I’ve always wondered if there’s a current version of “Trekkies.” It seems the answer is “yes.”
My first reaction to this post is that Buffy/Angel did this free will stuff so much better than BSG. That puppet episode in Angel S5 is so saturated in this kind of thing, it’s completely unreal. And unreally funny (in both ways).
I don’t think BSG is that clear as to what it wanted to do in S5. I’d pretty much given up hope that this was really going to go anywheres, since too much of it was ad-hoc to remain coherent. The confusion was good for the end, of course, as it mimics the kind of confusion that a conflict stage’s end is like. “We did WHAT?” “What the hell FOR?” “Our Leaders thought THAT?”. Eventually all the facts and feelings get swept under the great rug of hubris, like France at then end of it’s colonial period.
As for free will and hubris as topics in and of itself, I don’t think Amanda’s analysis holds up. The showrunners had to give Balter breathing space to keep him around. Lee Adama describing the whole don’t throw stones in glass houses premise is generally bad storytelling, bad philosophy, and especially bad law. Whether we have free will or not is immaterial. As much as we know the issue to be *complicated*, we cannot assume that people don’t have free will. This is complicated by the fact that Amanda is essentially making a normative judgement on Balter, and she implicitly is asking, if we were as full of hubris (are we a bad person if we were?) as Balter, would we make the same choices? That’s begging the question of whether we are innately good or bad, rather asking whether we have free will or not.
The law doesn’t really act under the assumption that we don’t have free will mostly because that leave various holes in the process of determining guilt that one could drive a MAC truck through. The law also inherently cannot run under this assumption because the entire premise of most culture’s legal framework is that it is contractual between individual people and individual people/groups with the State. Not only that, the law is based on certain normative frameworks that some acts are good and some acts are evil, like that it is good to respect body and property, and bad to hurt others. It doesn’t really make sense to have a legal system that operates on whether someone is naturally good or bad. We might as well have divine tests as your legal process…like attempted burnings or drownings, and seeing if God preserves or not. Things like a failed hanging was a presumptive declaration of divine innocence in certain areas. People thought this way precisely because people didn’t feel as if they had free will, and were encouraged to think that way by the Church. Even if we don’t have free will, it is best to assume that we do, even if it makes an ass out of you and me. Hey! Asses are perfectly respectable creatures, and I’d be proud to be an ass.
As far as philosophy and neurophilosphy goes, well… First of all, Muslim theology essentially holds the common sense idea of Judas Iscariot that Amanda does, that Judas was playing his role, and that he should be commended for it. Islam can be pretty determinist. Next, one *really* has to put up a less butchered definition of the self before we can even really discuss free will. If you want to read something cool that gets to the nitty gritty of this sort of thing, Blindsight by Peter Watts is a really cool, very hard sci-fi that works through consciousness, intelligence, and free will ideas. Now, here’s the thing, we keep talking about a mixture of environment and brain/intellect/personality that comprises what a person is. That’s not nearly enough to know what’s going on. Let it suffice to say that Dr. Andy Clark, who wrote an overview of some of the latest thoughts in neurophilosphy in his book Being There , would probably disagree with how the self is conceptualized here. There are no final states, for example. No definitive Balter snapshot you can take, with the environment and some Baltar concious mixed. There are many intractibly complex feedback cycles such that it’s difficult to tell what is enviroment and what is person because of thing like: We modifiy our environment because our environment tells us to modify it. Without a solid idea of what comprises an actor, we have no real idea what is acted upon and what are simply phase changes within the actor. Without that idea, we have no idea of what free will is.
Lastly, I kinda don’t like BSG to be the focus of discussion about free will. Moore and Eick tend to have excessively functionalist ideas of who people should be. This comes out in a nasty way with the whole no abortion thing. It was also sort of discussed in that “union” episode, which was really about Manorialism . The Cylons have humanoid forms! They want to take over our way of life, including *breeding*, and they think they know what love means! Love means children! Or whatever.
AMAZING GENIUS COMMENT MARK FOXWELL !!!!!!
In your free time, I think you should pursue this vein of thought, write a book, and get some props.
Your thinking reminds me of the time when mental illness stopped being about talking about sex, and started being about evaluating the chemicals in people’s brains. WHen it stopped being about THOUGHTS and started being about THE PHYSICAL BRAIN.
a great breakthrough, as much as the Freudians hated it.
Amanda,
You still haven’t really made your meaning clear here. Do you mean to say either that a) There is no “free will” as such but rather that human decisions are constrained by of the interplay between environment, personality, experience, socialization, etc. or b) There is no “free will” because all human decisions are wholly the outcome of the material body, personality, environment, etc.?
The later, suggesting that there is no free will in the strong sense is necessarily deterministic in its bent as it suggests that human behavior is nothing but the product of genetics and environment.
I will leave you with a quote from Professor Balagangadhara:
I think that if people were more interested in reality-based outcomes and less in ego-mollifying religious concepts and grand-standing, we’d be better for it.
I don’t entirely disagree, but I don’t see where you then turn for justification. Where do you get the drive to fight injustice?
Another way that the illusion of “free will” is problematic is that in order for person X to feel that he is transcendent and has free will, he traditionally has to believe person Y is animalistic and more constrained by body and environment than he.
Yah. Traditionally, this does happen, but it doesn’t follow that it’s any kind of necessary truth, does it? So the concept of free will, as commonly used as a justification to dominate others, is a problem, but the concept of free will itself is not THE problem.
Anecdata: I became interested in feminism not only through empathy with women I know, but from a profound realization that I was doing “wrong”: that I had a personal responsibility to make choices and interact in the “right” way, and that I didn’t get to blame my socialization up to that point, nor biology, nor anything else. That’s not an exercise of the will?
Maybe you think this conversion is solely due to your writing. Tell me that doesn’t just reeks of specialness.
Magis is right, and so is Mark Foxwell, and Arun is oversimplifying Indian philosophy which has a LOT to say on free will (the notion of karma relies on the idea that people are agents and can act), and Amanda is operating on a really weird existentialist straw-definition of free will. Because why on earth would you WANT to be free from personality or environment or body or any of those things? All of those things are a part of who you are. But none of them determines you completely, and your rational faculties and self-awareness allow you to prioritize these various aspects of yourself when you need to make a decision.
For the curious, the British moral philosopher Mary Midgley has written a lot about this weird idea of “free will” that’s completely unmoored from emotion, biology, family, etc. Midgley describes this notion of free will as “a power of choice without objectives” (I’m paraphrasing), noting that all the things that supposedly constrain free will actually give it definition and purpose and meaning, and that it would be silly to talk of a being without biology or social connections having free will. Basically, that notion of free will comes from Sartre and is a bit similar to the idea that true freedom must entail the freedom to defy gravity. I’ve seen both proponents and opponents of free will assume that freedom entails this existentialist assumption, but it really doesn’t.
Or to quote John Locke: it’s not the will, but the (wo)man that is free.
Fascinating discussion. I tend to agree with Mark Foxwell, although he said it more eloquently and extensively than I could. Free will does exist — it is part of the way humans think, our operating system. I would suspect that evolutionarily, it evolved as a way of reinforcing learning at the cognitive level. I drop a box on my foot, and it hurts, so the next time a similar situation occurs, I think “well last time I dropped the box on my foot. This time I’m not going to do that,” and I experience it as a choice and a (very minor) kind of personal growth, so that I can understand my own learning process. Really what’s happened is that my brain has processed information and led me to act in a way that preserves myself.
Here’s a thought experiment — if you really and truly believed that you had no free will, could you act like it? What would that mean? I don’t think it’s possible, personally; even if you “decide” to just let the winds carry you or to do nothing, you will still experience it as a decision (and so will everyone else). It’s a fundamental part of being human not necessarily because it’s a fact of external, physical reality, but because it’s how our brains process and understand that reality. What’s interesting is that we can grasp the idea that there’s a gap between those two things.
All the social, legal system questions, questions of guilt, questions about do we institute social systems to try and cause some sort of change, follow from understanding that free will is part of the Human OS.
Valentino Braitenberg gives an excellent explanation of “free will” in his outstanding book “Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology” (MIT Press 1984)
a) There is no “free will” as such but rather that human decisions are constrained by of the interplay between environment, personality, experience, socialization, etc. or b) There is no “free will” because all human decisions are wholly the outcome of the material body, personality, environment, etc.?
The latter, in the religious sense of “free will”, because there is no part of a being that is inorganic and can be held cosmically responsible for sins on the soul. I don’t deny critical thinking, learning, etc. I just deny that there’s this extra special part of a person outside of their neurons firing that makes decisions for them.
Magis in not right, in the sense that the ability to think is not separate from neurons firing. There is no will outside of the neurons firing. The highly touted differences between us and animals, or between men and women in some cases, are so much ego-stroking of ourselves. We in fact become better critical thinkers when we accept that we don’t have some internal super-special “free will” that will guide us into the proper moral behavior without doing the hard work of creating our minds and impulses to lead us in the right direction.
Here’s a thought experiment — if you really and truly believed that you had no free will, could you act like it? What would that mean? I don’t think it’s possible, personally; even if you “decide” to just let the winds carry you or to do nothing, you will still experience it as a decision (and so will everyone else).
You do “make decisions”, in a sense, but all you’re doing is weighing options and priorities and neurons are firing. It’s like a computer algorhithm and even if there’s randomness there, it’s not especially controlled by some outside force. If your neurons quit firing, you could not freely will anything.
Again, it’s more a religious question than a secular one—in the reality-based world, the necessity of an extra-special soul-based “free will” is irrelevant. We judge people by their circumstances and environment. The question of whether a person should be punished for knowingly breaking a law is beside the point, since they are being held up as a way to change the environment so that others don’t break the law. But the free will question in determining whether god is a jerk because he made Eve eat the apple is interesting, to my mind the answer is yes.
Christ, stop hyping it, now I’m scared of being dissapointed by season 4. ;-o My dissapointment at The Matrix’s end is still fresh.
Magis in not right, in the sense that the ability to think is not separate from neurons firing.
I think this is an assumption, not anything that has been proven in any empirical sense. And it’s also in your conclusion. This is a problem.
It brings us ’round to what Togolosh was saying yesterday…in a mechanistic system, free will is a lie. Fine.
So we’re left with probability theory; Bohr said that this only illustrated problems with our cognitive framework–limitations in our ability to understand sense data. Others say, no, quantum mechanics is an accurate description of reality, so we can assess the probability of the outcomes of systems based on our knowledge.
Or, what Praxis said.
The way I learned experimental methods is more along the lines of what Bohr said, though. In the absence of anything to the contrary, I’m going to continue to assume that probability theory is a great way to look at reality, but is not itself reality.
That was very nice.
And very largely spot on.
The sub-discipline of neuro-science called
‘Decision science’ has a vocabularly and cerebral kernel
however for the kinds of choice with which one is faced
in encountering two altogether unfamiliar,
but exigent choices…
A decision perhaps involving velocity on unfamiliar terrain
and peril -at dusk- or some especially fast-moving and fresh
video game.
[Might be ‘the Lady and the Tiger’ analogy, can’t remember.]
Then, when we have no base or background or time
to take a considered branch of that fork in the road..
’seat-of-the-pants’ decisioning takes over.
And even then the choice is modulated by experience
and character. [not to mention the character of your bottom].
The chain of causation in choice is, as with so much in thoughts or behaviors , almost interminable.
But it is that image which give body to the free-will illusion to which you allude.
Nice.
There may not be a God or Brahma (et al.) “making” those decisions for us. If there was, then you’d be back to determinism. The idea of free will dictates not that decisions are made for us but rather that we reference the commands of the relevant deity in making our decisions. However, God is not necessary to propound free will. External reference probably is. We reference the social contract constantly however vague it may be. Whether your reference God’s Commandments or Kantian imperatives makes relatively little difference on a practical level.
Missogyny seems to me to be,usually, the product of determinism; i.e. biologic destiny. Women can’t make rational decisions because there is too much estrogen in their systems. While we all may be driven somewhat by our moods it would seem to me to ba a good argument that the rational faculty can be used to minimize any biologic foolery that may be running around in our systems that day whatever our gender.
Probability is no more under our control. Say that it’s not a given in any circumstance that I want ham or salami (or whatever—I’m a vegetarian). Is my choice of one or the other a mighty demonstration of my fundamental soulfulness, or just a random chance of preference?
Magis, what I’m saying is that the fundamental bio-ness of people troubles those arguments of transcendent soul-having, thus the bio-ness is displaced onto women so men can feel superior, closer to the angels. Women are ascribed an inability to think so that men can feel their thinking makes them superior, but it’s both false that women cannot think and false to think that thinking is somehow above biology.
Determinism’s main problem in my eyes is that it judges all of a group by a single standard—women are “hormonal” (what, men aren’t?), ergo all female behavior can be assumed the same and also different from men’s. Again, it’s actually a problem from the argument for this transcendent “free will”—if we accepted that we’re all a bundle of urges, thoughts, personality traits and outside pressures, then this knee jerk need to have women be the holders of bio-ness so men can be elevated wouldn’t be such a big deal.
I can’t be not a woman, I can’t will myself to not be Amanda. That doesn’t mean I’m doomed to live a life of what some other person says is certain for all women. In fact, from my point of view, my being a woman is one of the factors that determines my angry reaction to being told that women are stupider than men.
I’d add that the traditional belief that women don’t have free will in the same sense as men do has led to an odd backlash against feminists—we lay claim to equality with men, so we’re told that we should simply be able to will social equality into place. And that if we fall behind because of discrimination, that’s a failure of will. Which then is used to insinuate that it’s true, women have less will than men. The admission that no woman is an island, that we are all living within environments that constrain our choices, is quietly left out of the discussion.
Yeah, I’ve seen that before. Hell, I’ve done that before: “Ok, feminists, be equal.”
Well, I got better, y’know.
Anyway, I’m perfectly willing to accept that free will is a lot more limited than we tend to believe; but I do not think you have explained it away. We don’t have to “control” probabiiity; the point is that probability theory is an abstraction that speaks to our inability to apprehend reality, rather than reality itself.
Hey Amanda, I have a really hard time understanding what you are saying at comment 37 and 42. From what I *do* understand, I do not think you’re making the best arguments one could make.
And all(and Magis specifically)! Please read the wiki about Determinism! We can’t really have a decent conversation about philosophy without solid definitions. It’s part of why I can’t understand what’s going on…
I can’t be not a woman, I can’t will myself to not be Amanda.
Define “woman”. Define “Amanda”.
Back on an earlier thread before some idiots started spouting off that I was patting myself on the back for not, you know, actually being a rapist, I was trying to point to these ideas. With an existential understanding, we realise that we are both considerably more free than we usually allow ourselves to think, and by that token required to deal with that freedom in defining who we are. All of us.
There is no sign of destiny or foreseeing in the real world.
There are constraints; you do not have a penis.
There are considerably more assumed constraints people do not question in their daily lives - does not having a penis mean you must sit down to pee, that you must defer to those who do not have a penis, or that you must require that your lovers be people who do have a penis? Being aware of the assumed nature of these constraints is necessary to living authentically, even if you choose to go along with them.
Ignoring “destiny” as fictional, we get into the interesting territory of what “you” are - largely the result of brain processes, your upbringing and the environment, or an actual independent agent. I suspect that here we’re talking about two different perspectives on the same question - what is “you”?
I’m reminded of that picture in “Godel Escher Bach” - a solid figure that looked like a “G”, an “E” or a “B” from different angles.
I feel like I have free will. If anyone wishes to argue that I do not have free will - that I am, largely, a slave to my neuroses, my brain chemistry and my environment, they must first show how the illusion of free will differs from the actuality.
If you can’t show any distinction between the “illusion of free will” and “free will” itself, then you can’t meaningfully ask a question about whether one or the other exists.
You have two individuals. One is a (philosophical) zombie who follows programming to arrive at decisions. The other is a human being who uses her free will to arrive at a decision.
They’re both placed in the same situation. The zombie follows his program and arrives at the optimum action to take in that situation, and takes it. The human uses her reason and free will and decides on the optimum action (it’s the same action) and takes it.
What’s the detectable difference between the two of them? What, exactly, does the human have that the zombie does not? It’s this problem that makes “free will” an intractable, useless philosophical construct, IMO. The conclusion of science, etc. is not that all humans are actually robots or zombies; it appears to be that the difference is a difference that is no difference.
Personally I find it much more fruitful and interesting to worry about what people will do, and have done, compared to whether or not they had free will when they did it.
PR, I think rape is a perfectly good example of how, from a secular perspective, the argument about “free will” is extraneous and irrelevant.
Some men don’t rape because they have no internal desire.
For men who do, we can pretty safely say it’s a battle inside between moral qualms, fear of punishment, and desire. For those whose moral qualms and/or fear of punishment trump desire, they will not rape. For those whose desire trumps moral qualms or fear of punishment, the rape will happen. Appeals to “free will” are extraneous. For those of us wishing to stop rape, dwelling on free will is downright dangerous—we’re in a much better position looking for ways to reduce desire, up moral qualms, and introduce fear of punishment. Instead of worrying about whether you are predestined to sin or not, we should care about teaching men to empathize with women, fighting the places where desire to rape is inoculated, upping fear of the justice system, and addressing external pressures that teach men that raping is part of establishing a masculine identity.
If anyone wishes to argue that I do not have free will - that I am, largely, a slave to my neuroses, my brain chemistry and my environment, they must first show how the illusion of free will differs from the actuality.
Er, no, Pho - that’s what you have to show. It’s your positive claim, remember?
You have to show that there would be a detectable difference between illusory free will and “real” free will to defend your own assertion that you really have it; the people who are saying that there isn’t any free will are saying that there’s no difference between illusory free will and real free will - not that there’s a difference to detect.
That there’s a difference to detect is your position, implicitly taken by you when you assert a claim of having “real”, not illusory, free will.
We don’t have to “control” probabiiity; the point is that probability theory is an abstraction that speaks to our inability to apprehend reality, rather than reality itself.
No, wait a minute. Isn’t it one of the conclusions of Bell’s theorem that randomness in the universe isn’t just our inaccurate modeling of “hidden” variables, but that fundamentally there aren’t any hidden variables, it actually is random?
A given atom can only be decayed or not decayed, but somehow in aggregate all atoms of an isotope “know” how to decay statistically consistent with that isotope’s half-life, without any indication or communication amongst themselves about which is supposed to be the next to decay?
Bell’s theorem, to all indications, appears to settle the question of whether or not it’s a deterministic universe - no, at least on the smallest of levels. But I’m a biology major, what do I know?
You have to show that there would be a detectable difference between illusory free will and “real” free will to defend your own assertion that you really have it; the people who are saying that there isn’t any free will are saying that there’s no difference between illusory free will and real free will - not that there’s a difference to detect.
That there’s a difference to detect is your position, implicitly taken by you when you assert a claim of having “real”, not illusory, free will.
I disagree. “I believe I have free will” is a statement which is both (largely) true and one that stands alone.
I do not raise the question of whether I “really have it” In order to raise that question, you must first show a difference between really having it and just believing you do.
I don’t think there is a difference, in the general case. Until someone shows that difference, the belief I have free will is, IMO, exactly the same as the reality.
Amanda, will get back to you when I have time.
I disagree. “I believe I have free will” is a statement which is both (largely) true and one that stands alone.
I can’t determine what you believe, but determining that your belief is true (once you’ve told me what it is) requires that you show us how the difference between illusory free will and real free will - not the other way around, as you put it.
Until someone shows that difference, the belief I have free will is, IMO, exactly the same as the reality.
Without knowing what the reality is, there’s no way to assess that belief. The proper response to an unanswerable question is to say “the answer can’t be known”, not to simply jump to whatever conclusion you want. Your belief that you have free will is not equivalent to having it; it’s equivalent to simply jumping to unsupported conclusions.
Amanda, that was an extremely interesting and profound analysis.
I am probably so fascinated right now because just a moment ago I had been listening to a podcast about Naturalism that the Infidel Guy did with Tom Clark, the founder fo the Center for Naturalism (just go to naturalism.org if you are interested) and they also discussed the topic of free will at length.
You can find the interview here:
http://infidelguy.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=222686
Clark basically argued against this notion of what he called contra-causal or libertarian (in a philosophical, no the political meaning of the word) free will, i.e. the idea there is something inside us that makes us special, some kind of ultimate causation of our will that is not related, determined, caused… whatever word you want to use… by the uncountable factors that make up our own being and our environment.
They used a great Schopenhauer quote:
“Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants.”
And here is an article on Free Will in the NYT science section from January 2007:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/science/02free.html
If you like psychology, you might like the new behaviorist theories…mostly premised on the lack of free will. This is a particularly good introductory text:
http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Behaviorism-Behavior-Culture-Evolution/dp/140511262X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/103-9919499-6595832?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193090766&sr=8-2
Amanda, while I do agree that there is little to no evidence to support the notion of free will, and that most likely it does not exist, you seem to be underestimating the number of significant implications of that.
If free will does not exist, then any “should” statement we make is simply ridiculous wishful thinking, a mere reference to our own feelings. If I say Bush “shouldn’t” have done half the things he did, what am I saying? Am I merely saying I (and others) would be happier if his actions had been different? But his reactions are the result of a causal chain going back to the beginning of the universe, so I’m really saying I would be happier if the universe was fundamentally different from day one, which is just wishful thinking in the extreme. You might as well say we should have all been born on a better planet, and become morally outraged that we weren’t. There’s no reason to feel any more outrage at a human’s actions than a hurricane’s.
One is a (philosophical) zombie who follows programming to arrive at decisions. The other is a human being who uses her free will to arrive at a decision.
They’re both placed in the same situation. The zombie follows his program and arrives at the optimum action to take in that situation, and takes it. The human uses her reason and free will and decides on the optimum action (it’s the same action) and takes it.
This situation can’t be evaluated until you describe what precisely you mean by “following programming” and “making a decision.”
Of course we’re a bundle of urges, and that bundle is held together by things like consciousness and memory. Which enable us to self-evaluate and make decisions.
“I don’t think there is a difference, in the general case. Until someone shows that difference, the belief I have free will is, IMO, exactly the same as the reality.”
I’d say the difference is this - the belief in free will is a description of your experiences, you experience the feeling of being the controller of your destiny. To be true free will would be if the following statement was true: “Given a certain state (say the position and motion of every particle in the universe), multiple outcomes are possible.”
Granted the truth or falsity of that statement are completely impossible to prove, our understanding of physics (ignoring, just for the moment notions of uncertainty and probablity), seems to imply that the above statement is false, and therefore free will (as defined by that statement) does not exist.
There is no free will for the same reason that there is no god: Occam’s razor. Adding god or free will to an explanation of the operation of the universe, or human action, adds nothing. There is no test to verify free will or god, and adding them into the equation doesn’t improve prediction.
Many non-religious have an impression of free will, too. And there have been deterministic interpretations of Christianity. But more fundamentally, religion flatters our desire to not believe in our own deaths.
Since Hume, philosophy has decided that uncertainty about our senses, even our existence (cogito ergo sum, an elementary tautology, doesn’t answer, but rather begs the question) is impossible to dismiss. So we don’t know for sure that we die. Indeed, we don’t. As soon as I am dead, I am nothing that can be made the subject of a meaningful sentence anymore. It is more than just semantics to say that I may not exist then, but I am not dead. I am not. Not dead. Not nothing. (We are not talking about a body, but a personality).
But more importantly, I am unique. I sure seem to be the same as every other human, but am I? I never see through anyone else’s eyes. Nor think with their mind. It is an assumption to imagine that since flesh seems temporal that I, like everyone else, will die. A reasonable assumption, perhaps, but only susceptible to proof with my own death.
Is there a god? If I can’t adduce definitive evidence, even in theory, then how can I agree to this theory of god? But there can’t be, even in theory, any evidence beyond analogy, that I will die. We just don’t believe it. We don’t, quite literally, even dream it.
And that is why we make up religion. Bad reasons to justify what we believe on instinct (to paraphrase Nietzsche). I don’t really believe in my own death, because it’s not certain. Of course I’m a little unsure about my existing at all, so maybe it’s just me.
In re Sharon/Boomer having free will — she’s not just a pawn of the humans, but also of the cylons. She was sent after Helo to procreate, because she possessed (and, it seems, was created for the purpose of possessing) the capacity to love, which the cylons had determined was critical to biological reproduction. So the cylons set her up to get pregnant, which got her to having Hera, which put her in the position of needing protection from humans, which is tied up with her allegiance to the fleet and humanity. Her expression of “free will” was not free in any meaningful sense of the word — she was created to eventually need humans at the expense of needing cylons.
Petey Wheatstraw:
We justify outcomes in the usual ways: Greatest good for the greatest number, or whatever your criteria are.
And what you call choose, I call human action. Of course you choose which human actions you like to call free will. Some things you do, you call free will, others things you do with just as much contemplation, and call addiction or brainwashing or habit, or blame it on the devil, or whatever.
MikeEss:
I think chaotic systems are deterministic. Just unpredictably so.
PhoenicianRomans:
If you wish to argue that there is a free will, you must show how that adds to our ability to explain our behavior beyond theories that don’t identify this ether, free will, which you interpose in your theory of behavior, between our brains and muscles. Or is it before the central nervous system that this free will resides? Or doesn’t it reside in anything physical?
It’s as confusing as adding god to your science.
There is no free will for the same reason that there is no god: Occam’s razor. Adding god or free will to an explanation of the operation of the universe, or human action, adds nothing.
At this point, Samuel Johnson punched E. in the nose and shouted “I refute you thus!”
If you wish to argue that there is a free will, you must show how that adds to our ability to explain our behavior beyond theories that don’t identify this ether, free will, which you interpose in your theory of behavior, between our brains and muscles.
Plain and simple. People do things. A causal chain of events which ignores a concept of agency cannot be demonstrated - you have posited one, but such a theory has no predictive value. You cannot demonstrate any difference between a causal chain too chaotic to have any predictive value, and the non-existence of such a causal chain.
It may be that people do things simply because neuron A fires thus, neuron B fires thus, and chemical concentration C is at this level - but can you show this before the event?
On the other hand, a chain of events which allows human agency has predictive value. People do things because they want to do them.
In that that human agency is self-reflective, “free will” is as good a term as any for one of the elements in determining that agency.
Boomer, a Cylon, may or may not be programmed to do certain things. She is, however, aware of herself making choices. That awareness modifies those choices - she is aware of herself as an agent, and her concept of herself as an agent both modifies the choices she makes and is molded by those choices.
She has free will. Perhaps not to the same degree as her human peers, but she has it.
Amanda, the more you talk about what “free will” means and how it relates to the soul, the more confused I get.
Based on this:
I was going to ask, “If a decision is based on neither external factors nor internal personality, then isn’t all that’s left random chance? Wouldn’t a truly “free” being think that murdering was the same as not murdering?”
And I still want to ask a question somewhat like that, but then I read this:
So it seems to me you also don’t think chance is an example of free will.
So as far as I can tell, for you, free will is something that is not influenced by external factors, nor internal factors, and yet is not random.
In other words, free will is neither random nor non-random.
And that certainly does sound like a confused and unlikely thing.
But, who, exactly, thinks that’s what free will is? It certainly isn’t what any of the laymen I’ve met have considered free will to be, nor does it seem to be a noticeably popular religious viewpoint.
first of all, the idea that a soul has no personality is, um, problematic. As far as I can tell, most Christians seem to think your soul would have essentially the same mind as you would. Aztec philosophers often said that a soul didn’t exist until a person had developed a personality.
For most of us, we still feel we have free will even if our choices are constrained by some factors, and, in fact, such constraint almost seems necessary; many of us would NOT define chance as being synonymous with free will.
Who, precisely, has expounded this “neither random nor non-random” view of free will?
“I think chaotic systems are deterministic. Just unpredictably so.”
I guess there’s no reason to go on then…
…and, of course, it was already fated that I would react that way…
This situation can’t be evaluated until you describe what precisely you mean by “following programming” and “making a decision.”
It’s actually the reverse, I think. Until you can evaluate the difference in the two individuals’ responses to the situation, you can’t begin to define the difference between following programming and making willful decisions.
It may be that people do things simply because neuron A fires thus, neuron B fires thus, and chemical concentration C is at this level - but can you show this before the event?
On the other hand, a chain of events which allows human agency has predictive value. People do things because they want to do them.
Wait, what? You expect us to believe that people-as-zombies, with no free will, simply causality and mechanics, are inherently unpredictable; yet, free them from causality with free will, and they’re suddenly a lot more predictable?
Christ, Pho, how do you always manage to get things completely backwards?
PhoenicianRomans:
A causal chain of events cannot be proven for anything. Not since Hume’s analysis. We are making assumptions. And in the free will world view, there is just one more assumption to make. And thus Occam punches the good doctor Johnson right back.
I think that’s roughly my point, Christopher—free will is a concept that was invented mostly to justify belief in the concept of “sin”. It seems unfair for god to create human beings to be a certain way and then punish some of them for it by throwing them into hell, right? So the concept of “free will” steps in, the part of you that god set “free” to make your own decisions.
I don’t think it has a secular purpose, but since our secular thinking in our culture is descended from our religious heritage, even atheists feel they have to grapple with the concept of free will. But what does it even mean to have a part of you that’s free? Free from what? Circumstance? Biology? We don’t really know. So I reject the discourse as meaningful as a secular thing. In religion, the idea that god sets people free to make decisions is important, but ultimately illogical as well. In terms of the show, you see the concept grappled with in a biological sense (Are Cylons and humans different? Not really—both are a series of urges and responses) and in a religious sense. In both cases, the concept of “free will” ends up being rejected as the hazy, ill-thought-out self-flattery that it is. It’s tied to the notion that there’s a special self that is separate from biology, memory, environment, etc. But the Cylons give lie to this—they are copies of each other and begin to differ from each other not as an act of will, but as a result of different experiences.
PhoenicianRomans:
So you think that human behavior is MORE predictable than rat behavior since the rat doesn’t have human agency? You are just being silly now.
I’m confused by this entire discussion.
To me, “free will” means that the individual has choices, and freely selects among them based on who he or she is. Who he or she is, is composed of an assemblage of genetics, experiences, and subroutines running in the brain. But ego — the portion of the mind that is consciousness — can select among several choices that seem appealing, and freely choose one based on the priorities that ego chooses to prioritize.
So there’s no contradiction between “we are influenced by outside sources” and free will, or “we are a bundle of neurons” and free will. We *are* the bundle of neurons, therefore its firing *is* who we are, and therefore we are exercising free will. Certainly I can’t freely choose to write this post in Russian, because I don’t speak Russian, so we do not have infinite choices — but did anyone ever think we did? Free will never included, for example, the concept that we could fly if we really, really want to. Our free will is always constrained by the available choices. I cannot buy a trip into outer space no matter how much I might want to, because I don’t have the money. I cannot father a child, because I am a woman. I cannot be President of the United States, because my personality lacks various traits that seem to be required to win an election.
But I can choose to have a child or not have a child — and I have. I can choose whether to write a novel or a blog post or sit on my butt reading a book or do some chores or do some billable work — and I do. I can choose whether or not to kill some asshole who pisses me off. I can choose whether or not to treat my kids well. The fact that it’s processes within my mind making these decisions doesn’t mean I don’t have free will — these processes *are* my free will. These processes are my mind, and if my mind chooses, then the mechanism of that choice are these processes.
It is possible to find out that there are constraints on my choices that I wasn’t really aware of — for instance, recent studies that even when people know what’s going on they eat more from a bigger plate that’s full than a smaller plate that’s full. But these things are much like my choice not to jump off a building because it’s the fastest way to get downstairs. Most of the time, I don’t think through “Oh, that’s right, I don’t want to jump out the window because it’ll break my bones and could kill me;” I just go down the stairs by rote without thinking about the constraint on my thinking. When we don’t *know* of a constraint that’s present, sure it can shake our belief in free will… but I believe that will has *always* been known to be free within constraints, and finding out that you don’t know everything that constrains you is not inconsistent with you having free will in the first place.
I think free will is our belief that we know ourselves. By the time we are adults, we know our own brains well enough that we can usually (but, critically, not always) tell what we are going to do before we do it.
Of course this is just the cortical, executive function of higher brains, doing what it does, which is evaluating what the rest of the brain is doing, and deciding what works and what doesn’t.
I assume that most of the apologists for free will don’t think an ant, or a 2 wk fetus has free will. Does a day old baby? Two month old? Two year old? How can a mother better predict what a two year old is going to do than the two year old itself? Is the mother exerting the free will for the child? When does free will begin, and in what part of the brain does it reside? Does it sneak up on us gradually? Do we all have it in equal parts?
You can choose chocolate over vanilla ice cream, but can you choose to LIKE chocolate more than vanilla? You choose chocolate like a robin chooses to mate with a robin not a blue jay. You call it free will, but your mom knew all along.
Alara Rogers:
Have you ever told yourself that you were going to do some chore today, then not done it? So your free will just changed? Why? Did you will yourself to ignore your promise to yourself?
Free will has no explanatory power, which is why it has been banished from polite scientific discourse. Like references to god. Perhaps all our physics is due to the will of Allah. But since that adds nothing to the predictive power of our science, we have quietly dropped references to Allah (and free will) in the scientific literature.
Sorry for the drive-by comment, but my kitten just went into heat and I have to seal the house.
Amanda’s recurring use of “mind/brain=computer” is driving me crazy. There is, of course, an analogy there–just not an identity. The mind is like a computer–if a computer were the CNS of an animal, and if the computer had hopes and fears; and if the computer evolved over eons to value family, clan, and fidelity; and if the computer mythologized explanations for the transience and mystery of awareness or consciousness; and so on and on.
Of course this is just the cortical, executive function of higher brains, doing what it does, which is evaluating what the rest of the brain is doing, and deciding what works and what doesn’t.
Which is exactly what free will is.
It’s actually the reverse, I think. Until you can evaluate the difference in the two individuals’ responses to the situation, you can’t begin to define the difference between following programming and making willful decisions.
Sure you can. I am conscious and my computer isn’t, for one thing.
What you mean is that you can’t externally define the difference between following programming and making willful decisions. That’s a whole other kettle of fish.
By focusing on external evaluation, you are going by a behaviorist model of decision-making which was rejected a long time ago because psychologists and psychiatrists realized that ignoring an organism’s inner mental life was simply not scientifically viable. And inner mental life is what makes the difference between a human (or even a bonobo or a chimp) and a computer. It’s damn HARD to get data on inner lives, but there’s just no way around the obligation to TRY to do so, and psychologists have had some success with it.
You can choose chocolate over vanilla ice cream, but can you choose to LIKE chocolate more than vanilla? You choose chocolate like a robin chooses to mate with a robin not a blue jay.
You can choose to ignore your liking for chocolate, for whatever reason. You can choose to mate with a chimp if you’re really set on it, though I wouldn’t recommend it, whereas a robin probably can’t choose to mate with a blue jay.
Besides, animals have free will. Just not to the same degree that we do. Freedom is a matter of degree, always.
So your free will just changed? Why? Did you will yourself to ignore your promise to yourself?
Well…yes. Why not? Free will changes based on the brain’s re-thinking and re-evaluating of situations. You’re all basically whacking away at this strawman of mystical transcendental free will, which is certainly a religious concept, but it’s not one that’s really necessary in this discussion.
So you think that human behavior is MORE predictable than rat behavior since the rat doesn’t have human agency? You are just being silly now.
Rats also do things because they want to.
I’m contrasting agency to the assumption that there’s, in theory, a deterministic explanation for our actions.
Sorry for the drive-by comment, but my kitten just went into heat and I have to seal the house.
Oh NOOOOES!!
Let’s make this simple.
Amanda is extending the concept that free will is useless and damaging from its use in the religeous experience…to that free will is useless in general.
Make no mistake about it, I do not believe in free will. I believe in the utility of the concept of free will. Neither zero or infinity are numbers, yet we use them with regularity in number conceptualizations. We use imaginary numbers (or at least I certainly have, enough to believe in imaginary numbers and know how crucial they are to figuring many things) as well. Numbers themselves have only limited amount of reality. Doesn’t mean that they don’t exist at certain levels.
It is the same with free will. We use it as one of the many utility-generating artifacts of language, and it can be used for self-reflection, examining goals, as well as estimating the intentions of other people. We have to pretend that we understand others to have any chance of anticipating our futures to our benefits…
“By focusing on external evaluation, you are going by a behaviorist model of decision-making which was rejected a long time ago because psychologists and psychiatrists realized that ignoring an organism’s inner mental life was simply not scientifically viable. And inner mental life is what makes the difference between a human (or even a bonobo or a chimp) and a computer.”
WHAT?
How do you know that a computer doesn’t have an inner life but a chimp does, if you discount external factors as evidence?
I beg you to read what you’ve just written again, because I can’t honestly see how it can possibly hold any meaning.
None of the anti-free will types here are saying that we don’t have an “inner life”, what we’re denying is your unsupported claim that it has a fundamentaly different nature to their “outer life”.
I really don’t see how saying “HAH! My unsupported claim is also unfalsifiable and relies entirely on unmeasurables!” is supposed to STRENGTHEN your argument.
Basically you’re confirming Amanda’s thesis that free will belief is a consequence of egotism. You have produced no argument that doesn’t rely on pure egocentrism.
“Neither zero or infinity are numbers, yet we use them with regularity in number conceptualizations. We use imaginary numbers (or at least I certainly have, enough to believe in imaginary numbers and know how crucial they are to figuring many things) as well.”
ARGH!
Zero and (certain kinds of infinity) are too numbers, so are “imaginary numbers”, so are negative numbers, so are counting numbers. Furthemore they are all as real as one another, saying zero is “less real” than one is wrong. Real doesn’t mean “solid”. Denying the reality of numbers is exactly like denying the reality of colours, a criminal misuse of language.
As you were, malpollyon.
Yeah, they are numbers, up to a certain point. But I advise you not to get any philosopher riled up about it. I’ve certainly gotten upbraided by certain people on this topic when I said they were numbers, way back then.
Sure you can. I am conscious and my computer isn’t, for one thing.
You say you are, but I can program my computer to do the same thing; indeed, the very format in which we’re communicating is the perfect medium for a Turing test, which means I really have no idea if you’re a conscious person or not. You could simply be a zombie following a program that leads you to report, to all questioning, that you’re conscious. Perhaps the program even reports that to you.
What you mean is that you can’t externally define the difference between following programming and making willful decisions.
External, internal, there’s no difference if the subjective experience of consciousness is part of the zombie’s program. The internal experience still can’t be distinguished.
At any rate, when you say “I’m conscious and my computer is not”, you still can’t draw any conclusions from that without a definition of consciousness, and if by “conscious” you mean “have free will”, you’re simply engaged in circular reasoning.
But I can choose to have a child or not have a child — and I have.
The point is that you chose according to a set of parameters that was pretty certain—if a factor had changed, like finances or desire, then your choice would have. Your choice was not made in a vacuum, but is a result of who you are. Which is why I’m not denouncing free will so much as suggesting it’s irrelevant, since who we are and what forces act upon us is all that matters.
Amanda’s recurring use of “mind/brain=computer” is driving me crazy. There is, of course, an analogy there–just not an identity. The mind is like a computer–if a computer were the CNS of an animal, and if the computer had hopes and fears; and if the computer evolved over eons to value family, clan, and fidelity; and if the computer mythologized explanations for the transience and mystery of awareness or consciousness; and so on and on.
Yep, and what I find brilliant about this show is that they gave up asking if a computer that bright would have free will and realized the real question is that whether or not a computer indistinguishable from us shows whether or not the conceit of “free will” is unimportant and a myth of ego.
Anyways, the point is that natural integers, complex integers, irrational numbers, zeros, infinities, all have a rather contextual basis. There isn’t a descriptive plane of reality that easily holds all these concepts together using one set of explanatory tools.
and malpollyon, if numbers were real and you could prove it, you’d be pretty famous for disproving implicitly Godel’s theorem and saying that numbers are more real than simply the definition we ascribe to them.
Just comparing that with free will. There more than egotism about free will.
Amanda, this is simply too static.
Can you even pick out a slice of time and deconstruct all the reasons for someone to have a baby or not?
Causuality is too fluid for anyone, even for the actor, to always, or even most of the time, choose the reasons for his or her decisions.
What is certain might not be so, even if the actor thinks s/he is certain of the circumstance.
This really brings me back to the last part of The Matrix Reloaded, where the Architect watches Neo already having made a choice before Neo exits stage left. The consequences of the nonexistence of free will was a running theme in that movie. The movie also makes the argument that we, humans, cannot cope in any schema, whether utopian or dystopian, without at least the illusion that there is some kind of choice, that someone has the free will to choose it, because the greater abstractions of community and bondage requires that illusitory free will as a gestalt generator.
Forgot to add:
This is so because free will is useful as a means to placemark time and space in physical, social, and intellectual history, past and future. When you look forward, or backward at you Dao, so to speak.
@shah8
If you don’t think there’s a common set of descriptive tools that hold together “natural integers, complex integers, irrational numbers, zeros, infinities” then I advise you to shut the hell up until you know what you’re talking about. There certainly is, and it’s called set theory.
As for your reference to Godel’s famous theorem, to borrow a phrase: “I do not think it means what you think it means.” I really don’t understand why you think I’m disagreeing with Godel here, he had a quite platonic concept of number. Anyway, “red” has no meaning besides that which we ascribe it, do you not believe in “red” either? How about “chair”?
Anyway, “red” has no meaning besides that which we ascribe it, do you not believe in “red” either?
“Red” describes electromagnetic radiation of about wavelength 625-740, it’s not just what we “ascribe” to it. Like “river.”
“Number”, on the other hand, is not a physical property of any object, it’s a property of sets of objects, and while the objects are real the set that contains them exists only in our minds, the way words do.
On the other hand, I know mathematicians often fall prey to wanting their field of study to be “important” by falsely concluding that the things they study and invent are actually “discoveries” of real things, like the scientists do, but it’s important that they not be encouraged in their folly.
I’d still argue that that the *idea* of free will (in the sense of the possibility of a person having made different choices in the exact same situation) is necessary to reasonably feel moral outrage at any person’s actions (anymore than feeling moral outrage at fires and hurricanes).
““Red” describes electromagnetic radiation of about wavelength 625-740[nm], it’s not just what we “ascribe” to it. Like “river.”
“Number”, on the other hand, is not a physical property of any object, it’s a property of sets of objects, and while the objects are real the set that contains them exists only in our minds, the way words do.”
You just claimed with a straight face that “wavelength 625-740″ is a physical property, but “number” isn’t. Here’s a hint to the audience: 625 is a number, so is 740.
You seem confused, if red is a physical property, then so is two. Both are measurable, both are useful, on what grounds do you claim that “red” is more real than “two”?
malpollyon, oh hell yeah I know what I’m talking about. From the Wiki, I can simply copy and paste this statment:
bad post, retrying post…Preview didn’t work
malpollyon, oh hell yeah I know what I’m talking about. From the Wiki, I can simply copy and paste this statment:
Brandon [at 6:18 pm], you stated:
“Given a certain state (say the position and motion of every particle in the universe), multiple outcomes are possible.”
That is actually true (such as I understand quantum physics) at every given moment. So I’m not sure how the rest of your conclusion follows:
“…our understanding of physics …seems to imply that the above statement is false, and therefore free will (as defined by that statement) does not exist.”
If I am parsing your argument as you meant it, you seem to imply that at each moment multiple outcomes are NOT possible (in physics) and therefore free will can NOT exist. Perhaps you meant quite the opposite, but in case anyone else also interpreted you this way, let me bring up Schrödinger’s cat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat
oh bugger it…the html works in the preview screen, but not in the friggin’ post…
Roughly speaking, the Gödel statement, G, asserts: “G cannot be proven true”. If G were able to be proven true under the theory’s axioms, then the theory would have a theorem, G, which contradicts itself, and thus the theory would be inconsistent. But if G were not provable, then it would be true (for G expresses this very fact) and thus the theory would be incomplete.
The argument just given is in ordinary English and thus not mathematically rigorous. In order to provide a rigorous proof, Gödel represented statements by numbers; then the theory, which is already about numbers, also pertains to statements, including its own. Questions about the provability of statements are represented as questions about the properties of numbers, which would be decidable by the theory if it were complete. In these terms, the Gödel sentence is a claim that there does not exist a natural number with a certain property. A number with that property would be a proof of inconsistency of the theory. If there were such a number then the theory would be inconsistent, contrary to hypothesis. So, assuming the theory is consistent (as done in the theorem’s hypothesis) there is no such number, and the Gödel statement is true, but the theory cannot prove it. An important conceptual point is that we must assume that the theory is consistent in order to state that this statement is true.”
I am unsure why you think that the existance of propositions that are undecidable from one specific axiom set proves your point. That is why (uncharitiably I admit) assumed you didn’t know what you were talking about. Again, what do you mean by real? I am genuinely unable to concieve of a definition which allows “red” but denies “two”.
Iolight,
That’s why I said “setting aside uncertainty and probability”. Granted those complicate the issue. But from what I understand, at the level of neurons in the brain and human action, things are deterministic for all practical purposes (i.e. there was no remotely reasonable chance that gunman X wouldn’t have pulled the trigger in situation Y).
Is it really controversal to say that there are differing and contexual levels of reality?
I’ve done quite a bit of math and physics when I was in school studying biology and materials science. I’m reasonably well familiar with a system of particles and actions that you cannot reduce, like an electron in a pi bond. Or why we can think of everything as both a particle and a wave. Going outside of physics, how traffic jams form and other aspects of the dynamics of complexity.
All I was just saying was that not everything can be reduced, ultimately, and that Amanda was wrong to dismiss the concept of free will entirely because it’s not true. That is, in certain contexts, it is axiomatic that free will does exist.
probably should comment at all since I don’t watch TV.
But I have seen some pretty good arguments that our minds are not organized to function as freely as we perceive or hope they are .
Brandon,
Well… arguably for the neurons to reach a state of polarity in which to trigger further action (e.g. downstream neurotransmitter release; muscle reflex) a certain electrical potential must first occur. The yes/no status of this potential in the brain could be traced to events on a quantum level.
I’m being philosophical at this point; I don’t know if such an argument has been made in serious scientific inquiry and it’s been years since my college bio classes…
Hmm, some quick Googling suggests the verdict is still out on that one (though ion channels apparently do follow deterministic models, as per your assertion). Cheers!
Shah8 I have no qualm with numbers being contextual. I was merely reacting to your claim that that makes them less real, the only difference it makes is that you need to specify a context when using them. I still don’t see what you think Godel adds to the conversation, It’s like claiming that computer science doesn’t exist because of the halting problem.
Misunderstandings?:
Why should we suppose that morally-acting people at the best of times are not also deterministically bound to their actions? If culture has trained me to do the right thing, and my actions rely upon my cultural training, I’m cool with that.
I think I’m going to puke. What are you talking about?? The universe doesn’t give two shits about you and it’s never insinuated otherwise. Other people care about you, and you insult them to suggest that some imaginary Oneness is more important than these people’s actually-existing lives and feelings.
I am no mathematician, but I don’t think chaos theory invokes randomness at all. It is, if I recall, a handy shortcut for practically indescribable complexity of the sort that is beyond human modeling, but it has nothing to say one way or the other about determinism.
I’ll have to come back later to bitch about other posts.
You just claimed with a straight face that “wavelength 625-740″ is a physical property, but “number” isn’t. Here’s a hint to the audience: 625 is a number, so is 740.
625 nm is a measurement of a physical property - wavelength. 625 is a number, a concept used to specify how many things are in a set, like a set defined as “the number of peaks in a graphical representation of the wavelength of the light perceived as red by human beings.”
Bu,t prove me wrong. Hand me 625 - like, physically, right into my hand - without handing me 625 things. Go on, give it a try. If numbers are real things you should have no problem with that.
You seem confused, if red is a physical property, then so is two.
You seem confused. Just because red is a physical property, it doesn’t make two such a property. You’ve committed a category error - red is a property of objects, two is a property of sets. And sets don’t exist.
the html works in the preview screen, but not in the friggin’ post…
You have a tag scope problem. This:
<tag 1><tag 2></tag 1></tag 2>
can’t work because tags need to nest; they need to close in the reverse order that they are opened, like this:
<tag 1><tag 2></tag 2></tag 1>
That is, in certain contexts, it is axiomatic that free will does exist.
If it’s “axiomatic”, then its only axiomatic because you’ve chosen to make it an axiom.
I don’t find that terribly rigorous. It would seem like there’s nothing that I can’t simply axiom up into existence, if “axiomatic that it exists” is suddenly to be taken as corroborating evidence.
Chet, the certain context was the givaway…
in this case, there are community standards that make the assumption that we have free will, under this, that and and the other circumstance, but not that, this, and the last situation.
In other words, I’m saying that humans tends to need to declare that there is free will, so as to help certain social constructs to function.
and not merely for egotistical reasons
I’m not ideologically opposed to the idea of free will, but I think the arguments against it are very strong.
However:
Bush, Cheney, Rumseld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Ashcroft, Blair, Howard, Merkel, et al, are dangers to humanity. It doesn’t matter whether they could control themselves or not. They cannot be trusted to walk free among us. We must protect ourselves from people like this, and prison is a fine means of doing so.
What else do you suppose that I might be? Perhaps I can account for it if you name it.
I won’t speak for Amanda, though I won’t be surprised if she agrees: people who feel the same way as me don’t want to “wipe out” others who disagree with us. I recognize the value of enshrining liberty of conscience, not least because if you are in danger for your beliefs then it’s only a matter of time before I’m in danger for my beliefs.
I’ve experienced critical thinking, I think. But this has not convinced me that I was genuinely able to have chosen otherwise than what I finally chose.
This I must disagree with. To abandon ourselves to “God’s will” (or nihilism) is to choose inaction, is to say that nothing is worth doing. There is no automatic leap from “I did not control this” to “nothing is worth doing.” I have noticed results of my own actions that pleased me. Those things were worth doing. I had to be motivated to do them. I was motivated, even though I have no particular belief in free will. Thus, it is a non sequitur to propose that determinism necessarily equals nihilism. I have experienced a counterexample.
“Bu,t prove me wrong. Hand me 625 - like, physically, right into my hand - without handing me 625 things. Go on, give it a try. If numbers are real things you should have no problem with that.”
Chet, I’ll hand you “625″ just as soon as you hand me “red”, and no cheating by handing me a red THING. I respectfully contend that it is not I who is making the category error here. I say it again real doesn’t mean SINGULAR NOUN, I don’t have to hand you something to prove it’s real.
I can measure two just as you can measure red. “Does this bucket contain two balls?” is just as empirical a question as “Does this bucket contain red balls?”. Again there is no essential difference and to assert otherwise is a category error.
Common and probably respectable argument. What are those constructs, though? The justice system isn’t one of them. We can judge someone a danger, and protect ourselves from that person via prison, without judging that they hurt us because of free will.
Grammar RWA oh yeah?
It’s not about judgement. It’s about understanding, especially for the community to see justice.
For example, how does a legal system that makes no judgement on free will of any of it’s participants judge an incident where someone ?mistakenly? shoots somebody else in self defense? It isn’t always easily detectable as to what is acceptable personal Dao (personal neologism) and what isn’t. It usually winds up being about what systems of normative behavior is encouraged by the community. Is it always right to shoot someone in self defense, even if you’re not sure the other guy was hostile? Are people who shoot first and asks questions later necessarily a hazard to the community?
Making an assumption that someone has free will can make it *much* easier to determine whether someone is a hazard to the community or not, and vastly easier to determine the pluses and minuses of the components of justice in a community.
It can be an excellent heurist kind of thing for all manner of things.
This was worth saying. There can be egotistical reasons for imagining that we have free will, but there can be strictly neutral, observational reasons for it as well.
Eh, not every Christian at the time was a Calvinist? Is it an absurd oversimplification for me to think that I’ve answered you, here?
What on earth else could it be?
Many christian cultures did trials by god, protestant and catholic alike.
How does a legal system that has some expectation of free will judge such an incident? I suggest that the problems for the non-free case exist just as vividly for the freely-supposed case.
I suspect I do not have free will, but I can imagine a situation in which I might want to shoot someone and pretend it was self defense, and I can imagine a situation in which I might think I am firing in self defense only to later realize that dude was reaching for his wallet, not a gun.
I think this situation occurs regardless of whether free will exists, and I think juries can handle it either way. The dude who wants to shoot, just to shoot, needs be locked up to protect the rest of us. The dude who made a mistake, may safely be given probation.
Am I missing something?
Or, to finish the example, perhaps if I shot the dude who was reaching for his wallet, I’m too dangerous to the community and should be locked up anyway. Certainly a community’s choice. But I fail to see how whether or not I’m judged a loose cannon depends upon my free will, rather than my itchy trigger finger.
I will not attempt to make an argument for or against the free will here. However I find it a bit ironic that on a deep personal level we do not have a choice as to whether to believe in it. I think that our frontal cortex, the “rational” decision-making part of our brain functions only with the assumption that it is actually making decisions, that free will in fact exists. Not even the most ardent determinist can disbelieve in free will to their very core. Otherwise they would become feral at best and catatonic at worst.
While everyone personally accepts free will on an implicit level, it behooves those working in the social sciences to dismiss it. Psychology is the discipline I am studying, and I know very well that it would cease to have scientific meaning without deterministic explanations for thought and behavior.
That we think of thought and behavior differently in academic discourse and personal cognition is not really bothersome to me. Thinking and studying thought are very different things.
I’ve been the victim of injustice, and through such experiences I’ve decided that it sucks and so no one should be the victim of injustice. Sweet caramel Jesus, I can’t imagine how this is difficult to understand. I thought it literally went without saying. This is preschool stuff.
Susan Blackmore swears up and down that she has no experience of having free will. I cannot find the particular essay where she explains this; perhaps you can if you’re interested. She claims that the feeling of being non-free has come about though meditation, if I remember correctly.
I think this is blatantly false. If free will does not exist, humans are still mutable. History demonstrates this; people change, cultures change. It is certainly possible to initiate change, even if one is not a free agent in doing so. I might be determined by cultural forces to have become a progressive. The notable thing, then, is that I was determined by cultural forces, and those forces did not arise without people being motivated to bring them about, in the decades before I was born. It also doesn’t matter whether those people were culturally determined or not; their actions had a measurable effect.
I hope that instead we can have a justice system that intends only to protect us from demonstably dangerous people. Insofar as this “makes an example of” anyone, that’s fine, but I don’t think that theatrics should ever be a goal of the courts. I imagine we can get the desired effects from really considering how much of a threat any given person is and protecting ourselves accordingly (jail, monitored probation, house arrest, what have you).
Grammar RWA: “I’ve been the victim of injustice, and through such experiences I’ve decided that it sucks and so no one should be the victim of injustice.”
I agree with the sentiment, though it’s still odd to think about - by saying there “should” be a lack of future injustice, you’re ultimately saying that the first instants of the universe (and/or the more recent results of subatomic pure randomness), should have been other than what they are, which in one sense seems as absurd as saying we “should” have been born in an entirely different universe - each an equally impossible alternative.
Grammar RWA, my argument was not that free will mode is better than determinist modes in terms of practical outcomes. My argument was that it was *easier*, and as a process, better utility arises.
Odd, perhaps. Only insofar as those early “shoulds” are understood as appealing to someone who can take account of them and react accordingly. As an atheist I can only appeal to other humans.
It’s no more or less odd than saying that the Holocaust should not have happened; there the speaker is appealing to those millions of Europeans who had some influence upon the outcome, but who ultimately failed to helpfully intervene.
In both cases I’m appealing to a brick wall of history. That’s always the case in retrospect.
We are not going to change the past. This does not mean that the future does not hold the possibility of peace. It is always necessary to not confuse determinism with nihilism. “Whatever will be” will not be without our active involvement.
shah8, I’ll have to look over your argument again then. I’m really not sure of where belief in free will makes a difference, but I’m not categorically stating that it does not.
Grammar RWA: “This does not mean that the future does not hold the possibility of peace.”
It either holds peace or it doesn’t, the word “possibility” refers only to our own ignorance of what is already as inevitable as the past.
I guess what seems strange is that something like a tsunami or an earthquake *feels* more inevitable that a holocaust, when reality both were always just as certain.
Alright - let’s get to it. I apologise, Amanda: there’s not enough time at work to concentrate fully on my spare moments off.
PR, I think rape is a perfectly good example of how, from a secular perspective, the argument about “free will” is extraneous and irrelevant.
Some men don’t rape because they have no internal desire.
For men who do, we can pretty safely say it’s a battle inside between moral qualms, fear of punishment, and desire. For those whose moral qualms and/or fear of punishment trump desire, they will not rape. For those whose desire trumps moral qualms or fear of punishment, the rape will happen. Appeals to “free will” are extraneous. For those of us wishing to stop rape, dwelling on free will is downright dangerous—we’re in a much better position looking for ways to reduce desire, up moral qualms, and introduce fear of punishment. Instead of worrying about whether you are predestined to sin or not, we should care about teaching men to empathize with women, fighting the places where desire to rape is inoculated, upping fear of the justice system, and addressing external pressures that teach men that raping is part of establishing a masculine identity.
Okay, let’s distinguish here between the impulse and the desire to do something. An impulse to do something can arise from our animal natures, and we don’t really have any control over this. It’s also considerably healthier to acknowledge them than to suppress them - I have impulses to rape, kill or assault, and I believe most people if they are honest will acknowledge the same.
The desire to do something implies a continual assessment of the environment with an eye to meeting a goal. Some of those goals involve actualising impulses, some involve modifing those impulses, some involve goals which come from other sources. You can choose to act on those desires or not based on competing goals.
I do not want to rape my friend. I do desire, to some degree, to have sex with her - but not enough to bother making a play for her while she’s happy with her boyfriend. I also want her to move house now before the Xmas rush, to stop dating assholes who hit her, and to read more - and those things I do nag her about.
Stating it’s a clash of moral qualms is incomplete; moral impulses operate on several levels and differ from person to person. I do not consider it immoral to have sex with a person to whom I am not married, assuming I am satisfied he or she is willing. Others might. Some may consider forced sex with their spouse to be moral. I do not.
I discount the fear of punishment. I suspect very few would-be-actual-rapists are deterred by the threat of punishment.
We can look at morality then. We can consider the intensity of moral belief and the quality of moral belief - the level of moral development. A society can try to enforce morality by ensuring people intensely believe in the propagated moral code - “God exists for sure, and He wants you to do this.” Or it can work on individuals by raising the level at which they assess moral development - “Do not do this not because I tell you to, but because it threatens the social contract or violates others autonomy.”
I have a problem with intensifying morality. Plurism in a society erodes the unquestioned belief this needs. Further, it can be used to justify things I disagree with - and deny me the ability to express that disagreement. If the goal of such a moral code is a functioning society, then there is no reason why this code can’t sanction murder (assuming you restrict it to uppity niggers, Tutsi cockroaches, or them sodomising fags) or rape (assuming you don’t violate another male’s property rights over his women). They’re not my codes, or yours - but they work, for values of “work” which don’t include upholding the values we consider important.
I have no problems with attempting to improve the level of morality at which people operate - indeed, this is a major goal of a liberal education. You state that dwelling on free will is dangerous, choosing to look at functional ways of addressing the problem. I disagree with that first part; for those people for whom consideration of free will is important, very few of them will choose to be rapists or murderers. They may choose to be deserters, dissenters, abortionists, or euthanisists - placing their morality above that of society - but they develop a morality, and very few people who make this effort seem to sanction rape or murder. Seducing people into sufficient reflection to make this effort isn’t going to cause a problem here - Hannibal Lector is a fictional character.
What causes the problem is
(i) people who operate at a level that privileges gratifying their impulses without regard for others AND
(ii) People who derive their morality from their peers and the apparent environment, who go along with the crowd.
Some of those in (i) may be sociopaths, of which not much can be done. Some may be too ignorant or have never learned to modify their impulses; when I was working for the Justice Dept, I read some material suggesting direct cognitive training in things we take for granted had some results in reducing recidivism - “you need to show up for work on time”, “you need to match spending with your funds”, “because you’re horny doesn’t mean she’s horny”.
The worse problem is (ii), which is where your functionalist approach is appropriate. I made a comment at Liss’s blog a while back suggesting, much as I didn’t like it, that many people do derive their morality simply from what is around them. The same sort of people who go to church each Sunday and sing proudly about Jesus would be part of a lynch mob hanging a black eighty years ago, or cutting up Tutsis in 1994, or lining up at a frat party to take a crack at the drunk chick passed out on the pool table - if the circumstances were right.
You state that “we should care about teaching men to empathize with women, fighting the places where desire to rape is inoculated, upping fear of the justice system, and addressing external pressures that teach men that raping is part of establishing a masculine identity”. I agree, with the caveat that I don’t think the justice system should be warped out of fundamentals such as the presumption of innocence as a form of deterrant.
All of these should be done in the sense that they change the “ambient social morality” to one where women are assumed by default to be full human beings, where sex is assumed by default to require consent, and where rape is assumed by default to be something a real man considers beneath him.
But these are aimed at a failsafe position - one where people who aren’t making decisions based on a clear consideration of morality (which, note, includes most teenage and young adult males of course) fall back onto assumptions which support the values we consider important.
That’s pretty much orthogonal to considerations of free will, which require making decisions and choices conscious of their moral dimension.
I believe people are capable of having agency. I believe they are capable of making decisions based on that agency, in light of who they understand themselves to be and what they want themselves to become. I believe that what you choose to do when you make such decisions counts, in that it defines the meaning of your life. It defines who you are.
You can have free will if you reach for it.
If they’re trying to say that on Battlestar Galactica, good for them. It may simply be that they’re making it up as they go along.
It may be that they’re reading this thread and taking notes. If so, I want any character based on me to be played by this guy and to die a horrible snivelling death. Im watching Boston Legal season 3 and, oh my god, is he such a great actor, and his character utterly repulsive!
Er, this is precisely the point: “Blame it on the debbil” carries about as much weight as “I’m addicted” or “I thought it over and decided…” Human beings without free will are irrational agents, and your moral calculus is also void of any particular significance (except, of course, to you).The question really isn’t “how do you justify X,” because you’re only going to show me how X fits in with whatever system you adhere to. The question is how, without choosing X, you can be held accountable for choosing it instead of choosing Y.
It seems like any justification you might have at this point for exactly why your system is good will be recursive: “We do the greatest good for the greatest number of people because…it does the greatest good for the greatest number of people.” Ok.
Not really. All I have to do is demonstrate that your conclusions are contained within your assumptions, therefore, your explanation lacks any significant explanatory power.
Not at all. We impose stricter punishments upon those who choose to do something wrong (First degree murder vs. manslaughter). If there is no way I can intend to do something, then I can’t be found “guilty” of anything in any sense of the word.Lee’s defense of Baltar only makes sense in the context of free will: without it, anything and everything you blame for a crime is a scapegoat. So we’d be imprisoning rapists for what…? For being born into a situation that eventually led them to violate someone? For having the wrong parents? Yeah, ok.
Okay, let’s distinguish here between the impulse and the desire to do something. An impulse to do something can arise from our animal natures, and we don’t really have any control over this.
I reject the idea that there’s a non-animal part of us. Again, I’m not religious, so the idea that god gave us a special grace that makes us non-animal doesn’t appeal to me. So this difference between desire and impulse doesn’t make much sense to me—my cats have impulses/desires they resist (like going outside when the door is opened).
Stating it’s a clash of moral qualms is incomplete; moral impulses operate on several levels and differ from person to person. I do not consider it immoral to have sex with a person to whom I am not married, assuming I am satisfied he or she is willing. Others might. Some may consider forced sex with their spouse to be moral. I do not.
But we’re not talking about sex, we’re talking about rape, another beast completely. You might feel there’s different moral impulses, but in the end, they are all constraints. That they differ from person to person doesn’t matter with regards to what we’re talking about. Some men don’t consider women fully human; they have a different internal balance between impulse and morality, they are more likely to rape. That people have different weights and measures inside is an argument against, not for, the necessity of “free will” in these arguments.
The existence of sociopaths, people who may have some biological inability to empathize, shows how much of it is not under our control—there but for the grace of happenstance go I.
The worse problem is (ii), which is where your functionalist approach is appropriate. I made a comment at Liss’s blog a while back suggesting, much as I didn’t like it, that many people do derive their morality simply from what is around them. The same sort of people who go to church each Sunday and sing proudly about Jesus would be part of a lynch mob hanging a black eighty years ago, or cutting up Tutsis in 1994, or lining up at a frat party to take a crack at the drunk chick passed out on the pool table - if the circumstances were right.
I highlighted these parts because you assume that these two things are in conflict and show free will, when it’s the opposite—you’ve amply demonstrated that people are products of their environment and that they’ll sing in church or rape a drunk girl according to environment. Which is basically my point—the more that we feed ourselves the ego-calming illusion of “free will”, the less we are willing to ask ourselves the hard question of whether or not we’d just as easily go along with a gang rape as a choir singing in church, and thus the more likely we are to do it. If you want to be the person that stands out from the crowd, don’t leave it up to “will”—start doing the hard work now of setting your moral parameters and critical thinking skills up so that your internal balances work in your favor when the opportunity to participate in gang violence comes along.
All of these should be done in the sense that they change the “ambient social morality” to one where women are assumed by default to be full human beings, where sex is assumed by default to require consent, and where rape is assumed by default to be something a real man considers beneath him.
Exactly—you change people’s external circumstances and internal compasses so that more of them make the right decisions. “Free will” has no need to enter the equation.
I believe people are capable of having agency. I believe they are capable of making decisions based on that agency, in light of who they understand themselves to be and what they want themselves to become.
I’m fairly certain that agency that is completely at the mercy of desires and understandings is a strike against the metaphysical concept of free will. Agency to me means the intellectual capabilities of acting on your desires and understandings fully—when I say women have it, I’m basically arguing that their cognitive functions are equal to men’s, not that their souls are as free in the eyes of god.
I guess my question is, where are you getting this theology?
In the theology you posit, a soul is only relevant if it is entirely separate from the body, mind, and random chance.
I’m not really a theology buff, but in terms of what you might call “lay theology” I’ve never heard a person express the concept of free will that way.
In fact, I’ve heard quite the opposite; it seems to me most people posit the soul as being synonymous with the mind, and free will as being located somewhere within said mind/soul.
Prediction. Free will is freedom from prediction.
I disagree that no secular concept could meaningly be called “free will”.
I have a formulation of free will that, near as I can tell, requires no metaphysical ideas AND meshes much more closely with an average person’s (religious OR secular) idea of what free will is:
We humans have free will if:
1. Our internal states are heavily weighted in determining what action we will take in a given situation.
In other words, nobody can say that in a given situation, every human would react the same way.
2. Given a prediction of our future behavior, we can behave in a different way, and that this change can be caused by conscious thought. In other words, this could happen:
Oracle: I am 100% certain that the next word out of your mouth will be “cat”.
You: Well, you are wrong. I said that because I hate oracles.
If anything, I think free will in THIS sense is more likely to exist then the alternative.
Seriously, I find this conversation frustrating because the argument against free will is essentially “Free will is illogical, because if it were logical it wouldn’t be called free will.”
But what you call determinism I might (And do) call free will.
How do you know that a computer doesn’t have an inner life but a chimp does, if you discount external factors as evidence?
I beg you to read what you’ve just written again, because I can’t honestly see how it can possibly hold any meaning.
Then try reading some psychology or biology. Obviously we can deduce from external factors, because there’s no way to get into another’s subjectivity, but there can and has been experimentation done showing the difference between what goes on in a chimp’s head and what goes on within a computer.
You say you are, but I can program my computer to do the same thing; indeed, the very format in which we’re communicating is the perfect medium for a Turing test, which means I really have no idea if you’re a conscious person or not. You could simply be a zombie following a program that leads you to report, to all questioning, that you’re conscious. Perhaps the program even reports that to you.
So? This isn’t really contradicting anything I’ve said. I know I’m conscious, but not that you are. But we can and have done experiments that would give me more reason to trust that you are conscious than that my vacuum cleaner is. And yes, human consciousness is linked to free will–that we can and do stand back from and evaluate our motives and actions. It’s not circular, it’s a logical implication.
t is always necessary to not confuse determinism with nihilism. “Whatever will be” will not be without our active involvement.
This is silly. If we don’t have agency then “our active involvement” is predestined and has been since the moment of the Big Bang and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Of course, what that would mean for the practical side of human life is…well, nothing. Every time we feel gratitude to one person and resentment to another, or engage in even the most basic elements of human life, we’re assuming free will.
Susan Blackmore swears up and down that she has no experience of having free will.
Yeah, and it’s completely incoherent. What is her experience of going to the supermarket, then? Does she just feel carried along by some sort of force? No, she makes a decision. And if she consciously stops herself from thinking, “hmm, I should go to the supermarket because there’s no food in the fridge,” then she’s still making a decision–the decision not to decide. Any time you say “should” or “will” you’re assuming free will.
If she never has any thoughts about what she’s going to do in the future, and never follows any such thoughts up with actions, then I’ll be prepared to say she has no free will. But I doubt it.
I have a formulation of free will that, near as I can tell, requires no metaphysical ideas AND meshes much more closely with an average person’s (religious OR secular) idea of what free will is
Yep. But most people here seem to be focusing on the concept of the soul rather than free will, which is a biological phenomenon rooted in our evolutionary history.
If you want to be the person that stands out from the crowd, don’t leave it up to “will”—start doing the hard work now of setting your moral parameters and critical thinking skills up so that your internal balances work in your favor when the opportunity to participate in gang violence comes along.
…but that’s precisely what “will” is. It’s what the average person means by “will,” not some weird quantum force that somehow sets you apart without effort.
(sorry to spam!) Actually I take back what I said earlier. People aren’t even talking about the soul, which (as Christopher pointed out) is a more sophisticated concept than what people are describing in this thread and doesn’t have to be dualist. No, people are talking about something non-animal and non-physical–Sartre’s existentialism, in fact. They’re talking about the Ghost In The Machine. I’m quite happy to concede that this mystical (and ill-defined) thing doesn’t exist but you’re mistaken if you think that’s the only or even the most common definition of free will.
Phoenician in a time of Romans:
I only acknowledge a desire to throttle those who insist I dream of rape and murder.
Yeah, it does feel different, particularly because people see agency in humans and not the weather. I wonder if it feels different for people who think the gods make those earthquakes. Anyway, this is an ancient conundrum: humans have never been able to certainly distinguish fate from freedom. I am comfortable with using “possibility” to mean “ignorance”. In a sense it has always meant this.
I suspect I do not have free will, but I do have intentions. There’s still a difference here between murder and manslaughter. Having intentions is independent of whether or not I could have had other intentions.
I think the problems that you are alluding to only exist when justice is imagined in a framework of retribution. If a person does not have free will, then it is wrong to say, “let’s git im! Fry the bastard!” But I’d argue that retribution is wrong anyway, whether or not free will exists. “Leaves us all blind”, etc.
Again regardless of free will, we can take justice in a framework of protection. Then if a person, by committing a crime, demonstrates that he is a danger to others, we can imprison him to protect the rest of us. This makes sense with or without free will.
No, we’d be imprisoning rapists to stop them from raping the rest of us.
Yes, but I’m saying it’s nevertheless necessary to consider the effects of one’s actions. There are at least two different points of view that a person can take:
“my active involvement is predestined and now I’m going to get my ass up off the couch and do it,” or
“whatever’s going to happen is going to happen no matter what I do, so I’m just going to chill on this couch and eat corn chips.”
One point of view involves you in history, the other resigns you to inactivity. The important thing to remember is even if you do not have free will, it doesn’t mean that your actions are irrelevant. Some people assume this; I think we should be cognizant of the difference.
Let’s assume you’re right, and thinking about the future means that in some sense I believe in free will. This can still be the case if I have only the illusion of free will. If we all believe in free will, it doesn’t imply that the belief is correct.
I don’t think you’re right, though. I think two year old humans think in terms of “should” and “planning”, but they have no concept whatsoever of free will or determinism or compatibilism or fatalism. Having the experience of making choices is not necessarily an implicit endorsement of a worldview.
I have the experience of making choices. I am not convinced that I could have chosen differently. I don’t think that my experience of making a choice somehow undermines my suspicion that the choice was not free.
Found this in current clips…one among a great many filed here or there.
Not very tecky, but some and not very long so if it’s ok
-the thread is about run-
It is neuro-science, in this case EEG…not the most perceptive investigative tool…but ok.
Here: On the anterior cingulate cortex often symbolized with a traffic robot green light red ligt and I dunno light.
And some of the functional problems relating to
that thing we’re calling will.
”
Why it is impossible for some to ‘just say no’
Drug abuse, crime and obesity are but a few of the problems our nation faces, but they all have one thing in common—people’s failure to control their behavior in the face of temptation.
While the ability to control and restrain our impulses is one of the defining features of the human animal, its failure is one of the central problems of human society.
So, why do we so often lack this crucial ability”
As human beings, we have limited resources to control ourselves, and all acts of control draw from this same source.
Therefore, when using this resource in one domain, for example, keeping to a diet, we are more likely to run out of this resource in a different domain, like studying hard.
Once these resources are exhausted, our ability to control ourselves is diminished. In this depleted state, the dieter is more likely to eat chocolate, the student to watch TV, and the politician to accept a bribe.
In a recent study, Michael Inzlicht of the University of Toronto Scarborough and colleague Jennifer N. Gutsell
offer an account of what is happening in the brain when our vices get the better of us.
Inzlicht and Gutsell asked participants to suppress their emotions while watching an upsetting movie.
The idea was to deplete their resources for self-control. The participants reported their ability to suppress their feelings on a scale from one to nine.
Then, they completed a Stroop task, which involves naming the color of printed words (i.e. saying red when reading the word “green” in red font),
yet another task that requires a significant amount of self-control.
The researchers found that those who suppressed their emotions performed worse on the Stroop task, indicating that
they had used up their resources for self-control while holding back their tears during the film.
An EEG, performed during the Stroop task, confirmed these results.
Normally, when a person deviates from their goals (in this case, wanting to read the word, not the color of the font), increased brain activity occurs
in a part of the frontal lobe called the anterior cingulate cortex,
which alerts the person that they are off-track. The researchers found weaker activity occurring in this brain region during the Stroop task in those who had suppressed their feelings.
In other words, after engaging in one act of self-control this brain system seems to fail during the next act.
These results, which appear in the November issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, have significant implications for future interventions aiming to help people change their behavior.
Most notably, it suggests that if people, even temporarily, do not realize that they have lost control, they will be unable to stop or change their behavior on their own.
###
For a copy of the article “Running on Empty: Neural Signals for Self-Control Failure” and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact
Catherine West at (202) 783-2077 or cwest@psychologicalscience.org. Association for Psychological Science. EurekAlert! ”
Christopher: “Seriously, I find this conversation frustrating because the argument against free will is essentially “Free will is illogical, because if it were logical it wouldn’t be called free will.”
I think I’m talking about most people’s idea of free will when I say that it includes the notion that for many actions a person has done in the past, they could of done something different, even with the exact same personality and the exact same ‘inputs’. This I think is incompatible with determinism.
“But what you call determinism I might (And do) call free will.”
So you accept that even our freely chosen actions were always inevitable? That the exact same person in the exact same environment has one set of actions he is “destined” to follow (even though no human can know this destiny)? In that case I’d say I have no problem with your notion of free will, though I might quibble over the semantics.
Grammar RWA,
I think I’m in agreement with you. Something that occured to me though: the rejection of free will, though still allowing for moral outrage and punishment - does seem to undermine the Christian notion of “hate the sin, not the sinner”, as every evil a person commits flows directly out of who they are - they are inherently the kind of person who will commit an evil act given a specific situation.
I only acknowledge a desire to throttle those who insist I dream of rape and murder.
So you dream of murdering people who insist you, uh, dream of murdering people?
There are at least two different points of view that a person can take:
“my active involvement is predestined and now I’m going to get my ass up off the couch and do it,” or
“whatever’s going to happen is going to happen no matter what I do, so I’m just going to chill on this couch and eat corn chips.”
One point of view involves you in history, the other resigns you to inactivity. The important thing to remember is even if you do not have free will, it doesn’t mean that your actions are irrelevant.
It means your actions are not yours and not really under your control, and therefore not worth worrying about. It means that a person can’t “take” any point of view, and that a person can’t “act” in any meaningful sense, any more than an electron can “act.” It means that we are resigned to doing whatever we were going to do anyway no matter what, and that we can’t really do anything about this.
Let’s assume you’re right, and thinking about the future means that in some sense I believe in free will. This can still be the case if I have only the illusion of free will. If we all believe in free will, it doesn’t imply that the belief is correct.
I’m not talking about beliefs. I’m talking about notions embedded into the structure of human thought, which are a bit different. Beliefs are both conscious and optional, for one thing. Structure of thought is neither. Two year olds may not have words like “free will” or “determinism” in their conceptual vocabulary, because they don’t consciously hold ideologies. But they think things like “I will” and “I should”–all of which is meaningless unless you think there’s some “I” that can act. Even above, when I was trying to describe the determinist point of view, I succumbed to free-will rhetoric by saying that our actions were not “worth” worrying about. If we truly have no control over our actions then we’re going to worry whether it’s worth it or not–”worth” is a concept only relevant to beings that can choose.
I’ll just also note that the “could have done otherwise” standard for free will is flawed. The only real way of measuring if something could have done X is by measuring how often it does X as opposed to Y, and that’s basically a measure of predictability. But predictability and unpredictability aren’t really about free will, but about randomness. When people talk about free will, they don’t really mean unpredictability at all but the capacity to self-evaluate and act based on those evaluations.
I reject the idea that there’s a non-animal part of us. Again, I’m not religious, so the idea that god gave us a special grace that makes us non-animal doesn’t appeal to me. So this difference between desire and impulse doesn’t make much sense to me—my cats have impulses/desires they resist (like going outside when the door is opened).
Mmm - I’m tring here to make a distinction between our most basic impulses and what we actually want to do when considerations such as self image, deferred gratification or social expectations get in the way. If there was no difference, then people would act the same way while drunk or high that they do while sober.
But we’re not talking about sex, we’re talking about rape, another beast completely.
You might be; I’m pogoing all over the place trying to express myself coherently
.
You might feel there’s different moral impulses, but in the end, they are all constraints.
In the way I’m looking at this, moral impulses, to the individual, provide the goals on which to act. Constraints are the environment in which they act, limits on the possible courses of action. Does that make sense?
There are multiple and competing goals within any person, competing desires. The balance is shown in which they choose to act on, and which they choose to supress.
That they differ from person to person doesn’t matter with regards to what we’re talking about. Some men don’t consider women fully human; they have a different internal balance between impulse and morality,
No. That belief does not necessarily change the balance between impulse and morality. Consider that such a person may well consider women to be the property of particular men (fathers, husbands etc). In the absence of a “fair target”, they may be less likely to rape and violate some other man’s property rights. They’re operating from a different set of assumptions about morality than we are; this does not necessarily mean they’re more likely to act out the basic impulses
That people have different weights and measures inside is an argument against, not for, the necessity of “free will” in these arguments.
That people have the ability, indeed, the responsibility to choose between different weights and measures is an argument for free will.
The existence of sociopaths, people who may have some biological inability to empathize, shows how much of it is not under our control—there but for the grace of happenstance go I.
Biology imposes constraints.
You must eat to live. This is a constraint on your actions. You are not a sociopath and (I assume) not suffering from PKU or diabetes. Each of us has a different set of constraints from others, but we all have the ability to choose our actions from within those constraints.
I highlighted these parts because you assume that these two things are in conflict and show free will, when it’s the opposite—you’ve amply demonstrated that people are products of their environment and that they’ll sing in church or rape a drunk girl according to environment.
No, I am stating that I believe this is the case for many people. The story Liss cited regarding the “drunk chick in the fraternity” had her eventually extracted because some people went against what was happening. When the Nazis were hauling the Jews away, some Germans took action against them. While there were more people standing around in the lynch mobs (I assume you’ve seen the “Sans Sanctuary” pictures?), there were also the Freedom Riders.
People are capable of bucking the surrounding social morality based on a deeper sense of morality - that something is wrong even if your neighbours don’t think so. Many don’t.
Which is basically my point—the more that we feed ourselves the ego-calming illusion of “free will”, the less we are willing to ask ourselves the hard question of whether or not we’d just as easily go along with a gang rape as a choir singing in church, and thus the more likely we are to do it.
Okay, here is where we have a fundamental disagreement. I believe considering free will does not calm the ego but puts it at the fore. To be aware of free will is to recognise that your decisions are your responsibility, that you cannot escape that responsibility, and that the decisions you make are meaningful in that they define who you are. What we choose to do defines what we are; being aware of free will makes that choice inescapable. It is those who are not aware of exercising free will who are most likely to be good church-goers, good frat buddies, or Good Germans.
If you want to be the person that stands out from the crowd, don’t leave it up to “will”—start doing the hard work now of setting your moral parameters and critical thinking skills up so that your internal balances work in your favor when the opportunity to participate in gang violence comes along.
And if the environment leads to type of evil in a way that goes along with your prejudgement?
Consider “setting up your moral parameters” to be totally against rape. Now imagine that a lynch mob of your friends and neighbours is forming to hang up someone accused of serial rape.
It takes an exercise of will to not go along with that - if you coast along on your previously considered parameters, you’re going to be part of the mob. ‘Critical thinking skills” seem to be part of what I’m talking about when I mention the responsibility of making choices.
Another good example may be straight reactions a generation or so ago to assertions of gay rights. The gay rights movement has succeeded in changing society in a large degree due to straights who listened and said that, regardless of their personal feelings towards homosexuality itself, the claim to equal rights and privacy was valid - our parents and grandparents said that it was wrong to use the law against the Evil Sodomites.
It is necessary to use one’s free will to act as a moral agent against assumed social morality.
Exactly—you change people’s external circumstances and internal compasses so that more of them make the right decisions. “Free will” has no need to enter the equation.
You change their external circumstances so more of them make what you consider to be the right decisions (which is a political matter). You encourage them to develop their internal compass so that they, themselves, can make their own decisions, trusting that a considered moral choice, while it may not be one that you would make, will be a reasonable one.
“I believe people are capable of having agency. I believe they are capable of making decisions based on that agency, in light of who they understand themselves to be and what they want themselves to become.”
I’m fairly certain that agency that is completely at the mercy of desires and understandings is a strike against the metaphysical concept of free will.
I did not say that it was at the mercy of desires or understandings. The impulses and desires we have supply goals which we may seek in exercising free will; the understanding we have constrains the choices we can make. But we make those choices within the environment imposed (in part) by our limited understandings, and in pursuit of our desires.
Agency to me means the intellectual capabilities of acting on your desires and understandings fully
I’d phrase it as “acting consciously within your intellectual capabilities and understandings towards those desires you choose.”
—when I say women have it, I’m basically arguing that their cognitive functions are equal to men’s, not that their souls are as free in the eyes of god.
I’m essentially an atheist for these discussions. I haven’t seen anything to suggest that women can’t have free will as much as men; many people do not exercise their free will to any great extent in making moral choices.
This free will does not arise from a soul; it arises from a self-knowledge of yourself as a moral actor, and from a consideration of your decisions in light of this understanding, and in light of an understanding that your identity is defined by the choices you make.
You can choose; knowing you can choose, what you do is a choice (and cannot be escaped as such); what you choose to do defines who you are.
Brandon, I agree with you on that as well. I’m no longer Christian, but if I were I would reject “hate the sin, love the sinner” on other grounds as well. Kierkegaard:
Nicely summarized:
I’m an atheist now, so I’ll point at something else. A person is “inherently the kind of person who will commit an evil act given a specific situation”, very much because of environment. One can still sensibly hate the factors of culture that encourage that kind of behavior, and strive to change the culture. It would, as ever, be a waste of energy to direct that hatred at the individual, who is as much a victim of hierarchies as any of us. And as Amanda points out, one can notice how one has been influenced by the culture, and strive to counterbalance that in onesself, before a situation arises that would bring out the worst.
I’m still mulling over what you’ve said about our lack of justification for moral outrage. I think I shall not be finished processing this before this thread is stale and abandoned.
But my initial reaction is to say that by biology or more likely by culture, we have evolved or otherwise honed this capacity for moral outrage because it is useful and returns some benefits (to some individuals or groups; I suspect that group is all humans).
As an admittedly imprecise rule of thumb, it may be useful to retain. For example, I’ve had my disposition influenced in positive ways because of my awareness of others’ moral outrage toward my previous behavior. I’ve also directed it at myself, to some benefit, and at others, sometimes to some benefit.
If we’re non-free, we’re still justified in saying that “if more people acted this way, the world would be better.” We’ve seen that culture changes, and laying out moral guidelines appears to be part of that process.
If we’re non-free, then strictly it would be inaccurate to say “you chose to do something wrong when you could have chosen rightly!” and this judgment would be unjustified. But it may nevertheless be a valuable tool, inasmuch as the person is aware of her own motivations and can be influenced otherwise. It may be a convenient shorthand for justifiable statements that do not spring as easily to the tongue. There’s still danger, of course, if we make the mistake of thinking that we are also justified in lashing out with retribution. Protection is all that makes sense.
If there’s no such thing as free will then it’s totally illogical of you to get angry at and blame religious hypocrites, wife beaters, rapists, sexists, etc, since they’re just products of their environment, too.
Of course you could argue that you’re just compelled to rant at them, but then that reduces all human conversation and protest to an exercise in futility…
Answered already in the post directly above yours. People can be and are often influenced to change.
If there’s no such thing as free will then it’s totally illogical of you to get angry at and blame religious hypocrites, wife beaters, rapists, sexists, etc, since they’re just products of their environment, too.
Which might make it an interesting exercise, to bring it back to BG, to see who gets pissed off at the Cylons and who merely treats them as a threat to be exterminated dispassionately…
bellatrys:
Does a dog have free will? Do you get angry when it eats your homework? Do you punish and reward it to change its behavior?
Adding the phrase free will adds no more to our understanding of human behavior than adding a reference to Allah does for our understanding physics. We can no more prove there is no free will than we can prove there is no god. We don’t use these concepts because they are not useful, adding nothing to our understanding.
“It may be a convenient shorthand for justifiable statements that do not spring as easily to the tongue.”
I agree with this. I think one expressing outrage or moral condemnation is really saying something like this in a much less clunky manner:
“I am saying these words hoping that the result of uttering them will be to influence the attitude of the wrongdoer or the people/society around him or her towards the attitude I feel is better.”
Epistemology:
Though the notion of free will adds nothing to our understanding, I think one could argue that it serves an emotional-psychological purpose. It’s much easier to feel release by venting one’s anger towards an individual or an institution than towards the immutable chain of causality of the entire universe.
Christopher:
Then the weather has free will.
We can’t perfectly predict ant behavior.
I don’t choose to hate oracles, but I do, and since I do, I must answer thusly. Not a very convincing argument.
No, the argument you aren’t addressing is that free will, like the concept of god or soul, makes for fine theology, but lousy science. It adds nothing to our ability to predict human behavior.
Your impression that you have free will comes from the fact that you are able to sense your internal states in ways unavailable to anyone not you, and using this information with what you know about yourself, you are better able to predict what you are going to do next than we are.
But there are times when you predict your own behavior incorrectly, aren’t there?
Does a dog have free will? Does a two year old? Where is free will located in the brain? How does it feed into, and change the firing of motor neurons? At what age does it develop? What is addiction in a world where will moves your muscles? What is brainwashing? When is it will and when is it neurology?
If you are confused by this conversation it is because you are inserting a poorly defined and scientifically useless term into an already extremely complex system. It has no place in science.
And denying free will says nothing about determinism. Deterministic and non-deterministic systems both lack free will. And deterministic systems does NOT imply predictability. Chaotic systems are deterministic, but unpredictable.
Free will has only legal and theological definitions. No definition that is well formed and verifiable exists for free will in science. To paraphrase Wittgenstein: That of which we cannot speak we should STFU.
do NOT imply
Sheesh. I’d take responsibility for the bad grammar, but the devil made me do it. Did too!
One thing I am continually struck by with Grammar RWA, is that there seems to be such an emphasis on control of circumstances. It seems as if free will concept is simply moved from the individual to a concept of human society, as an addition of all of its desires and fears, that can gestalt a truer free will.
We do not need to posit free will to be legitimately angry at bad behavior.
Is this about to lapse into the familiar arguments for god: What about morality without god?
The US currently has more people in jail than any time in its history. Our legal system, and the philosophy behind it, is in need of some serious revision.
Antiquated notions like free will prevent us from doing the hard work of rethinking crime and punishment.
“We do not need to posit free will to be legitimately angry at bad behavior.
Is this about to lapse into the familiar arguments for god: What about morality without god?”
Not at all, it’s simple to rationally posit a morality without free will, and certaintly to posit one without god. I just beleive that *emotionally*, it’s easier to feel anger at something that isn’t perceived as inevitable since the beginning of time.
“Antiquated notions like free will prevent us from doing the hard work of rethinking crime and punishment.”
Cryoprisons, like from Demolition Man and The Minority Report…
:)
Brandon:
Lack of free will does NOT imply inevitability. And even deterministic systems (the weather) are not necessarily predictable.
“Brandon:
Lack of free will does NOT imply inevitability. And even deterministic systems (the weather) are not necessarily predictable.”
True, but to many people things like the weather feel more inevitable than human actions.
Regarding issues of justice, I think most still hold even in a completely deterministic system, but a few notions seem out of place, for example:
If somebody is shaped into a criminal by a life of hardship, we generally hold him less accountable than a person shaped into a criminal by a life of privelige and entitlement, when both are enviromental forces outside their control.
It’s a shame if I’ve implied this. I don’t think society has a free will. I’m just saying that society can be influenced, and I’m only saying that because it’s an aggregate of individuals who can be influenced.
Good point, Brandon. Perhaps this is a holdover from retributive frameworks of justice. In a protective framework, the hardship suffering criminal might be just as dangerous and so needs the same sentence.
On the other hand, maybe the current common sense notion points to something real. Perhaps the hardship suffering criminal will be less dangerous if given an opportunity to earn an honest living, whereas the privileged criminal has already decided that such an opportunity is irrelevant.
Chet, I’ll hand you “625″ just as soon as you hand me “red”, and no cheating by handing me a red THING.
Hold out your hand. You feel that? That’s electromagnetic radiation of wavelengths between 625 and 740 nm. That’s red, as you would be seeing if those photons were impacting the retina of your eye (assuming you have color vision.)
Your turn.
I can measure two just as you can measure red.
Wrong again. Ordinalities are counted, not measured, which is why counting affords arbitrary precision but measurement is limited, ultimately, by the uncertainty principle.
Surely, theory of measurement texts are available wherever you’re getting this misinformation.
“Does this bucket contain two balls?” is just as empirical a question as “Does this bucket contain red balls?”.
It’s clearly two different types of questions, which is obvious from the fact that each ball can be taken out and assessed for color regardless of where it is, but the twoness of them only exists for as long as they’re in the bucket.
Antiquated notions like free will prevent us from doing the hard work of rethinking crime and punishment.
Once more, with feeling: without free will, we can’t do “work” at all, and we certainly can’t get rid of “antiquated” notions like free will, because we can’t act.
Lack of free will does NOT imply inevitability. And even deterministic systems (the weather) are not necessarily predictable.
Lack of free will does imply that human agency can’t do anything about it, that any non-inevitability comes from random chance. Predictability has nothing to do with what we can do–free will is necessary to think we can do anything. “We can do something about it” does not follow from “it’s not inevitable,” unless you posit us as agents.
And getting angry at your dog for chewing up a newspaper might be legitimate or might not be, depending on the kind of dog you have and the sort of training its been through.
i’m just saying that society can be influenced, and I’m only saying that because it’s an aggregate of individuals who can be influenced.
Actually, you’re not. You’re saying that society can be deliberately influenced according to a specific agenda–which, yes, relies on the assumption of free will.
That’s your assertion and I’ve already explained why I disagree.
I have a specific agenda. That does not necessarily mean that I could have had a different agenda.
It clearly does not mean this. It only means that we can’t act otherwise than as we do. I just took the towels out of the dryer. If determinism holds, I could not have done otherwise, nor at another time. But the towels did not take themselves out of the dryer. I acted.
My goodness, still going! One last try. I concede (and never actually contended) that God has nothing to do with free will. Further, I will concede (and never contended otherwise) Amanda’s notion that the ancient Greek idea of dualism is poppycock. I concede that we should confine the universe of the topic to the grey machine inside our cranium.
So, it the present is determined by the past the futer is determined by the present; Q.E.D. As Christ said to Pilate in Superstar “Everything is fixed and you can’t change it.” Sooo…. fine then. Let me ask, is there some point in human life where actions are not determined, that the brain is still “plastic?” Is there free will in the abscence of determining factors. Are randomness and free will the same thing?
To me the whole notion of determinism is as creaky as Newtonian physics and every bit as mechanistic. They are similar in that the describe our everyday experience in most every case. But since the the discovery of realtivity and the uncertainty principle we again are presented with a universe where “A” doen’t always follow “B,” usually, mind you, but not always.
Our ‘progarmming’ determines the vast majority of our decisions. Life is too complicated and fast for it to be any other way. But there are times when we come to the fork in the road; when we are faced with moral conumdrums. There are times we have to make decisions for which our ‘programming’ has not prepared us. There are times we stay and listen to a friends grief though we’d rather be a million miles away and do for others all sortis of things that are inimicable to our own harmony and well being.
If it gives anyone comfort to rest in the arms of hard determinism, so be it. For me it is simply counter-indicated by my programming. I have no choice but to think that it is sheer nonsense
“If it gives anyone comfort to rest in the arms of hard determinism, so be it. For me it is simply counter-indicated by my programming. I have no choice but to think that it is sheer nonsense.”
It isn’t a matter of comfort, it’s a matter of being the most consistent with our understanding of physics (though technically I suppose a more accurate picture would include an aggregate of random events that for all practical purposes (anything at the level of human action) is deterministic.
Leia:
So an ox can’t work, a monkey can’t act?
It only means that we can’t act otherwise than as we do.
Please indicate how this statement might be falsified…
“It only means that we can’t act otherwise than as we do.”
Please indicate how this statement might be falsified…
In practice it can’t, since we don’t possess the capacity to turn back time, but a statement does not have to be falsifiable to be the most reasonable position to hold.
I expect everyone here has considered this. Tell a precocious ten year old about quantum indeterminacy, and by eleven, the kid will regale you with a sparkling fresh hypothesis for free will under materialism.
It hasn’t been said often enough, though, and I’ll let James Miles say it:
‘The random chance of quantum theory has no connection whatsoever to the concept of ethical freedom anyway; the freedom to choose, the freedom to will. Doing something because (hypothetically) a subatomic particle randomly moves inside your skull is no more “freedom” than doing something because genes or culture dictate it. The quantum event may be uncaused, but your (hypothetical) resulting action would itself be caused by the quantum event. The action is therefore not uncaused, and it is most certainly not chosen or willed. As the mathematician Norbert Weiner said in 1948: “The chance of the quantum-theoretician is not the ethical freedom of the Augustinian”.’ — Born Cannibal, 2003
By the way, I don’t think you should have invoked relativity, as it has naught to do with your apologia for free will. At best it’s scientific name dropping.
First of all, let me play drama queen and express my dumbfounded shock, indeed my profound distress, that you would seem to suggest we can only be programmed for ill behavior like walking out on another’s grief, and cannot be programmed to listen and comfort and be a dear. Were you programmed in a barn?
Secondly, what is making your spur of the moment moral decisions, if not the current electrochemical state of your brain (that is, your disposition or mood)? And what determined the current state of your brain, if not the previous state, plus any external input during the interval? Yes, your brain undergoes self-reflection and changes its outlook; so your politics and ethics have changed since you were a teenager, or whatever. This, like everything else your brain does, is an electrochemical process. Like the motion of gas molecules, it’s effectively unpredictable yet still entirely out of your control.
What an odd thing to say. I think I would be more comfortable with free will, but I have no means of invoking it. Should we assume you’re doing what you imagine others are doing, and simply laying claim to the viewpoint that makes you more comfortable?
I don’t claim that it can be, and that’s why “ah but how do you know you weren’t fated to think you are free” is as perpetually useful for stoner entertainment as it was in ancient Greece.
You took me correcting someone about the implications of determinism, a contingent statement intended to hold true given certain axioms, and asked me to defend the statement as a positivist claim about the nature of reality. I will not.
I don’t claim this conclusion follows from empiricism. I suggest it follows obviously from a simple philosophical process of elimination. If all we have is materialism, then it seems a person can act only according to the electrochemical state of the brain; there is nothing else. What else would there be, a soul?
Did you miss the entire point of what “epistemology” was telling you earlier? If “biology plus culture plus free will” does not provide measurable differences from “biology plus culture”, then you are multiplying unnecessary hypotheses, and raping William of Occam’s corpse. You might as well say that we’re acting from “biology plus culture plus unicorns”, for all the good it will do you.
Here’s the difference between my claim and yours: we have evidence that biology exists, and we have evidence that culture exists. There is no evidence to justify tossing in free will as well.
The standard “weak atheist” line works here. Can I prove that God free will does not exist? No. Is there any reason whatsoever to hypothesize that God free will does exist? No. Therefore the person making the claim for God free will is pulling rabbits out of her ass.
I’m so clever. The last paragraph is supposed to read like this:
The standard “weak atheist” line works here. Can I prove that
Godfree will does not exist? No. Is there any reason whatsoever to hypothesize thatGodfree will does exist? No. Therefore the person making the claim forGodfree will is pulling rabbits out of her ass.The idea that Judas is “necessary” is an absurdity unless the promulgator of the idea is, herself, omniscient. Keep in mind that Judas was only necessary because that’s how things played out. If things were “different,” he wouldn’t be necessary. This is inherently circular logic, signifying nothing.
No one could say that the crucifixion could not have gone differently and with the same result. No one can say that about any phenomenon. This is why it’s impossible to test for free will: to do so, you would need an entirely new universe — literally — where you recreate an event save for one factor and watch the results.
The existence of environmental factors does not negate free will. The entire concept of evil is that it is a response to said factors, a set of choices among many given environmental limitations. Pure freedom is not having an infinite amount of choices, but having the choices that we think are necessary for human dignity. That phrase is fuzzy, of course, but no one on this site, one concerned with moral rights, would dream about saying dignity is nonexistant because it is fuzzy.
And Amanda misinterpreted the Baltar speeches. The idea isn’t that everyone would fuck up in his position, but that everyone on Galactica HAD fucked up. Frankly, I’m a better person than many of the assholes on that ship — which is pretty easy to be. I know plenty of people that would have done more for their communities under the stress that they were under (given equivalent levels of technical competency). But high morals are a rarity and the ratio of good people to assholes always favors the latter. Fact of life. The Baltar thing was poignant because all assembled realized that they suck as much as he does in many ways. There are people who, in Baltar’s position, would have manipulated the Cylons and even sacrificed themselves to disrupt their rule. Of course, there are people who wouldn’t have committed the horrible wrongs the other characters did. They all made bad choices — free will was evident. The issue was whether or not the standards of justice could be low enough to free them and high enough to condemn Baltar. That dog wouldn’t hunt.
And, of course, if there is no such thing as “wrong,” much of what has gone on in BSG and much of what is ranted about on this site is worthless. I don’t mean “low in value,” I mean worthless. The nihilist would have the correct view in this case. If there is no wrong/right dichotomy, there most certainly is not free will because there is no value in any “choice,” just chemical responses to a complex environment.
I am constantly amazed at the persistence of people who maintain there is no free will to fail to act rationally and take the conclusion to the logical end. If there is no arbiter of right and wrong and no way for a person to meaningfully choose between such options, there is no basis of criticism for the actions of another save for that those external acts are not beneficial to the individual in question. In other words, I don’t like Bush because he doesn’t make me feel good. No one could say Bush had ever done anything wrong; there wouldn’t be any wrong for him to do. Each of us carry around our own, personal MoralityMeters(tm) that, being nothing more than chemical constructs with no metaphysical meaning, have no authority outside our own heads. This site’s supporters arguing that there is no free will is akin to the mathematician striving to prove 2=3 then blithely claiming there are no implications at all once he’s successful.
NOoC,
The lack of free will and/or metaphysically grounded morality does not reduce all ethical claims to personal subjectivity - that’s the point of the social contract - we as humans share many traits and desires, and that similarity is a basis for creating a shared morality.
“The existence of environmental factors does not negate free will. The entire concept of evil is that it is a response to said factors, a set of choices among many given environmental limitations. Pure freedom is not having an infinite amount of choices, but having the choices that we think are necessary for human dignity.”
No, but if materialism and determinism (or probabilistic outcome that is effectively determinism) are true (as they appear to be given our understanding of physics), *that* would negate free will.
“If there is no arbiter of right and wrong and no way for a person to meaningfully choose between such options, there is no basis of criticism for the actions of another save for that those external acts are not beneficial to the individual in question.”
First of all, there would be value in the criticism if you believe the very action of making the criticism can lead to a more positive outcome in the future. Also, you’re argument seems to assume that human feelings are objectively worthless, but I would disagree with that. I would argue that certain human feelings, such as empathy, are an inherent part of what morality *is*, part of its definition.
No One of Consequence:
Does a rat have free will? Can I judge that a rat that is vicious in a cage full of pet rats is not behaving in a way that is acceptable and take action to isolate or even punish the rat?
The notion of free will is not necessary for morality, nor condemnation of people who do anti-social things.
Indeed this is why free will has been discarded by the scientific community: it is utterly unnecessary for understanding any human behavior. What we knew before, we still know; what we didn’t know, we still do not know.
Does a rat have free will?
The lack of free will and/or metaphysically grounded morality does not reduce all ethical claims to personal subjectivity - that’s the point of the social contract - we as humans share many traits and desires, and that similarity is a basis for creating a shared morality.
Bullshit. The social contract, whatever it may be, is still arbitrary and its mores are designed by a consensus of human beings. (Not even necessarially a majority.) Its mores are as arbitrary as a single human being. If the majority of citizens think slavery is good, the social contract they create calls it good. There is no “shared morality” — that is a patent absurdity. There are personal morals, true, but those are meaningless tripe unless there is an authoratative arbiter for those morals.
First of all, there would be value in the criticism if you believe the very action of making the criticism can lead to a more positive outcome in the future.
Wrong again. There would be a subjective value — you would find value there — but I might not. There would be no objective value. Subjective value is really an oxymoron — value implies that there is an absolute sense of worth regardless of individual perspective.
Also, you’re argument seems to assume that human feelings are objectively worthless, but I would disagree with that. I would argue that certain human feelings, such as empathy, are an inherent part of what morality *is*, part of its definition.
I don’t agree that human feelings are worthless — that is an assumption on your part. I argue that human feelings have no value unless there is a nonhuman arbiter of said value. That is, no feeling creates value. There is no true right and wrong save for a system that has an external arbiter of the same. Without that external agent, all you have is opinion.
Does a rat have free will? Can I judge that a rat that is vicious in a cage full of pet rats is not behaving in a way that is acceptable and take action to isolate or even punish the rat?
Quite irrelevant. A rat has never acted in a way to suggest that it is self-aware. Way off topic — not sure what sense this was supposed to make.
The notion of free will is not necessary for morality, nor condemnation of people who do anti-social things.
That is completely false. If there is no true choice between a series of options there is no way to morally judge those options. It would be absurd to condemn you for metabolizing oxygen because you have no options outside said process.
Indeed this is why free will has been discarded by the scientific community: it is utterly unnecessary for understanding any human behavior. What we knew before, we still know; what we didn’t know, we still do not know.
Phenomenal bullshit there. Free will hasn’t been “discarded” by the scientific community. I studied hard science for a number of years and it simply doesn’t come up. It is irrelevant to the study of science, much like your rat analogy is irrelevant to the discussion of free will. Human behavior can be studied without any stance on determinism or free will, just as it can be studied by both Republicans and Democrats, cat people and dog people, American Idol fans and people with taste.
Grammar:
On the Alleged Illusion of Conscious Will
By van Duijn & Bem in Philosophical Psychology, Volume 18, Number 6, 01Dec2005, pp. 699-714(16)
The point, Grammar, in talking about relativity and quantum mechanics was merely to point out that things are not always what they appear to be nor is their course like the fixéd star.
What, pray do tell, in biology necessitates determinism and/or precludes free will; i.e., who gets the presumption here and why?
I don’t claim this conclusion follows from empiricism. I suggest it follows obviously from a simple philosophical process of elimination. If all we have is materialism, then it seems a person can act only according to the electrochemical state of the brain; there is nothing else. What else would there be, a soul?
The problem is that you apear to be implicitly assuming that there is a person as a set entity, a little mannequin sitting somewhere in a brain, whether you know it or not.
There is not. You, your identity as a person, is a phenomenon arising from brain processes (indeed, as some previous posts have pointed out, much of what “you” do may not be associated with your consciousness at all).
Your identity, therefore, is that of subjective self-awareness and, importantly, reflective self-awareness. What you do, what you decide, changes what “you” are.
To say that there is nothing but the electrochemical state, nothing but materialism, is like equating organic life with inert matter. It can be done, but it is naive to do so. Organic life uses inert matter and obeys the same rules, but has a level of operation, a set of laws and principles, above that.
Self-awareness arises from brain processes, but changes the rules from those of neurochemistry. One of these changes is free-will, that a human identity can make meaningful decisions based on an understanding of itself and its place in the world.
Here’s a fascinating creature.
Translation: “If my thoughts and actions aren’t granted Cosmic Significance, then I don’t wanna do anything at all!”
The idea that Judas is “necessary” is an absurdity unless the promulgator of the idea is, herself, omniscient.
Which is true for the whole Jesus-As-Redeemer-Through-Sacrficial-Lamb-Role idea. Why didn’t God just let Jesus stub his toe to redeem mankind? Or, for that matter, why not, I dunno, just forgive mankind instead of going through the crucifiction kabuki?
It doesn’t make sense. If he ain’t heaven-sent, you must dissent!
Neuronal activity is the brain. If not neuronal activitiy, then what? The soul?
Due to quantum decoherence, objects as large as neurotransmitters and cellular organelles in neurons are probably ruled by classical, “billiard ball” physics: the sphere of the fixed stars.
You may insist on throwing in quantum uncertainty, but there’s no meaningful return on this investment. You get thoughts and actions that were caused by random and uncontrollable quantum events. The point is they’re still caused by events outside your control, so your will cannot alter the future by this route either. All you’ve added is a source of madness.
Translation: “If my thoughts and actions aren’t granted Cosmic Significance, then I don’t wanna do anything at all!”
Resorting to behaving like a five-year-old is much more fun than being a grownup and admitting you’re logically inconsistent, isn’t it?
If you want straw men arguments, my advice is to hit your local playground for debating partners.
Which is true for the whole Jesus-As-Redeemer-Through-Sacrficial-Lamb-Role idea. Why didn’t God just let Jesus stub his toe to redeem mankind? Or, for that matter, why not, I dunno, just forgive mankind instead of going through the crucifiction kabuki?
Crucifixion wasn’t important — death was important. More specifically, death and damnation. How Jesus died doesn’t mean shite on a hot day. Some religious people play that up — but some religious people insist the NT has long, winding tirades against homosexuality while affirming the blessed state of the kleptocracy (here’s a hint: it doesn’t).
How Jesus died is, perhaps, instructive as to human nature and authoritarian regimes, but the methodology has no salvatory nor metaphysical value. . . contrary to popular belief.
“Subjective value is really an oxymoron — value implies that there is an absolute sense of worth regardless of individual perspective.”
That’s completely wrong, in almost every context that we use the word “value”, we mean value in the minds of groups of humans. Money (or food, pleasure, comfort, etc.) is valuable because human beings ascribe value to it, not because some nonhuman arbiter grants value to it.
Likewise, most people use the terms “objective” and “subjective” rather fuzzily when referring to human concepts. Mostly they refer to whether a trait falls well within standard human variation (i.e. favorite color), or whether it is something that the vast majority of humans share (i.e. the desire to avoid pain.)
Now I agree that the lack of a nonhuman arbiter (just say “god”, btw, we know that’s what you’re talking about) prevents any sort of absolute, universal morality. I define morality as something including human desires as at least some of the fundamental building blocks. But to me (and many others), that still makes morality worth fighting for and being passionate about.
If there is an absolute universal morality, then “subjective morality” is meaningless in comparison, but if there isn’t, if subjective morality is all there is, than that subjective morality is the most important thing there is – and so is immensely important.
PiatoR: “Self-awareness arises from brain processes, but changes the rules from those of neurochemistry. One of these changes is free-will, that a human identity can make meaningful decisions based on an understanding of itself and its place in the world.”
Do you think that these decisions are meaningful even if they are still *ultimately* ruled by physical determinism (in the same way that organic chemistry is ultimately ruled by rules of non-organic matter)? If so, we may be in complete agreement. If you are arguing for a compatibalist view of free will (that we genuinely make free choices even though those choices are ultimately determined), then I may argue with your semantics, but I agree with the fundamental ideas.
If there is an absolute universal morality, then “subjective morality” is meaningless in comparison, but if there isn’t, if subjective morality is all there is, than that subjective morality is the most important thing there is – and so is immensely important.
Important for what? And that’s the only kind of important it can be: “for what.” It cannot have inherent importance — that’s out the window. My point is is that there _is_ no debate if there is only subjective morality. If another person’s morals are vastly different than my own and morals are completely subjective, I can never prove that his morals are wrong anymore than I can prove that blue is good or pasta is up or car is west. It’s an absurdity. If six of us think the guy is wrong, it doesn’t make him wrong or right. If six billion of us think the guy is wrong, it doesn’t make him wrong or right. If we use logic to evaluate his behavior we are still just handwaving around the fact that we see his behavior as less useful for promoting what makes us happy. There’s no “good” or “bad” — just utility.
Subjective ethics are, ultimately, not ethics at all. It’s all just stuff.
Note that people who argue that there is no arbiter of ethics who then condemn unethical behavior in others can still be right to condemn others — they are drawing (successefully in this case) a set of ethics that exist whether or not they happen to — they’re just wrong about the first argument and, as such, are being inconsistent. This inconsistency is a good thing, imo. Nihilists who follow their beliefs to their logical conclusion are psychopaths. Irrationality would be preferrable, and that’s the option most humans choose.
“Note that people who argue that there is no arbiter of ethics who then condemn unethical behavior in others can still be right to condemn others — they are drawing (successefully in this case) a set of ethics that exist whether or not they happen to — they’re just wrong about the first argument and, as such, are being inconsisten”
Or they are just rejecting the subjective rule that says: “You are only justified in condemning something if it violates non-subjective absolute rules handed down by god.”
“If six of us think the guy is wrong, it doesn’t make him wrong or right. If six billion of us think the guy is wrong, it doesn’t make him wrong or right.”
Unless that’s how you *define* wrong or right. But you are correct in saying that you can’t say he’s wrong without referencing the mind[s] of a person/group of people. That every wrong is “wrong to somebody”. But so what? Maybe I can’t show that my morality is *objectively* any more valid than a nazi’s, but because it is my morality, that means that I value it enough to fight for it and try to impose it on the nazi. I don’t need a god to justify it, I have near universal human traits (like empathy) to appeal to in order to justify it to other people (not to mention *factual* errors the nazi is probably making when formulating his morality).
“My point is is that there _is_ no debate if there is only subjective morality.”
Except that there usually can be debate - usually the person you are debating with shares certain basic values with you, and you can argue that your specific morals follow from those assumptions.
But yes, if someone does not share any of your basic moral assumptions, you cannot debate with them. But that is just as true even if you do have a non-human arbiter of morality.
“Important for what? And that’s the only kind of important it can be: “for what.” It cannot have inherent importance —that’s out the window.”
That’s true of all morality. Even assuming you can somehow create an “objective morality”, if it isn’t important to me subjectively, it isn’t going to have any effect on my actions, and therefore is meaningless for all practical purposes. The only morality that makes any practical difference in the world is subjective morality.
NOoC, are you referring to your Sky Daddy?
Do you think that these decisions are meaningful even if they are still *ultimately* ruled by physical determinism (in the same way that organic chemistry is ultimately ruled by rules of non-organic matter)
Apart from the quibble that chaotic systems might preclude determinism, sure. Even if, in theory, everything was determinable on a Newtonian clockwork basis, at the level of the individual identity, there is the subjective experience of making decisions. It is at that level that we reside - to posit that this may be deterministic from some other Godlike perspective is irrelevant.
We make decisions, as conscious people, as identities. Those decisions, within constraints, are as I decide them to be, because the “I” making the decision is doing so in awareness of itself, and the effects those decisions will have on who “I” will be. They have meaning because they change who “I” am; they have meaning because “I” have no choice but to accept responsibility for having made them.
We have a retributive justice system because most people assume that criminals could have done other than as they did. People are being executed because it is assumed they could have chosen not to murder, and nevertheless made a free choice to murder. The invariable questions about the accused’s mental state revolve around whether he knew right from wrong, because this information is assumed to imply he made a free choice. The justice system today is predicated upon the assumption of free will, and it is clear that a reevaluation of this legal fiction would force a reevaluation of sentencing, which would in turn change the lives of millions of people.
It is not irrelevant.
Who are the chaos theorists claiming that these systems might be indeterminate?
Charles Manson, after being found guilt of conspiracy to commit murder (Bionka-Tate murders) said:
He was not to blame, Society created him. Society created Charlie Manson. The State of California disagreed.
The State of California ruled that Charlie acted in free will to manipulate and influence the murders. Those murders also where found guilty.
So is the state of California right. Did Manson and his follwers act with free will? or is it an illusion to put charlie away?
Or they are just rejecting the subjective rule that says: “You are only justified in condemning something if it violates non-subjective absolute rules handed down by god.”
Wow, your ability to dodge the point is phenomenal. You’re doing nothing but arguing with yourself here. There is no justification concerned. That’s your bullshit invention you pulled out of your ass so you could counter an argument you didn’t care for — I didn’t mention it, nor any subjective rule.
Unless that’s how you *define* wrong or right.
Bullshit again, and I already said why. You can just scroll up and read what I wrote the first time if you care as for the why — didn’t do it the first time so I don’t expect you’ll do it now.
but because it is my morality, that means that I value it enough to fight for it and try to impose it on the nazi. I don’t need a god to justify it,
Sounds like you do. I never brought up justification. That would imply that the problem with your morality vis-a-vis a Nazi’s is that one of you lacks sound logic. That’s not the case at all.
If meaning is subjective, then there is no arbiter of meaning in the first place. You just subscribed to a might-makes-right philosophy. Congrats. If the Nazis had been successful under your system, by killing anyone who opposed them, they would have been right. Whatever is, is.
Magis:
Again, lack of free will doesn’t imply determinism.
Who gets the presumption? Those who posit the the theory with the simplest explanation.
Why? Because there is no prediction you can make about human behavior based on the concept of free will, that I can’t make without it.
Praise Jesus. Or not. It never makes a difference in science. It only matters in religion and law. So it is with free will. Does a rat have free will?
Even assuming you can somehow create an “objective morality”
*sigh.* You can’t create one — that’s the point.
if it isn’t important to me subjectively, it isn’t going to have any effect on my actions,
No one cares. If a behavior has meaning in the context of right and wrong, it doesn’t matter if you grasp the meaning in and of itself. It has meaning even if you don’t recognize it. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be objective. It need not affect your behavior.
NOoC, are you referring to your Sky Daddy?
Little boy, adults are talking — ssshh.
In practice it can’t, since we don’t possess the capacity to turn back time, but a statement does not have to be falsifiable to be the most reasonable position to hold.
No, but if a statement can’t be falsified, there’s always the chance it isn’t actually saying anything meaningful.
We have a retributive justice system because most people assume that criminals could have done other than as they did. People are being executed because it is assumed they could have chosen not to murder, and nevertheless made a free choice to murder. The invariable questions about the accused’s mental state revolve around whether he knew right from wrong, because this information is assumed to imply he made a free choice. The justice system today is predicated upon the assumption of free will, and it is clear that a reevaluation of this legal fiction would force a reevaluation of sentencing, which would in turn change the lives of millions of people.
Provide me a Godlike perspective on which the justice system may draw in invalidating free will, and we’ll talk about dropping this assumption.
Until then, society and the justice system are made up of people, and free will is a more-or-less valid concept at the human level.
“No one cares. If a behavior has meaning in the context of right and wrong, it doesn’t matter if you grasp the meaning in and of itself. It has meaning even if you don’t recognize it. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be objective. It need not affect your behavior.”
If objective morality has no affect on human behaviour, then why should we give a shit about it?
No one:
I think you’re confused. Whenever I talk about value, I’m not talking about *objective* value, but subjective value.
You argued that subjective value is an oxymoron, I pointed out how patently absurd that statement is (i.e. money has value precisely because humans attribute value to it, it is irrelevant whether some “nonhuman arbiter” attributes value to money, it still has value in every meaningful sense.
Chris, your question does not make sense except in a framework of retribution. You seem to be asking whether it’s right to punish Manson, and get him back for what he did. It isn’t, California was wrong and Manson did not have free will. However, they’re justified in imprisoning him as long as he is a danger to others. Since he comes up for parole regularly and assures us that he would like to kill more people, he’s apparently still a danger. It may be the case that some of the Family members serving life sentences without parole are probably now safe to release, though, and their sentences should be reviewed.
No One of Consequence, I know I’ve pissed in your porridge and hurt your feelings. But you must understand, when you start raving about how you need to devalue humans in order to make your god seem valuable in comparison, and then repeatedly assure us that you’re an adult even though you have an imaginary friend, it’s hard to pass up the temptation to mock you.
PhoenicianRomans, could you explain how free will can exist? I can imagine the doctrine of free will being seriously “on trial” sometime in the next couple of decades. If the criminal justice system presumes that a crime is only committed if the accused could have done otherwise, and if part of the prosecutor’s job is to explain to the jury how the crime was committed, then the prosecutor will have to explain how free will can exist at all. The defense attorney’s counterargument need not be a rigorous proof of its nonexistence (and again, you are trying to shift the burden of proof away from yourself, even though you are the one making the positive claim that X exists). The defense need only argue that the prosecutor has not shown beyond a reasonable doubt how free will could exist and thereby how the crime could have been committed. It would seem prudent to excise the doctrine of free will now, in the legislatures, before it results in a not guilty verdict for a serial killer.
Brandon, I’d be interested in tackling problems in materialist ethics, but the breadth of such a discussion may be off-topic for this thread. If you’re interested and not weary of this already, drop a comment here.
“You seem to be asking whether it’s right to punish Manson, and get him back for what he did. It isn’t, California was wrong and Manson did not have free will.”
In terms of punishment one could argue in favor of the detterence benefits of retributive punishment, though then it comes down to a factual debate of how effective such methods are in infulencing others (I haven’t read enough studies to know either way, but the general idea I get from what I have read is that retributive justice is usually a pretty poor detterrent unless one resorts to extreme retribution such as torture, and even then it really depends.
“No, but if a statement can’t be falsified, there’s always the chance it isn’t actually saying anything meaningful.”
True, but I think here one has to draw a line between statements which can’t be falsified in principle, and statements which can’t be falsified in practice (perhaps due to the current limits of our technology), but could be falsified given sufficient power to perform experiments.
In the determinism (when it comes to human actions) example, it would be falsified if we had the ability to put a person in absolutely identicle positions (down to the internal state of his brain), and he performed different actions at least one of the times.
“If meaning is subjective, then there is no arbiter of meaning in the first place. You just subscribed to a might-makes-right philosophy. Congrats. If the Nazis had been successful under your system, by killing anyone who opposed them, they would have been right. Whatever is, is.”
If the Nazis had won completely, would it really matter if some nonhuman arbiter declared their actions immoral, if it had no actual effect on them?
And I don’t subscribe to might-makes-right: assuming the Nazis’ idiologies weren’t primarily based on factual mistakes (for example about the specific inferiorities of certain races), and were simply fundamentally different goals, then win or lose their philosophies are right *to them* and wrong to everybody else.
I had a hunch this particular fire might still be smoldering. I’m kind of disappointed that the very entertaining debate about the relative reality of counting vs. measurement died down.
As a favor to the spectators, I don’t suppose I could ask the current participants to see if they can pass the paraphrase test — re-state the position you disagree with in such a way that the commenter you disagree with agrees with the paraphrase? These conversations get so much more interesting when clear enumerations of the disagreements start to emerge.
Just a thought. Now, wish me luck on the CAPTCHA.
How fucktarded is this? You have to resort to schoolyard tacticts because you’re too chickenshit to actually engage in argument and then you swear you’ve hurt my feelings? Please. I’ve been dealing with dumbasses in grad school and public office irl with more panache than you’ve demonstrated online. Face it: you have no idea how to deal with the conclusions of your own position and resorted to giggling to yourself because of the same. Go ahead and scroll up, boy: not once did you engage an argument I gave. Instead, you made shit up like any standard rightwing troll and then argued against the strawman you created. The rightwingers, at least, aren’t so quick to resort to concernt troll status after seeking ad hominems
I didn’t say it had no effect. I said it need not in a given example.
Rainfall in Brazil need not have an effect upon my actions at this very moment in order to exist, or to even be important to humanity in the grand scheme of things.
I know. I think you’re confused.
And I pointed out that it’s impossible to prove any subjective value as superior to another in any absolute sense, by definition, and you ended up arguing that might makes right — which, again, was my point. Personal morals are just predispositions, just opinions, that cannot be proven without the assumption of outside agency.
Okay, now I’m sure you’e confused. Of course it would have no effect — that’s why your analogy to the Nazis was absurd. You brought them up to show that your philosophy was superior, and I pointed out that there is no proof available of your philosophy over theirs. Physical acts cannot create meaning.
You, unfortunately, do, by implication, since you suggested that the Nazi’s defeat would somehow validate your system over theirs. You’ve provided no means by which one moral system can be judged “better” than another as an absolute. All moral systems are merely good for their holders. There is no way a human can create an absolute “bad” or “good.”
Which. . . was. . . part. . . of. . .my. . . initial. . . point. Your own morals are merely good for you. For others, their mileage may vary. You can’t prove moral superiority of your moral system, merely — at pathetic best — moral superiority within a shared system. Not that that is worth shit.
“I didn’t say it had no effect. I said it need not in a given example. Rainfall in Brazil need not have an effect upon my actions at this very moment in order to exist, or to even be important to humanity in the grand scheme of things.”
Then tell me, in the abscence of being subjectively valued by some people, what effect could this theoretical objective morality have in the “grand scheme of things?”
Anyway, you’re main argument is that subjective morality isn’t objective and therefore can’t be objectively proven to be superior to another subjective morality - I agree. You also made a language claim that the word “value” implies something absolute and objective, I disagreed, pointing out money as a prime example of something we use the word “value” on that has only subjective, and not objective, value.
“You can’t prove moral superiority of your moral system, merely — at pathetic best — moral superiority within a shared system. Not that that is worth shit.”
Not worth shit objectively, sure, I agree, so what? I don’t give a shit about your useless nonhuman arbitrated, objective morality. So I can’t in any way prove that my morality is superior to a nazi’s (not even with might), so what? I don’t need to objectively prove that in order to oppose them, and I don’t need to objectively prove that in order to convince other people to oppose them, so what use is this objective morality and this nonhuman arbiter?
PhoenicianRomans, could you explain how free will can exist?
You’re assuming that there is only one level on which it could be said to exist. I’m focusing on the level of ourselves as individual identities, knowing we exist and that we can make choices, At this level free will is a real concept. Such things as brain chemistry, perceptual biases or mental disorders are constraints.
You are positing (wrongly, IMHO) a deterministic level in which everything can be predicted. At this level our decisions might be considered mechanistic - but at this level, “we” also do not exist. “We”, our individual identities, have also been dissolved into your mechanistic sequence of cause and effect.
At any level where I can say “I’ exist, free will also exists, and matters.
I think here one has to draw a line between statements which can’t be falsified in principle, and statements which can’t be falsified in practice (perhaps due to the current limits of our technology), but could be falsified given sufficient power to perform experiments.
In the determinism (when it comes to human actions) example, it would be falsified if we had the ability to put a person in absolutely identicle positions (down to the internal state of his brain), and he performed different actions at least one of the times.
This doesn’t apply then, The brain is a neural net - experiences change it. You cannot, in the real world, “put it back” to a previous condition.
Further, you can’t even posit an identical brain. Firstly, the act of attempting to measure and map a brain would change it. Secondly, a human is not a closed system detachable from the rest of the universe. Entropy marches on, and you can’t escape the Third Law.
I’m not going to defend Roger Penrose’s ideas in “the Emperor’s New Mind”, but it may be worthwhile for you to seek it out here.
Your determinism is a theoretical exercise that cannot apply, even in theory, in the real world. You’re engaging in “what if”, and then using a fantasy built on this unsustainable premise. You cannot claim that a statement can be falsified on the basis of a situation that cannot exist even in theory.
Brandon, there’s the deterrence that can arise incidentally from protective imprisonment, and then there’s the deterrence you can get from deliberately using someone as an example of retribution. I have no quarrel with the former; it’s unavoidable, if it exists at all.
But I don’t think we’re justified in imprisoning or otherwise harming someone just to show others what we can do. Consider an extreme example. A man steals a DVD, and even though he could not have done otherwise, we cut off his hand as a deterrent to others. For whatever reason this is wrong, other punishments are also wrong if they differ only by degree and not by formula. But if deterrence is a valid goal in itself, then cutting off the hand is a great idea.
I suggest that it is wrong because people have a right to not be unwillingly utilized toward others’ ends (this is another way of phrasing the right to not be enslaved). How would we justify taking this right away so that we can unwillingly use him as an example? The alternative, protective imprisonment, is justifiable because it is necessary. But retribution is gratuitous, and so cannot be similarly justified.
No One of Consequence, keep throwing your little temper tantrum. That’ll sure demonstrate that I haven’t hurt your feelings. And you should review your copy of How to Impress People on the Internet, because you’ve made an elementary miscalculation. An ad hominem is of the specific form: “you are wrong because you are in an emotionally abusive relationship with your imaginary friend.” That crucial conjunction is missing from my game; I haven’t graced you with an ad hominem, merely a gentle ribbing.
Thank you, Pho. Brain chemistry is not only a constraint, it is the entire makeup of your mind. And your brain chemistry is always the product of the previous state of your brain plus whatever input you’ve received in the interim. It’s billiard ball physics. Nothing here for your “will” to act upon.
As “epistemology” said first, there’s no room for free will in an indeterminate universe either. You may insist on throwing in quantum uncertainty, but there’s no meaningful return on this investment. You get thoughts and actions that were caused by random and uncontrollable quantum events. The point is they’re still caused by events outside your control, so your will cannot alter the future by this route either. All you’ve added is a source of madness.
Free will has nothing to do with predictability, my arguments have nothing to do with predictability, and if you keep bringing up the P word I’m going to have to give up and assume that you’re beyond hope.
Free will requires that the mind can somehow reach in and alter the course of the billiard balls, and that the mind has a choice of doing this in more than one way.
You seem to be saying either:
1) even though the brain is built from components that are completely out of the mind’s control, these components somehow build emergent structures that are under the mind’s control.
2) or, even though the brain is completely out of the mind’s control, the mind is capable of performing feats that do not rely upon the brain.
Both of those sound like magic to me.
A couple of quick notes:
Phonecian in a Time of Romans wrote:
It’s worth noting that, regardless of whether free will and predictability have anything to do with one another, determinism does not necessarily imply predictability. The results of some very simple systems of differential equations, completely determined by their math, cannot be calculated meaningfully due to high sensitivity to small variations. Results like this kicked off the field of chaos theory — but the less said about chaos theory in a philosophical context, the better.
Grammar RWA wrote:
Without disagreeing with the underlying point, I do think there’s an interesting distinction between talking about a system and the emergent properties of that system. The material mind is at least to some degree a recursive system, and recursion can produce some deeply weird but still entirely determined effects.
Phoenician in a time of Romans:
My bird can say “I exist.”
Does he have free will?
Grammar RWA:
Ad hominems are any insults in lieu of argument. Accusing me of throwing a temper tantrum is, in fact, an insult, and I have not responded in kind. You have behaved consistently like a child — now you have resorted to behaving like a child who needs a dictionary.
Thanks though. You just gave my friends a laugh. We’ve seen dumbshit on the web before, but seeing someone attempt to sound erudite by misusing the phrase ad hominem is unique. Still, right wing trolls are less pathetic. They’re simply selfish, not afraid to delve into the conclusions of their initial positions. They know they’re arguing in bad faith, for the most part, so there’s more intellect there than in your own contentions.
Brandon: Then tell me, in the abscence of being subjectively valued by some people, what effect could this theoretical objective morality have in the “grand scheme of things?”
Nothing lest the same agency which arbitrates an objective morality reacts to its violation or enforcement.
So I can’t in any way prove that my morality is superior to a nazi’s (not even with might), so what? I don’t need to objectively prove that in order to oppose them, and I don’t need to objectively prove that in order to convince other people to oppose them, so what use is this objective morality and this nonhuman arbiter?
You can’t argue you’re better. You said otherwise. You can kill them. But you can’t be better. There is no better, just what you want versus what they want. That, again, was my original point. Glad you came around to accepting the conclusion of your initial position.
“Nothing lest the same agency which arbitrates an objective morality reacts to its violation or enforcement.”
That sounds suspiciously like “might makes right”. It seems like an odd semantic choice: why call the morals of some nonhuman agency who will enforce them “objective”, while calling the morals of some hypothetical absolutely dominant group of humans “subjective”.
I never denied that I can’t prove my morality objectively better. But there is a such thing as “better”, just not in the absolute sense. There is both “better to somebody” and “better at something”. The first is purely preference and can’t really be argued using logic, but the second is where one can make arguments about morality. If you discover what the other person’s basic moral values are, you can argue that their methods aren’t the most effective way of fulfilling them. You can also argue against inferences they make from their moral assumptions - those inferences may be logically incorrect.
Not my problem if you don’t understand the contingencies of a formal fallacy. You don’t claim to care about accuracy.
If you find the facts insulting, so be it. I quote your tantrum:
And after all that:
you’re still whining that I’m not giving you the validation and praise you so desperately want from me. I can’t imagine why, if you really think so little of me as you claim. Unless, of course, you’re just desperate for someone to assure you that your Sky Daddy still cares about you. Well, I talked to Him for you; He said maybe you should start seeing other people.