“I’ll just say that very few physicists and very few psychologists have accepted Penrose’s thesis. ”
Nor rejected it completely, that I’m aware of. It was too tentative. Our understanding of the physics of the operating brain isn’t yet sufficiently advanced to tell if he’s right at all. His two books on the subject, “The Emperor’s New Mind” and “Shadows of the Mind” were essentially laundry lists of possible shortcomings of the notion that the mind is computable, i.e. simulatable with a Turing machine. Even if he’s wrong, a) it may not be the most practical way to construct one and b) our minds, and all practical minds, may well operate (in the practical sense) in a way that is not well emulated by the types of Turing machines we build today.

bellatrys posted:
If there is no free will, then I guess you just can’t help ranting against the MRAs, and the MRAs can’t help abusing women, so you might as well just shut down this blog and give it up, you’re not doing anything but bouncing a ball randomly from hand to hand or barking like a puppy at cars going by, and you can’t affect anything in the world, right?”

1.) Not having free will doesn’t necessarily mean everything is deterministic. 2.) You’re both conflating determinism with fatalism (which I’ve noticed quite a bit going through these comments). Determinism simply means every action has a previous set of causes, it doesn’t mean X was fated or predetermined to happen no matter what came before it (that would be fatalism)….It just means X had to happen *given* everything that came before. So, reading Amanda’s blog post is part of your causal chain and it just might push you or another reader to question free will for the first time. You might even discard it as a viable concept…as a result of reading this blog and thinking critically about free will. And if Amanda or wriderdd were fatalists, these blogs might not have been posted, and maybe it wouldn’t have occurred to you to think about free will critically

As previously suggested by Dan, I’d recommend checking out naturalism.org (http://www.naturalism.org/fatalism.htm#Determinism%20vs.%20Fatalism%A0 is particularly relevant)

He learned his particular brand of targeted bigotry from his environment. No one disagrees with this, right? And yet acknowledging that he is a victim of circumstance has never meant that we can’t be mad at him. That is how we (try to) communicate that “this is not okay, you have to stop acting like this.”

With or without free will, we are justified in saying “we understand why you did this, but it’s not acceptable behavior, and you must not do it again,” followed by social ostracism or legal enforcement depending on the nature of the behavior.

I think this complaint is just a variation on the meme that “to understand is to excuse”. I don’t buy the premise.

Yes, it does mean that retaliation and punishment for the sake of punishment is unwarranted, but prevention and protection have been sufficient for the progressive justice paradigm already.

but such a machine would be hard to make, and would be problematic if we made it. generally machines are designed to imitate human actions, after we have developed them, but have no situational awarness.

Well, you can be upset that assholes exist, and upset that their actions hurt others. And believe that someone should try to stop them.

But you’re right: the lack of free will does hinder the ability to feel righteous indignation, or to believe that the rapists/abusers/etc. *deserve* retribition - stopping them to prevent harm is still valid, but the justificatoin for hurting them out of a sense of justice is at least partially undermined.

I’ve got to go with bellatrys and others in this thread: if, as you believe, there is no free will, only what is biologically determined, then why are you writing this blog trying to change people’s minds?

That’s silly. Obviously even in a completely deterministic billiard-ball system, we could still point to certain higher-level processes and call them “learning” and “reacting to outside stimuli” and so on. In such a system Amanda could have completely deterministically ended up writing this post (not just due to biology, but due to her mind processing information) and this post would have then proceeded to deterministically affect or not affect other minds. (note: i’m not saying, and neither did the OP, that our system is such a system)

And I think the objection “we can’t make two identical people in practice” misses the point a bit, since it’s a thought experiment, like the dreaded philosophical zombies. Yes, it’s true that even if we had some sort of Star Trek device to make two identical people down to the atomic level, there would be random noise so that the people would not stay identical. But how does that help the “free will” argument? We don’t even know if this random noise is important in decision-making.