00:04
"...cases in which it is generally recognized that agents are not responsible for their behavior – such as actions done in ignorance or under hypnosis, and actions by young children..." bu.edu/law/journals-archive/bulr/documents/scanlon.pdf
My understanding is that approximately 75% of the general population is genetically disposed to hypnosis. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnotic_susceptibility
My point is that I think there's a strong association between free will and the genetic tendency to resist hypnosis. Which may explain why so many people do not believe in the concept of free will: it doesn't exist for them.
Hypnosis involves suggestion. And the prefrontal cortex of the brain also plays an important role in suggestion. People who are easily suggestible are also easily hypnotized. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4812013
2 hours later…
1 hour later…
03:08
@HWalters Yes, by punishment I mean retribution- as though the guilty party deserves punishment. I don’t believe anyone deserves punishment, but I do believe they ought to be disciplined. My issue is finding the perfect balance between deference and an acceptable means of discipline. I feel like philosophers have wasted a lot of time trying to figure out the ethical implications of free will, rather than accepting it’s impossibility and considering other ways to reduce harmful behavior.
It’s not like these issues cannot be answered. We just haven’t had centuries of philosophers considering the consequences; and if a free will denier says “They couldn’t help what they did, but we should still lock them up” it gets mocked as though it’s the most repulsive idea ever. If it’s so repulsive, then it would be nice if more people could help us come up with solutions.
1 hour later…
05:16
@FrankHubeny For example, if a person has a brain malfunction that gives him an uncontrollable desire to murder, he ought to be removed from society- at least until his malfunction can be cured. It’s not that he’s being punished for something he deserves- but for the safety of society, something has to be done. It’s like Lassie. Everyone loved Lassie, but once she got rabies, there was nothing else that could be done but to put her down. It’s sad, but it was necessary.
05:36
@HWalters Locking people up seems to be the only deterrence mankind has consistently agreed with, but considering the high percentage of recidivism, it doesn’t appear to work very well. This doesn’t mean that the general population is not inhibiting their darkest desires to avoid prison, but it makes me wonder how many people refrain from murder solely because of prison.
Surely there are other reasons we don’t murder people. It seems like a restriction for murder would be included in any democratic society, so that probably means most people find murder to be repulsive. I actually asked a question about this recently.
6 hours later…
11:58
"Specifically, a "view on what free will is" is not describing a scene that you experience"" Views, as in things you believe, is absolutely a qualitative experience. Belief has a feeling to it. What is the meaningful difference, then?
In any case I find the very discussion of determinism to be utterly confused and born of the Christian obsession with original sin. We have free will precisely because determinism is true.
If things didn't cause our actions, then our actions would be entirely random, unbidden, arising from nothing at all. I want my choices to arise as a consequence of my beliefs, personality, and circumstances, otherwise I would be a slave to randomness. It is because determinism is true that we can hold people culpable for their actions. This only becomes a problematic view if you, like Augustine, want to answer why a benevolent God permits evil
12:39
@FrankHubeny Just looking through this a bit, I don't understand your "defeater" for determinism that you mentioned above. You said:
> You may be right. It might be a delusion. So, assume determinism. Can you try to do anything? Can you initiate any action at all? If you can then that would have started with free will, but that contradicts the assumption of determinism. That contradiction forces me to reject the assumption of determinism and accept free will.
> You may be right. It might be a delusion. So, assume determinism. Can you try to do anything? Can you initiate any action at all? If you can then that would have started with free will, but that contradicts the assumption of determinism. That contradiction forces me to reject the assumption of determinism and accept free will.
13:38
@Chelonian I'm using "defeater" to avoid saying that we must reject determinism, only that it is reasonable to do so. It is the same type of approach that Plantinga uses in the evolutionary argument against naturalism. Determinism might be true, but there are good reasons to believe it is not true.
Here is the argument: Assume determinism. Derive that determinism means we do not have free will. Derive from that that our belief that we actually have free will is faulty in some way (delusion, illusion, whatever). Derive a contradiction from our empirical evidence that we do experience free will with what the assumption of determinism concludes. Discharge the assumption of determinism by rejecting it.
@FrankHubeny OK, thanks. I didn't realize "defeater" could have this "lighter" sense (I see online that maybe this is called an "undercutting defeater").
@anonymouswho I agree that we should not get into issues of punishment. I am not taking my position in favor of free will from any religious perspective. Indeed, I don't accept religious positions that insist we don't have free will either. Now consider ought with respect to Lassie or a criminal. I see no need to use the word "ought" unless determinism is false. We will do what ever we will do. Our use of the word "ought" is a delusion.
However by using "ought" at all we have empirical evidence suggesting that determinism is false, that is, that the assumption of determinism should be rejected until there is some good evidence for it and I doubt there ever will be any good evidence for it.
@Chelonian This empirical evidence is our experience that we are making choices that we feel responsible for. Now I will admit many of our choices appear automatic as well and this might pose a defeater for free will. Ultimately this would require investigating who we are. I think the assumption of determinism reaches a conclusion of who we are too quickly. There is more to us than determinism can describe.
@Bread You make a good point about hypnosis. We are under many constraints that we even refuse to recognize. Having these constraints does not mean we do not have free will unless all of our behavior can be fully, completely explained by purely event and not other agent causes. By "agent" I mean someone, like the hypnotizer, who has free will.
14:12
@FrankHubeny Well, our experiences and feelings about what has happened are often out of alignment with the underlying reality (cf. optical illusions). It seems to me that free willed (in the sense of libertarian free will) and fully determined human actions would appear the same to us. I agree that further understanding of who we are (neuroscience, etc.) would help us understand these issues better.
1 hour later…
15:30
"What is the meaningful difference, then?" Percepts are born from sensation, and are independent of belief. A magician can appear to pull a rabbit out of an empty hat, and that may be amusing to watch, but it doesn't compel me to believe the rabbit was pulled out of the hat. Optical illusions, tactile illusions, etc are in a similar box.
@ubadub There are things I don't mind calling percepts related to "internal sensations" that can be somehow relevant to the discussion of free will; how exactly I'm not sure, because I'm not really sure there's a great concept here to free will per se. However, I think you have something really basic wrong here:
"In any case I find the very discussion of determinism to be utterly confused and born of the Christian obsession with original sin. We have free will precisely because determinism is true."
So you're a compatibilist; I often find myself on the side, here, of effective compatibilist apologist. But your notion that this has to do with Christianity is flawed. The discussion is much broader than Christianity; Christianity may simply provide particular views (but Christians can be found that are libertarian, compatiblist, and hard determinists)...
In particular, compatibilism can be traced back to Ancient Greece; same for determinism, which in its original form was spawned from a more theistic bent than the modern physics form
Chrysippus of Soli (; Greek: Χρύσιππος ὁ Σολεύς, Chrysippos ho Soleus; c. 279 – c. 206 BC) was a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was a native of Soli, Cilicia, but moved to Athens as a young man, where he became a pupil of Cleanthes in the Stoic school. When Cleanthes died, around 230 BC, Chrysippus became the third head of the school. A prolific writer, Chrysippus expanded the fundamental doctrines of Zeno of Citium, the founder of the school, which earned him the title of Second Founder of Stoicism.Chrysippus excelled in logic, the theory of knowledge, ethics, and physics. He created an original...
There are also modern non-Christian cultures that have views on the subject (by non-Christian culture I'm referring to the degree of influence of the religion on the culture)
@FrankHubeny "Derive from that that our belief that we actually have free will is faulty in some way (delusion, illusion, whatever)."
Belief that we have free will is culturally influenced; you treat this as if it's entirely derived from our senses. According to XP, there are too few libertarians and too many compatibilists to justify that your form of free will is something innate
Now, you might disagree with XP on methodological bases, but if we just take XP as you would normally take such things... as a "preliminary study", then the PS indicates that there's a serious question on the presumption of universality of libertarian free will
In other words, I think it's reasonable to reject the hypothesis that LFW is universally held. This is the precise reason I keep questioning you when you dance into the area of appealing to the "illusion" of free will...
...that, and the fact that compatibilists, despite common libertarian dogma, are not fighting any actual internal sense. There's nothing in your subjective experience that demands LFW to be true; it's all in your views
If you have some other reason to think we have LFW, I'm happy with that. But so long as you try to appeal to what things seem like, I'm going to challenge you
Regarding this comment: "This empirical evidence is our experience that we are making choices that we feel responsible for." ...I think you would be well advised to seriously hear out compatibilist ideas of responsibility. Simply dismissing them because you feel the world isn't deterministic is a distraction.
16:27
@Chelonian The problem with claiming our experiences (which include our rational processes) are illusions is that we use those experiences and rational processes to claim that determinism is true. Essentially that is how I understand Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism. There must be some reason to deny our experiences besides claiming they sometimes are wrong.
@HWalters How do you know this: Belief that we have free will is culturally influenced It may be very innate. If it were not we would not be using words such as "should" nor have a legal system related to responsibility. However, I think it is more likely that the argument for determinism IS socially constructed. It may require "education".
16:52
@FrankHubeny "It may be very innate." There is something I would contend is innate, but if the excess of 2 millennia of debates between compatibilism and libertarian free will, of which you simply are a single individual comprising some few decades of your own perspective, indicates to me a perversely severe problem with the hypothesis that LFW ideas of free will per se are innate
Certainly I can reflect on my own experiences of choice; and nothing in my own experience demands your concept of free will. So if you think this is innate, I must have a disorder. I seriously doubt I do.
"I think it is more likely that the argument for determinism IS socially constructed. It may require "education"." This actually works both ways. If you put yourself inside the determinism camp and demand free will, you're compatibilist. But you have to know where that camp is to put yourself outside of it one, to be a liberalist.
As for it "requiring education", do you have evidence for that, or are you just projecting your own views onto the population?
I have no idea why it takes specific argumentation to get people to realize that projecting their considered potential options onto ontic futures is a fundamental mistake, but for whatever reason it does require that argumentation. So I'm not even convinced that "requiring education" is even a counterargument
If all we have are fuzzy appeals to personal biases upon the subject, then IMO the entire subject is flawed
If there's a real answer to these things, it is only to be found in appeals to ontic entities... such as built in mechanisms within our persons that we're interpreting one way or the other. Such mechanisms do indeed exist
Disorders in themselves demonstrate something's going on; there's a difference between a normative person and one with, objessive-compulsive tendancies, invasive thoughts, alien hand syndrome, ADD, etc
Maybe somewhere in this mix you can find something that requires LFW; I'm not really betting on it, but I wouldn't rule it out.
But I've heard the standard high level arguments for LFW, and they not only not compel me; they go against the evidence born out by XP
...which I'm fine for rejecting as too preliminary, but not for simply dismissing and purporting an alternative view without evidence (this particularly relating to a view of what most people are like)
@HWalters You are trying to straightjacket Chrysippus into the compatibilist category, but compatibilism only exists as a position in relation to the determinism vs. free will debate. Chrysippus was not speaking within the context of that debate, which is a uniquely Christian invention, and so he can't justly be called a compatibilist.
Causal determinism only becomes a "problem" if you believe in a God who ordained the laws of nature, because then you have to explain why a benevolent God would ordain laws of nature that produce evil. Thus, from the perspective of the Christian free will vs. determinism debate, any thinker (e.g. Chrysippus) that doesn't adopt the same theological axioms will seem like a compatibilist, but that doesn't make that a valid appellation.
17:09
@ubadub I'm well aware of the fact that LFW is used as a proposed solution to say the problem of evil, but I think it's too small to conclude from this that LFW was invented to solve the problem of evil
@HWalters your page supports what I just said. Stoic ideas were, from the perspective of the modern (Christian) debate on FW, either compatibilist or non-determinist, neither of which advocate "free will," and indeed we can only ascribe them these names post facto. As the article states, "Greek philosophy had no precise term for 'free will'." It was not a relevant category for them.
3 hours later…
19:58
> @Chelonian The problem with claiming our experiences (which include our rational processes) are illusions is that we use those experiences and rational processes to claim that determinism is true. Essentially that is how I understand Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism. There must be some reason to deny our experiences besides claiming they sometimes are wrong.
I'm saying that some of our experiences--namely, our experience of libertarian free will--may be incorrect. Not necessarily all our experiences or thoughts. And the reason to deny that we have free will is that it seems inconsistent with our other observations of the universe, ones that have brought us to our current understanding of physics.
As an example, consider how Person A may look at the sky each day for hours and conclude that the sun travels through the sky. Person B may tell him, no, it doesn't. A then says "but my experience of it is that it travels...if you wait, you can observe it moving slowly across the sky yourself." B says that is an illusion. A then says that B has self-defeated because if everything B believes is an illusion, B shouldn't trust his belief that the moving sun is an illusion.
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Transcript for
Oct3
Oct '184
Oct5
Free Will, Omnipotence, Determinism
Discussing issues of causal and theological determinism
