Summations Only

What determines the state of your brain? I agree. With the exception of those who consider "their will" to be some non-physical mind. Substance dualism. Which I don't think is justifiable. I wouldn't say I a happy with it. It goes against the dualistic intuitive notions that seem to come rather naturally to us. But I accept it.

The state of my brain is determined by the prior state of my brain, plus input through my senses.Should the last bit give me pause? I don't think so. I'm going to cross the road, I see a car coming, I change my mind ... this is good. It would not be more like "free will" if I marched out into the road like a blind automaton and got squished. Well they're in the same boat. Just because something is invisible doesn't make it immune to the deterministic/random dichotomy. Some of them apparently think it does, but how could it? It's just the same old thing ... "How can I resolve this question ... I know, I'll postulate the existence of an invisible man having the property of resolving this problem."This has never worked out well.

Hi Doc, And I as well. So far so good. I am a compatibilist in the sense that the alternative is hard determinism. One of the issues I have with that is the idea that people who do really heinous things are really just victims of the inevitable. What are your thoughts along those lines?

The prior state of your brain is the big one. You didn't have enough free will to invent your brain from scratch, you inherited it from a huge combination of things from genetics, your upbringing, the culture you live in, the drugs you take and your medical condition ( to name just those I can think of off the top of my own brain).We also now know - or are at least beginning to understand - that emotions that we call morality are hardwired into our brains from very early in life. Not so much free will then - it's something else, more a flexible but pre-conditioned mind.

Yes, but it still is my brain, i.e. me. Again, to complain about this and say my will isn't free enough would be to demand that my will should be free of me, in which case it wouldn't be my will.

I agree. But I also think you are going to have a near impossible task persuading people that they can accept determinism and still have freewill. Because what you are calling freewill isn’t what anyone means by freewill when they talk about their subjective experience and the intuitive notions it results in. As wrong headed as such intuitive notions may be — They are very hard to shake. Especially if they go to the very core of who it is we think we are.The sort of freewill people think they have is probably best described as illusory.

Compatibilism isn't an alternative to hard determinism, it's the assertion that we can have free will despite it. Perhaps you could expound a bit on the problem.If you're worried that people might use it as an excuse, then it's not a very good one, because what it boils down to is: "Yes, my client did do all those really bad things. But in mitigation, I would point out that he only did them because he's a really bad person."

The difficulty of persuading other people of my point of view is not a fault in my point of view. It's not like I'm trying to sell it and make a profit, I'm trying to be right.

Sure, in the sense that you brain is in your head and not someone else's head, it's yours. And also in the sense that you live in your brain which is the sum total of your life experiences plus your inherited genes and that's what makes you you.But you simply don't have the freewill to say, rape a nun, just on a whim. Your brain is pre-conditioned to make that not a real choice for you. (Unless, of course, you're a psychopath with a sex and religion predilection - which is the other side of this argument).You're free to take morally neutral decisions freely, but once you hit on something of moral dubiety, bits of your brain that you have no control over start to make some things difficult to do.Freewill is a religious concept like the soul - it doesn't have a reality of its own.

Hence the controversy.A quantum fluctuation 14 billion years ago lead to Straggler posting on EVC this morning.No freewill needed it is a illusion.This is a fact, you did post and the big bang happened. So logic dictates the fact that you posted was caused by the big bang.Or is there anyway to reconcile the possibility that the thing that is you made a novel choice yet undetermined until it was actualized and the wave function responsible for every outcome that led to your selection collapsed?

Or, to put it another way, I don't want to rape a nun, so I'm not going to.This is what we call free will. Yes, there are some things that my brain doesn't want to do. Which are, by a complete noncoincidence, the things that I don't want to do. My brain being the physical instantiation of my will. "Bits of my brain that I have no control over?" No, bits of my brain that I am.I am not a helpless puppet of that sinister puppet-master, my brain, because I am my brain. There are no strings --- the fact that I always think the same as my brain does is because I always think the thinks I think, not because my brain, as agent, is acting on me, as patient, and making me think the things that it does.It's as though someone were to say: "There was no free vote at the last election --- the electorate only voted the way they did because the people of the United States compelled them to do so, which is coercion." No, it's actually just a very strange description of what was in fact a free vote; a strange description because it represents the electorate and the people as two entities when they are in fact one.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

If a bad person does bad things.Would not hard determinism suggest it was inevitable that person would be a bad person and do bad things?Even though the person is culpable, in the strict sense what we call freewill, they had no choice. Because they are simply operating in accordance to the previous initial conditions that led to the outcome of they're despicable behavior.Technically it is not they're fault, like Mrs. Rabbit said,
"I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way."

I'm just not willing to rule them out. Trains of thought seem to me to be very random, so either the neurons are firing in a random way from one thought to another, there is some "bleed over" from one neuron firing to another, or the chemicals, in crossing the synapse, are hitting other nearby neurons and making them fire. I don't think they are responsible, but I think they may be a part of it. In any case, part of human sentience comes from our brain's ability to jump to conclusions, or have one thought trigger another, seemingly unrelated thought to come to a solution. We see this all the time, most popularly in shows like House. I'm just open to the possibility that some of these "random" thoughts are due to quantum tunneling between neurons.I could be entirely talking out my ass here. I was a determinist for a long time. Then I started learning about quantum mechanics and realized that if our brains are mostly electrical signals, then there are some quantum effects occurring. I also thought that that might explain someone doing or thinking something that seems out of character or seems to come from nowhere.Regardless, it doesn't open the door for free will at all. Not entirely. Deterministic means that if you know all of the starting conditions, you can know what someone is going to do. If there is some quantum effect involved, the best you can do is know the probabilities of what someone will do.

The general consensus of hard determinists is that genetics plus environment (including history, drugs, etc) makes the actions inevitable. We can't change the genetics of a person, so if we don't want bad things to happen, we have to change the environment...either medication or incarceration, or both.You also have to decide whether the legal system is there to "stop bad people" or to "protect good people." If Serial Killer Sam is on a killing spree, yeah, we may be able to say that he has no choice. However, it is still fine to then remove him from the general populace to stop him from killing other people.And finally, you can think about it the way Dr. A is arguing. It may have been determined, but the inciting cause was internal to the person, thus they are at fault. They weren't coerced by an external agent.In any case, even thinking deterministically, the justice system would still operate much as it does now.

They had a choice. The fact that that choice was determined by them doesn't make them innocent, it's what makes them culpable."Yes, m'lud, my client did eat those people. But only because, by a sheer stroke of bad luck, he happened to be John Wayne Gacy, which could have happened to anyone. If he had had the good fortune to be Francis of Assisi, you'd be nominating him for sainthood. I therefore move ..."Now, the question I would ask the defense lawyer, apart from "can I have what you're smoking?" is --- who, precisely is he exculpating? He's talking as though there were two people, his client and J.W.G, and his client, who is different from J.W.G, just suffers from the appalling bad luck of being J.W.G.And again, when he says "it could have happened to anyone", what does he mean? Could it have happened to me? Only if there is a "me" that is not Dr Adequate, and is not to be identified with Dr A's thoughts, opinions, feelings, and marked preference for not eating people.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.