Please read Thou Art Physics
There's no conflict between free will and determinism -- the very opposite, free will becomes possible only in the presence of determinism. If your current self couldn't determine your actions, there wouldn't be any meaningful free will.
On one hand, free will appears to require determinism, for the reasons you give. On the other hand, this interpretation requires a significant re-interpretation of what "free will" means, that is incompatible with what most people think it means. Accepting the determinism-compatible definition of free will probably has non-obvious consequences.
The difficulty of seeing the determinist view of free will, of understanding timeless decision theory, and understanding what an algorithm feels like from the inside, are all basically the same difficulty. They are all non-trivial.
On the other hand, this interpretation requires a significant re-interpretation of what "free will" means, that is incompatible with what most people think it means.
I disagree with this. I think most people don't really think about what free will means, but once they think about it they concede that it must mean your personality decides stuff, and NOT that you're necessarily unpredictable.
Indeed, that's granted even by advocates of libertarian free will, albeit in a sneaky and one-directional fashion.
Concentrating on just the final paragraph first, because it provokes the most interesting answer IMO.
Imagine a heinous murder in which the killer did it “just for the fun of it”. Yet upon psychiatric and medical examination he is found to have a tumor the size of a golf ball in the medial prefrontal cortex of his brain (this area is responsible for emotional control and behavioral impulse). It would be fairly easy to surmise that he was not in any real sense responsible for his actions in carrying out the murder.
Really, why?
He was not in his right mind.
Not quite. He was his mind; where he refers to the man with a tumor. He was not in tumor-free-man's right mind. So we punish man-with-tumor, not man-without-tumor, as they are clearly very different people.
We would not prescribe the same punishment for him as we would a perfectly healthy individual.
Depends which state you live in. By removing the tumor, we are essentially killing man-with-tumor. Replacing him with man-without-tumor, a completely different person. If you live somewhere with the death penalty, that is in fact the punishment you would give a healthy individual.
Would it be moral to deny this man surgery as a ”punishment” for his crime?
In what way would that be a punishment for man-with-tumor, the entity that commited the crime? Man-without-tumor would be punished by that, due to continued non-existance, but man-with-tumor would not.
This topic has been covered ad nauseum on nearly every page on the internet.
Are you aware of the prior discussion of the topic on this site in particular?
I'm going to downvote this just because I think +4 points is too high considering you didn't provide links. I don't mean to discourage posting such comments without links, and wouldn't vote one into negative territory, but I think the links add a lot of the value, and should especially be given because you are criticizing someone new to the site for not searching for the old discussions.
I agree. I won't edit links in, though, because jsalvatier already provided that information and I don't want to karma-snipe.
I think the comments in reply to this are a really good illustration of how starting a discussion off with confused, unstudied and otherwise poorly framed arguments can doom the entire conversation. It's like there is a conservation of comment quality- where a reply to a post can never be more than twice as insightful as the OP. Given a sufficiently low quality post any comment that directly engages with it is also low quality.
Agreed, the term determinism is being used in a very non-standard way here.
"a theory is deterministic if, and only if, given its state variables for some initial period, the theory logically determines a unique set of values for those variables for any other period."[10]
—Ernest Nagel, Alternative descriptions of physical state''
This article doesn't add anything notable to the previous Less Wrong articles about free will, and in fact seems to miss the entirety of the philosophical tradition around it. Have you ever heard of compatibilism?
See my post Crime and Punishment, and the follow-up, Separate morality from free will, for my view on why this apparent paradox is not real, but is caused by misappropriating the word "morality" for religious purposes and cultural signalling.
We would not prescribe the same punishment for him as we would a perfectly healthy individual.
The purpose of the justice system is not to punish criminals, it's to protect society. This is usually done through negative incentives, i.e. punishment. If removing the tumor also removes the man's desire to kill for the fun of it, then there is no reason to punish him.
The purpose of the justice system is not to punish criminals, it's to protect society
There are at least 4 variations of what justice is for - some legal experts will endorse all of them simultaneously. It's at least the case that if you think one of them is obviously what justice is for, you're wrong.
Sorry, I was being American-centric, where the system is designed primarily to "enforce the standards of conduct necessary to protect individuals and the community" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice).
But you're right, there isn't a consensus on the "best" definition. Deciding which one is best would probably need another post for itself.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the relevant criterion here isn't what's best in some abstract sense, it's what governments actually implement, and to a lesser extent what our intuitions about punitive legitimacy say. Cultures vary, and so does rhetoric, but I've never heard of a justice system that wasn't functionally motivated at least in part by retributive sentiment.
I think this claim is either tautological or false. The tautological sense is that almost any goal, including abstract justice or state-sponsored retribution, can be viewed as ultimately contributing to a healthy society, thus protecting people. I would be surprised to find many advocates for any criminal-justice policy admit that the long-run consequences of their policy are bad.
If you take a narrow view of protection, then the claim is false. Advocates of some current or proposed US criminal justice policy often make arguments that leave the connection to "protection" fairly vague. To pick one example that's been in the news lately, let's look at capital punishment. I don't normally hear death penalty supporters talk about protecting society from the person sentenced to execution. They are usually interested in the abstract symbolism or "morality play" aspect of a bad person being punished for their wrongdoing. And you might think the social consequences of this spectacle are worthwhile, but it doesn't see to be about "protection", narrowly understood.
Your question of crime and punishment has nothing to do with the useless debate between determinism and free will (as pointed out repeatedly by many, we, ironically, have no other sensible choice but to act as if we had free will).
It is rather about reasonable ways of protecting people from harm and ways to rehabilitate the offenders, two hard civic and political problems currently lumped together and bandaided by the woefully inadequate penal system.
You may have concluded that crime+punishment should have nothing to do with determinism/free will, and that conclusion is IMHO a good one. But in the real world, crime+punishment do have a lot to do with determinism/free will. Our philosophy and our legal system is riddled with explicit statements about the issue. That is why we call it "crime and punishment" instead of "crime and prevention". See my post, Crime and Punishment.
(as pointed out repeatedly by many, we, ironically, have no other sensible choice but to act as if we had free will)
This is not true. Susan Blackmore has spoken a lot about his. Quick example:
It is possible to live happily and morally without believing in free will. As Samuel Johnson said, “All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.” With recent developments in neuroscience and theories of consciousness, theory is even more against it than it was in his time. So I long ago set about systematically changing the experience. I now have no feeling of acting with free will, although the feeling took many years to ebb away.
But what happens? People say I’m lying! They say it’s impossible and so I must be deluding myself in order to preserve my theory. And what can I do or say to challenge them? I have no idea - other than to suggest that other people try the exercise, demanding as it is.
When the feeling is gone, decisions just happen with no sense of anyone making them, but then a new question arises - will the decisions be morally acceptable? Here I have made a great leap of faith. It seems that when people discard the illusion of an inner self who acts, as many mystics and Buddhist practitioners have done, they generally do behave in ways that we think of as moral or good. So perhaps giving up free will is not as dangerous as it sounds - but this too I cannot prove.
I've done the same thing and have no feeling of free will left. (I'm not even sure I ever had it to begin with.) I find the whole idea of "agency" problematic and free will just blatantly incoherent, even as a useful illusion.
This has neither destroyed my life, nor made me any less moral. Rather to the contrary, I suspect it has improved both aspects.
This exercise sounded interesting, and I wanted to research it a bit more. I found another article by Susan Blackmore which I think relates: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-faith-column/2007/03/free-spirit-god-fear-anything
Does everyone wonder about free will? Certainly the world’s great thinkers have done so for millennia, the existence of God has been challenged by arguments about this very subject and modern science merely makes its existence seem less and less plausible.
But this is not a problem we should leave to the experts, for it concerns us all, tangling as it does with issues of morality, wisdom and the meaning of life. I suspect that at some level everyone who thinks at all must have asked themselves questions such as Who am I? Why do I end up doing things I didn’t want to do? Is everything inevitable, and if so why should I bother doing anything at all?
To my surprise I recently discovered that even my Dad does.
My father is not an educated man. He left school at fifteen, fought in the Second World War, came home to take over his father’s printing business and, as far as I know, never read a book for the rest of his life. He was a straightforward, honest and kindly man; a father I could admire, but not one I could share my ideas with – not someone I thought would have anything to say about free will. But I was wrong, as I learned one evening, sitting with him by the fire.
“Where did you say you were going dear?” he asked for the third or fourth time.
“To Sharpham House. It’s a Buddhist centre near Totnes."
“Why are you going there?”
“I’m giving a lecture on free will.”
“Free will? What on earth is there to say about that?”
How do you explain the problem of free will to a man of ninety who has advanced dementia, just about knows who you are, and whose world consists of a bed, a fireside chair, and the daily paper he can no longer understand?
I did my best. I said that it seemed to me that my body and brain are clever machines that can function perfectly well without there being any inner me, or spirit or soul, to direct them. So there’s a problem – I seem to be in control but I cannot really be. This is, I said, what I was going to be talking about. To my complete surprise this set him alight. He was quite sure that he had an inner spirit. Otherwise why would anything matter? I asked him where this spirit came from, and he said from God. I protested that there was no God, and that spirits controlling a body would have to be magic, and he came back with a comment I have never forgotten.
“If there is no God and no spirit, then why do we want to be good?”
This struck me so hard because I, too, have come to this point in my own, very different, struggles. I have long assumed that free will is an illusion and have worked hard to live without it, but doing this provokes a simple fear – what if I behave terribly badly? What if I give up all moral values and do terrible things? What indeed are moral values and how can I make moral decisions if there’s no one inside who is responsible? Why do I want to work hard at spiritual practice (link to previous blog on spiritual path) if there’s no one who acts and no freedom not to?
I’m sure I needn’t go on. I suspect that this natural fear is the main reason why so few people sincerely try to live without free will. Like my Dad, they want to be good, and fear that if they stop believing in a self who chooses to do the right thing they might do something terrible. Is the fear justified? I suspect not.
Evolutionary psychology provides reasons why we want to be good, such as nurturing instincts shaped by kin selection, and the desire to earn brownie points in the game of reciprocal altruism; memetics explains how altruistic memes can spread so successfully; and most of us have been trained since early childhood to behave at least reasonably decently. So it may just come naturally to us to want to be good, even though we so often fail. If this is true, this common fear is no excuse to carry on living in delusion.
Arguably our cruellest and most selfish behaviour is caused by clinging to the false idea of a self who has free will, in which case we might even behave better, rather than worse, if we could throw off the illusion. So it is by no means obvious that giving up believing in free will must be morally dangerous.
Another deep seated fear is that we will fail to do anything at all, and lose all motivation. I have frequently had students who thought this way, “Why would I ever get up in the morning?” they ask. I suggest they try the exercise and see what happens. What happens is that they get bored. Then they need to go to the loo, and once in the bathroom it seems nicer to have a shower and clean their teeth than go back to bed. And so the day goes on and things get done. In fact, if you keep practicing this way it becomes increasingly obvious that the physical body you once thought you inhabited does not need a ghostly driver. It really is OK to trust in the universe and in one’s own spontaneous actions. Then the feeling of free will simply loses its power and fades away.
I've done the same thing and have no feeling of free will left.
There is a difference between feeling and acting. Both of you act as if you had free will, which was my point.
Huh? I don't understand what you mean. Are you saying that you model me as having free will because that's the only way you can model human behavior? If so, I would say your models are seriously lacking.
This topic has been covered ad nauseum on nearly every page on the internet. But it still generates so much good conversation that I will stir he pot again.
Imagine you are walking down the street and come upon a woman lying on the ground crying. Suddenly you realize she has obviously been assaulted. You rush to her side, feeling an intense desire to help. The thing we would refer to as our “self” stands at the intersection of the lines of input and stimuli with decision and action. By all accounts you will tend to feel that you are the root cause of your own thoughts and actions. Personal choice has led you to either act or not to act. You seem to be acting on your own free will. However, as I hope to highlight this perspective cannot be held in light of what science tells us about the workings of the human brain.
At a conscious level we are aware of only a small portion of the information that our brains are processing at each moment. While we are continually aware of acute changes in our moods, thoughts, perceptions, behavior, etc. we are left completely unaware of the brain states that produce these changes. Yet nearly all of us maintain that we are the creators of our own patterns of thought and action. The physiologist Benjamin Libet has demonstrated that neural activity in the motor regions can be detected 350 milliseconds before the subject is aware that they have decided to move. (Libet, Gleason, Wright and Pearl, 1983). More recently fMRI data has been shown to convey that “conscious” decisions can be seen in neural activity 10 seconds before the subject is aware of them. (Soon, Brass, Heinze and Hayes, 2008) These findings make it difficult to maintain that one is the conscious author of their own actions.
No perspective which takes into account causality leaves room for freewill. Our internal dialog of thoughts, desires and moods simply pop into minds producing either action or stasis. The reasons for this are left unexplained from a purely subjective point of view. Our belief in free will seems to spring out of our moment to moment ignorance of the causal chain which produces our thoughts and actions. The term “free will” merely describes the feeling of being the author of our own thoughts as they arise in consciousness. Take for instance a train of thoughts like, “I’m hungry. I think there is some cake in the fridge. Well cake isn’t very healthy, maybe cottage cheese would be better,” this example highlights the apparent choices one can make, and they seem freely made. But looking deeper reveals that these thoughts simply arise free of our authorship and yet direct our actions nevertheless.
The alternative position to traditional free will is often known as Determinism, and is almost considered a bad word by most people. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has highlighted the confusion most people carry with regards to determinism. “They equate determinism with fatalism.” This confusion produces questions such as, “if determinism is true why should I do anything? Why not just wait and see what happens?” This line of questioning reveals that most people imagine that if our choices depend on prior causes that they do not matter. The fact that I am writing this paper is the result of a choice to do so, if I had not decided to write it, it would not get written. But my choice to do so was unquestionably the result of many causal factors, such as the desire to achieve a decent grade, social pressures and a desire to achieve a goal. Choice is as important as those who fancy free will state that it is. Some people imagine that if we acknowledge that we are not the author of our own thoughts and actions that, moral and political freedoms then become unimportant. But merely acknowledging the causal influences and the fact that we do not know what we will intend until the intention arises, does not lessen the value of personal freedom of individuals to do what they intend or not to do otherwise, regardless of the source of those intentions.
This issue is not purely philosophical and academic, meant to be a silly logical exercise. This belief in free will is the foundation of the religious notion of “sin” as well as the underlying commitment to retributive justice. Free will has been deemed by The Supreme Court a “universal and persistent” base for law in our country, also stating “a deterministic view of human conduct that is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system” (United States v. Grayson, 1978). It seems that any advancements in science which threaten the commonly held notions about free will draw into question the ethics of punishing people for their bad behavior. It seems that the primary worry is that an honest discussion of the root causes of our behavior will erode moral responsibility. But does the acknowledgement of underlying causes for our behavior mean that we cannot be expected to take responsibility for our actions? Of course we wouldn't.
We can view human beings as forces of genetic and environmental influences and still not be prevented from talking about moral responsibility, it does however, cause problems for our practices of retributive punishment. Obviously there are people who possess the intent to harm and cannot be helped away from his intention. We need to protect society from them. It is clear from the scientific findings that the people who are the worst criminals we can imagine have some grouping of bad genetics, bad influences, bad ideas and bad circumstances. The role these have played in the bad choices they have made should seem obvious. The question then becomes, which of these ingredients can we hold them responsible for? The justice system (if is to be just) must reflect the understanding that any of us could easily have been dealt a very different hand in life, and given that different hand we could be in their place. It borders on immorality to not consider the level of blind chance which is involved in morality.
Imagine a heinous murder in which the killer did it “just for the fun of it”. Yet upon psychiatric and medical examination he is found to have a tumor the size of a golf ball in the medial prefrontal cortex of his brain (this area is responsible for emotional control and behavioral impulse). It would be fairly easy to surmise that he was not in any real sense responsible for his actions in carrying out the murder. He was not in his right mind. We would not prescribe the same punishment for him as we would a perfectly healthy individual. Why not? Would it be moral to deny this man surgery as a ”punishment” for his crime? And furthermore where do we draw the line in ascribing personal responsibility apart from the causal forces which author our thoughts and actions?