This is one of those things I don't agree with, but it's expressed well and the intention is positive.
It would take me a lot of thought before I could articulate my thoughts on this into something intelligible, so discuss amongst yourselves if you will.
Originally shared by Ryan Beck
I don't believe in free will, and I think the concept of free will has been detrimental to society.
If you're going to talk about free will it's useful to define it, because it seems that people think of it in different ways. When I talk about free will I mean the real possibility of making a different choice in a certain situation. So my definition of free will is that if a situation were to replay itself with every detail down to the sub atomic level exactly the same, everyone involved would be able to act differently than they did the first time. I don't believe this kind of free will exists.
The reason I don't believe it exists is because every decision we make can only be based on the contents of our brains, and those contents are defined by the information our brains were previously exposed to and our genetic makeup. At birth your brain has not received much outside information, other than what it's learned in the womb. To learn new things a baby has to be exposed to them enough times for it to sink in. If a baby were only provided with food and basic care and nothing else its whole life without any education do you think it would learn to talk, to read, to understand math, what it means to be nice, how to be polite, or how to do anything else that is common in modern society? No, it would only learn what it can figure out on its own through trial and error. As an adult this baby would hardly be similar to a normal person. So I think we all accept that who we are as people is largely defined by what we learn in life. And our learning will be largely impacted by the genes that define what our brains are like and how we perceive information.
If our brains receive a signal, such as an image from our eyes, that signal will be processed based on the contents of our brains. Signals that seem familiar will be compared to other information stored in our brains. The way we process new information is dependent on the previous information we've been exposed to. A regular person is going to process an image very differently from the hypothetical Tarzan child. And our response to that image is going to depend on the way our brain processed it. Tarzan might see a toaster and, having never seen a toaster before, be confused and hesitant. A more average person will see a toaster, their brain will recognize that they've seen it before and knows what it does, and then decide if the toaster is useful to them at the moment. The decisions we make are dependent on the information our brains have previously absorbed.
So when you're presented with two options, your brain will evaluate them based on the information currently stored in it. Say you choose option A. If time were to repeat and everything was exactly the same with your brain and all the information you receive, you would choose option A again. There's no new information in your brain that would cause you to make a different choice.
We don't choose the information we're exposed to in our lives. At birth that information is provided by our parents. We don't choose the things we see as we walk around the world. Even when we do "choose", such as what book to read, that choice is dependent on the information we've received earlier in our lives, information we didn't choose to expose ourselves to. That's why I don't believe in free will. Every choice we make is based on a series of circumstances outside our control.
I think if you really look at someone you can often see a lot of these influences. Sometimes you can see how someone is just like their parents, or how their friends influenced them, or how some other information may have influenced them. But of course we can't know every aspect of a person's life, every little thing they've ever been exposed to, and even if we could we don't have the processing power to trace those experiences down to the way that person is now. So free will still seems plausible to people, because we can't recognize all the influences in another person's life, or even our own thanks to our limited memory. And no one wants to believe that they're anything but self made. They want to believe that everything they have is thanks to their own hard work and grit.
The reason I think the concept of free will is detrimental is because we often blame people for not making different choices. But to me it seems likely that it was not possible to make a different choice. So blaming people for their actions is like blaming the sun for coming up in the morning. I think accepting a lack of free will means being more compassionate and understanding towards others. This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to discourage behavior that is detrimental to society. We still want to make sure people don't commit crimes or aren't mean to others or don't chew with their mouths open. But by accepting a lack of free will, instead of revenge or punishment perhaps we can instead focus on why people behaved poorly and how we can get them to stop behaving poorly. It's not easy, and in some cases maybe nearly impossible. But maybe instead of thinking punishment will solve our problems we can instead focus on trying to prevent future problems by promoting positive influences in people's lives.
Most of what passes for pondering over a given decision is merely attempting to formulate a justification for a decision we've already made - but haven't acted upon, just yet.
ReplyDeleteIt's rather like a man deciding upon taking a particular shot in a game of pool. Certain choices appear immediately good, but upon further reflection, will leave the cue ball in an awkward position for a second shot, should the first shot be made. Or the cue ball might sink into a pocket, should a particular shot be attempted.
Moral agency is always peeking in the window of such a discussion. Most of what passes for Good Decisions in this world of wickedness are merely the least-terrible choices, the ones which didn't result in disaster. Most of that can be ascribed to luck, not wisdom, though this has never stopped the wealthy from believing they are goddamn geniuses.
All those concepts and paradigms, each more ludicrous and illogical than the one preceding it: we can cut to the chase and agree it's simply easier to state Free Will doesn't exist as advertised. It's a convention we use to describe the process of pruning away bad decisions - bad meaning not to our advantage.
I agree that much of free will is actually encoded in our brains. We are programmed to experience some things certain ways. And most humans are programmed to believe there is a god or supreme power that actually supersedes any so-called free will. So free will is a nice concept or fantasy to me. But. You know I said all this because I cannot think otherwise. Because.
ReplyDeletecobalt please The more we learn about the brain, the weirder things get and fuzzier the border becomes.
ReplyDeleteI remember my anatomy and physiology course at good old Elgin Community College, dissecting a pig's nervous system. I got really interested in the back of the head, where the brain meets the spinal cord. There's no neat division point. Since the Platonists we've been trying to create this mind/body distinction and it just doesn't exist. We like to talk about the "brain" but really it's a Platonic Form, the idea of the mind.
I don't fight the battle for Truth as once I did. We can use "Free Will" as a perfectly adequate shortcut, knowing it's a fantasy, a Nice Concept. Why? Because we need it for the legal concept of mens rea , the guilty mind, criminal responsibility.
We adore the concept of love, with all its fun bits and the romance and suchlike - we know that stuff is just the ribbons and bows around a decision to love someone and be their partner, come what may, knowing them for the fallible bastards that they are and deciding to love them anyway. Take away free will and we'll just get depressed.
Dan Weese agreed.
ReplyDeleteIn going to take a poke at this. Now, while at a quark level, I don't think I necessarily disagree, the concept, or illusion of free will, is basically an emergent property of a very complex set of parts. The deterministic aspects are many, but the way small alterations can magnify the end result leads to a lot of uncertainty. And I suspect that right down at the synapse level, it could very well have genuine uncertainty, aka Heisenberg stuff.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the impossibility of ever fixing circumstances to the degree needed for the thought experiment tells you how meaningless it is. He's essentially saying if you are exactly the same and circumstances are exactly the same, you'll always make the same decision. Sorry, but that's also tied up with identity, because those decisions were already mine.
But mostly I wanted to refute his negative effects. Part of the environment or precondition for all decisions is society's expressed opinion on prior decision making. Knowing that Bob or Bill previously did X and were ridiculed for it, is one of the ways society teaches its component humans. It's the basic principle behind law enforcement, teaching, and so on.
So basically, all these "there is no real free will" people always come across (to me) as people whining that someone told them they'd been stupid. Doubly so when they think that action is the problem. Try fucking learning from your mistakes instead of bitching that people pointed them out.
In fact you cannot touch the things. People have deeply build socially delusion that you can touch the floor, the chair or the book. But it's superstition deeply in our brains, implanted by social education and abuse of languages.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't know why, read on.
Reality is governed by quantum mechanics. And it is very different than our socially implanted superstitions. Most of the massive particles are fermions. So they cannot exists in the same states at the same places. Single rule - the Pauli exclusion principle, is responsible for existing of all elementary elements, like Hydrogen, Carbon or Oxygen just because electrons are fermions and cannot share the same states.
If you trying to touch something, or someone, for example you place your hands on your girlfriend breasts, electrons from molecules which are part of your cells which consists of your body, are so close to electrons of her body molecules, that Pauli principle start to work. This electrons cannot be at the same place - remember. Forces are so powerful so even electrons trajectories within atoms in molecules may bend! And anything never touches anything.
In fact you never, ever, touched anything in your whole life.
And remember: quantum mechanics is probably the best tested and the most accurate theory in physics. You cannot discuss with it. You just have to accept the consequences: it doesn't matter if you are 1 light year or very close: you never touches your girlfriend breasts. This is Scientific Fact, and Pure Logic.
So please take it into account. We all wrong about everything in our life, because we are living in a delusion we can touch....
One of the widely shared fables of our times is the mind-body division. The delusion that our `mind` inhabits a meat machine under our control, and that this mind can have pure, independent thoughts. Anyone who really pays attention can see how flawed this concept is...
ReplyDeleteNudging is a thing. It nullifies free will by definition.
ReplyDeleteDogmatic Pyrrhonist I actually favor only applying this understanding to others for the most part. To say "I screwed up but it's not my fault because I have no free will" I think is morally problematic, because it means that you know you did something wrong but are using an excuse to get out of it. It's not using all the knowledge in our brains, which I think we have a moral duty to try our best to do.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion there are effective ways to encourage good behavior in others that we often don't do because we're too obsessed with the mentality that it's their own fault and that they're responsible for fixing themselves. I think a lot more people could get behind the idea of helping the needy and doing more to divert people from the path of crime if we embraced the idea that people are a product of forces outside their control.
Rhys Taylor If you do articulate your thoughts on this at some point in the future please tag me in it. I've been in search of convincing counter arguments to this line of thinking but haven't found anything satisfying yet. I probably haven't looked hard enough though.
ReplyDeleteRyan Beck I do agree that there's too much focus on blaming, and not enough on finding errors, understanding them, and correcting. But I think we can avoid unnecessary blaming without ditching the idea of responsibility all together.
ReplyDeleteFlip a coin is a choice made by free will.
ReplyDelete