A BELIEF IN FREE WILL touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion. In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that this truth about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life.
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Re: Sam Harris mini-book on Free Will
It's going to a legal nightmare when attempting to prosecute criminals that were committing their crimes because they were merely slaves to their biological makeup.
_________________ "Quantum mechanics is very worthy of regard. But an inner voice tells me that this is not yet the right track. The theory yields much, but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One's secrets. I, in any case, am convinced that He does not play dice" - Albert Einstein.
The philosopher Richard Paul has described three kinds of people: vulgar believers, who use slogans and platitudes to bully those holding different points of view into agreeing with them; sophisticated believers, who are skilled at using intellectual arguments, but only to defend what they already believe; and critical believers, who reason their way to conclusions and are ready to listen to others."
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Re: Sam Harris mini-book on Free Will
ant wrote:
It's going to a legal nightmare when attempting to prosecute criminals that were committing their crimes because they were merely slaves to their biological makeup.
I don't think any version of the "free will is an illusion" position will ever be accepted by a large part of the population.
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Re: Sam Harris mini-book on Free Will
Dexter wrote:
ant wrote:
It's going to a legal nightmare when attempting to prosecute criminals that were committing their crimes because they were merely slaves to their biological makeup.
I don't think any version of the "free will is an illusion" position will ever be accepted by a large part of the population.
In 1924, Clarence Darrow used the problem of free will and Determinism in defending Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. He was successful; the two were not executed but were sentenced to life imprisonment.
_________________ "Quantum mechanics is very worthy of regard. But an inner voice tells me that this is not yet the right track. The theory yields much, but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One's secrets. I, in any case, am convinced that He does not play dice" - Albert Einstein.
The philosopher Richard Paul has described three kinds of people: vulgar believers, who use slogans and platitudes to bully those holding different points of view into agreeing with them; sophisticated believers, who are skilled at using intellectual arguments, but only to defend what they already believe; and critical believers, who reason their way to conclusions and are ready to listen to others."
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Re: Sam Harris mini-book on Free Will
Quote:
It's going to a legal nightmare when attempting to prosecute criminals that were committing their crimes because they were merely slaves to their biological makeup.
Immerse yourself more fully in the deterministic worldview. Even unintentional crimes are punished. That is a powerful point. It means that we can be guilty even if we truly did not intend it. The reason is that punishment is a cause. The effect is less crime committed, on average. If we did not punish any crime, there would be many more crimes committed. It is cause and effect, and the effect justifies the cause, even though some crimes may be unintentional. Even though some crimes may be "inevitable".
Regarding the court case, I hope that never happens again. The jury obviously didn't understand the negative unintended consequences of their actions. Contending that a crime may be inevitable does not excuse the crime. If the crime was inevitable, so should the punishment be. The word "crime" may need clarification, if none of this made sense.
_________________ “In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams
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Re: Sam Harris mini-book on Free Will
Quote:
The reason is that punishment is a cause.
I don't get it
_________________ "Quantum mechanics is very worthy of regard. But an inner voice tells me that this is not yet the right track. The theory yields much, but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One's secrets. I, in any case, am convinced that He does not play dice" - Albert Einstein.
The philosopher Richard Paul has described three kinds of people: vulgar believers, who use slogans and platitudes to bully those holding different points of view into agreeing with them; sophisticated believers, who are skilled at using intellectual arguments, but only to defend what they already believe; and critical believers, who reason their way to conclusions and are ready to listen to others."
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Re: Sam Harris mini-book on Free Will
Interbane's point is that punishment aims to deter other crime, so serves as a cause of action. We do not punish criminals solely as a moral response to their crime, but also in order to make other potential criminals understand that the risk of getting caught will be very unpleasant for them, so they should think twice before committing a crime. As the emperor put it, tremble and obey.
Harris has a superficial understanding of philosophy anyway. His tendency to reduce identity to neuroscience is not philosophy. The whole assertion that determinism invalidates freedom is a complete fallacy, because evolution has given us the ability to be totally unpredictable, ie free in decisions. Any hypothetical ultimate billiard ball type Laplacian material causality that may supposedly invalidate our freedom is rendered uncertain by the uncertainty principle in quantum physics, and is completely inaccessible in principle and practice. Morality assumes freedom.
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Re: Sam Harris mini-book on Free Will
Robert Tulip wrote:
Interbane's point is that punishment aims to deter other crime, so serves as a cause of action. We do not punish criminals solely as a moral response to their crime, but also in order to make other potential criminals understand that the risk of getting caught will be very unpleasant for them, so they should think twice before committing a crime. As the emperor put it, tremble and obey.
Harris has a superficial understanding of philosophy anyway. His tendency to reduce identity to neuroscience is not philosophy. The whole assertion that determinism invalidates freedom is a complete fallacy, because evolution has given us the ability to be totally unpredictable, ie free in decisions. Any hypothetical ultimate billiard ball type Laplacian material causality that may supposedly invalidate our freedom is rendered uncertain by the uncertainty principle in quantum physics, and is completely inaccessible in principle and practice. Morality assumes freedom.
We at least need to see what he says before dismissing him for being a neuroscientist. In his book The Moral Landcscape, he sometimes bolsters his claims with neuroscience, but very little neuroscience is needed in order for us to agree that the basis of morality should be human and animal well-being, and that there are definite things to be known about maximizing well-being.
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Re: Sam Harris mini-book on Free Will
Robert Tulip wrote:
Interbane's point is that punishment aims to deter other crime, so serves as a cause of action. We do not punish criminals solely as a moral response to their crime, but also in order to make other potential criminals understand that the risk of getting caught will be very unpleasant for them
Robert, what do you mean when you say we punish people as a matter of moral response? Is there something within morality that partners various crimes with their dictated punishment? Or is it a "feeling of fairness" that is appealed to? Or is it to contrast with it's opposite, an immoral response? I'm not getting a handle on what you mean, sorry.
Quote:
evolution has given us the ability to be totally unpredictable, ie free in decisions.
Who says we're totally unpredictable? And does a single moment of unpredictable behavior mean all of our actions are unpredictable? I can often predict with great accuracy what others will do, depending on the precision of the prediction. The fact that we can predict anything at all about one another shows that there are at least constraints on what you'd call freedom.
Quote:
Any hypothetical ultimate billiard ball type Laplacian material causality that may supposedly invalidate our freedom is rendered uncertain by the uncertainty principle in quantum physics, and is completely inaccessible in principle and practice. Morality assumes freedom.
You've said this a number of different ways, but I don't see how it's true. The same uncertainties are happening within the devices that we set our clocks to, with astonishing accuracy. Just because there's unpredictability at the quantum level doesn't mean it must therefore manifest at the macro level. In fact, the only mental escape I can see with appealing to uncertainty is that it would lead to a sort of randomness within our neurons, an intermittent hiccup. Who controls which neuron is caused to hiccup amongst the billions? If it is a random neuron(which I'd assume you'd agree with), then the cognitive effect would also be random. A twitch of the eye we call freedom.
Neurons do occasionally fire at the wrong time(or something like that), but it's not a good thing. Most of the time the random firings are due to deficiencies or imbalances of one chemical or another. A dendrite's sensitivity level is the cause, where a stray ion could set it off. Genetics plays a part.
_________________ “In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams
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Re: Sam Harris mini-book on Free Will
Interbane wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:
Interbane's point is that punishment aims to deter other crime, so serves as a cause of action. We do not punish criminals solely as a moral response to their crime, but also in order to make other potential criminals understand that the risk of getting caught will be very unpleasant for them
Robert, what do you mean when you say we punish people as a matter of moral response? Is there something within morality that partners various crimes with their dictated punishment? Or is it a "feeling of fairness" that is appealed to? Or is it to contrast with it's opposite, an immoral response? I'm not getting a handle on what you mean, sorry.
If a person commits a serious crime, they are sent to jail. Deprivation of liberty has several purposes. Firstly, it indicates society's disapproval of the criminal action. It also seeks to deter others from similar crime, and to protect society from the criminal for the duration of the sentence. The "moral response" contained within the legal punishment itself has several factors, including revenge and rehabilitation. What I was getting at, and sorry this was not clear, is whether the intent to deter others forms part of the moral response of inflicting a prison sentence. I suppose it does. However, the context of your previous comment that punishment is a cause is that there is a view of morality that distinguishes it from action. For example, we can influence a person by moral pressure, expressing disapproval, but words alone have limited impact. That was the sense in which I was distinguishing moral response, mainly the feeling of revenge and restitution, from the material physical response bound up in punishment.
Quote:
Quote:
evolution has given us the ability to be totally unpredictable, ie free in decisions.
Who says we're totally unpredictable? And does a single moment of unpredictable behavior mean all of our actions are unpredictable? I can often predict with great accuracy what others will do, depending on the precision of the prediction. The fact that we can predict anything at all about one another shows that there are at least constraints on what you'd call freedom.
Probability enables strong prediction, for example of voting patterns at elections. But a free election involves every individual having pure choice guided by their conscience. We can predict voting outcomes from free elections, but never with the level of certainty that we see in purely mechanical physical processes, because of this unpredictability factor within human choice.
Quote:
Quote:
Any hypothetical ultimate billiard ball type Laplacian material causality that may supposedly invalidate our freedom is rendered uncertain by the uncertainty principle in quantum physics, and is completely inaccessible in principle and practice. Morality assumes freedom.
You've said this a number of different ways, but I don't see how it's true. The same uncertainties are happening within the devices that we set our clocks to, with astonishing accuracy. Just because there's unpredictability at the quantum level doesn't mean it must therefore manifest at the macro level. In fact, the only mental escape I can see with appealing to uncertainty is that it would lead to a sort of randomness within our neurons, an intermittent hiccup. Who controls which neuron is caused to hiccup amongst the billions? If it is a random neuron(which I'd assume you'd agree with), then the cognitive effect would also be random. A twitch of the eye we call freedom.
Neurons do occasionally fire at the wrong time(or something like that), but it's not a good thing. Most of the time the random firings are due to deficiencies or imbalances of one chemical or another. A dendrite's sensitivity level is the cause, where a stray ion could set it off. Genetics plays a part.
Our brains are far more complex than atomic clocks. Have a think about what you said. Unpredictability always manifests at macro level, even with movement of planets, which have tiny error bars against the model of celestial dynamics. We do not have full information, so cannot fully predict anything. Laplace thought that full information (the mind of God) would enable accurate prediction of the future. Quantum physics says this is not true in principle, although we could speculate whether that is philosophically correct. The point is we can never have enough information to know what someone will do with absolute certainty, so we have practical freedom, and any speculation about material determination of fate and decisions does not detract in any real way from our freedom.
Nonetheless, a lot more is predictable about human action than many people assume. The election case illustrates this. People who are very well informed have greater ability to predict the result than people who are not well informed. The more information, the better the prediction. Even so, there are always unknown factors that are not predicted.
On genetics, unpredictability is adaptive in many contexts. An antelope will survive better and have more offspring if a leopard cannot tell which way it will jump. It has to be totally free to make a random split-second decision. The same applies in many human situations, such as the fight-flight algorithm.
An interesting example of the danger of predictability is the prime number life cycle of cicadas. Composite number incubation (eg 12 years) causes regular cycles of feast and famine for predators who have factored breeding cycles (2,3,4,6 years), whereas a prime number cicada larval cycle (eg 17 years) destroys the factor and makes the cicada more adaptive as less predators are waiting for them. This is a template for how freedom of the will, manifest in the complexity of intent, has evolutionary advantages by stopping others from predicting our actions.
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Re: Sam Harris mini-book on Free Will
Quote:
That was the sense in which I was distinguishing moral response, mainly the feeling of revenge and restitution, from the material physical response bound up in punishment.
Thanks. I think in a way the punishment satiates some sort of moral longing when you're the victim.
Quote:
Our brains are far more complex than atomic clocks. Have a think about what you said. Unpredictability always manifests at macro level, even with movement of planets, which have tiny error bars against the model of celestial dynamics.
I think we're both guilty of crossing back and forth over a line that distinguishes two perspectives. One perspective is that of human capacity. If we cannot predict each other fully, does that mean we all have a degree of freedom of choice? The other perspective is of a god's-eye view, where our failure to predict things does not mean they aren't predictable; it merely means we aren't yet able. Or even further, our failure to predict things does not mean they aren't mechanistic. The objective perspective is the god's eye view, the view of how nature really is, distinct from our experience of it. This objective positioning is necessary for hypotheses and theories, and much of science is devoted to distinguishing nature from our experience of it via controls on bias and human error.
I believe free will is an illusion. Yet I operate as if we are all free(because I'll never "know" the difference). Even if all my thinking leads me to the intellectual conclusion that free will is an illusion, that does not allow me to predict what others will do. I believe their actions are hypothetically predictable, but we're a century or more away from that level of prediction.
There is another distinction that I've been pondering. Starting with John Locke, I think, we've separated our vocabulary a bit with regards to the qualities of things. Primary qualities are objective, where secondary qualities are subjective. A great deal of the discussion on morality seems to be a mish-mash of secondary versus primary "wording". To those who believe "qualia" are a real thing, the implications of making this distinction aren't that great. But to those who think "qualia" are nothing more than neural states, the difference is everything. Daniel Dennet wrote a good essay which clarifies the modern position on qualia. I can find it if you wish, it's in a book my cat pissed on called Brainchildren.
An example to help understand is the mention of a "moral response". This is far more complex than a comparison of "chemical structure" versus "taste", but not any different I fear. A moral response is subjective phrasing, relying on the feelings of individuals as the key designator of what a moral response should be. The question this raises is, what is the primary way to word the same thing? I believe it has to do with game theory. In the same way that we can't find "sweetness" within sugar except as a complex interplay between taste buds, sugar, and neurons, we also can't find "guilt".
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Re: Sam Harris mini-book on Free Will
As Interbane said, I don't see how quantum indeterminacy rescues the concept of free will that most people think we have, meaning given the state of our brain at the time of a decision, we could have chosen something else.
No one is claiming you can predict your own or anyone else's decisions, or make any completely precise predictions about anything for that matter. But if you take materialism seriously (if that's the right word to use), how can your decisions be anything other than determined by your previous brain state? There's no point at which you can step outside that causal chain.
It is a bit disturbing to think about the implications of that, but it's not going to change the way you live your life -- we all act as if we have free will in the strong sense of the term.
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Re: Sam Harris mini-book on Free Will
Dexter wrote:
if you take materialism seriously, how can your decisions be anything other than determined by your previous brain state?
The question raised by quantum indeterminacy is whether there actually is something totally random about the behavior of matter. The classical mechanics of bumping particles with total embedded causality of outcomes seems to reflect an inadequate set of assumptions about the nature of reality.
If there is a random quality at the subatomic level, such that position and momentum of a wave/particle cannot in principle be predicted, there is equally a random indeterminacy about all complex systems, such as the human brain.
Since it is adaptive for organisms to be unpredictable, freedom is hardwired into evolution. Equally, it should be said that non-freedom is hardwired, given the extent of automatism determined by instinct. But freedom enables us to override instinct, including with genes that enable random decisions.
The assumption from Laplace that total God-like knowledge of the present and past would enable knowledge of the future is based on extrapolating Newtonian mechanics to an infinite degree. This extrapolation is pure a priori speculation (Does God play dice?), and in view of quantum mechanics is less plausible than the idea that freedom makes the future unpredictable in principle.
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Re: Sam Harris mini-book on Free Will
Quote:
I don't see how quantum indeterminacy rescues the concept of free will that most people think we have
It replaces one thing that we have no control of —Deterministic events in a Deterministic universe—with another—random quantum events in our brains.
_________________ "Quantum mechanics is very worthy of regard. But an inner voice tells me that this is not yet the right track. The theory yields much, but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One's secrets. I, in any case, am convinced that He does not play dice" - Albert Einstein.
The philosopher Richard Paul has described three kinds of people: vulgar believers, who use slogans and platitudes to bully those holding different points of view into agreeing with them; sophisticated believers, who are skilled at using intellectual arguments, but only to defend what they already believe; and critical believers, who reason their way to conclusions and are ready to listen to others."
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Re: Sam Harris mini-book on Free Will
Robert Tulip wrote:
The assumption from Laplace that total God-like knowledge of the present and past would enable knowledge of the future is based on extrapolating Newtonian mechanics to an infinite degree. This extrapolation is pure a priori speculation (Does God play dice?), and in view of quantum mechanics is less plausible than the idea that freedom makes the future unpredictable in principle.
I agree with you that the future is unpredictable, but adding a degree of randomness to an otherwise deterministic system doesn't make room for free will.
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