See how I am made to suffer for my belief that free will is an illusion? I am accused of being a pedophile! LOL.
Note that I have pasted this directly from the email I got; the misspellings and other errors, which are ubiquitous, are the responsibility of “Lee Hudson”
From: Lee Hudson [email address redacted]
To: [my email address]what do you gain from this? do you get a sick turn on from telling peope there not responsible? does it arouse you saying paedophiles are blameless? your a sick fuck jerry, a dirty paedophile prommoter. do you have kids jerry? I doubt someone like you would ever become a father but if you are, its even sicker and more disgusting, I bet they are really proud of a daddy who writes brain stuff about how nobody is free or responsible. Some get a firefighter or cop daddy or a lawyer, but no they will have you. At highschool it will be like yeah my dad writes articles but how none of us are responsible and being paedophile is ok. your sick, if you have kids I hope they disown you and Im sure your parents are really proud of you also…not! a career in writing about how moral responsibility is impossible and we are all blameless, well done you disturbed indivudual!!!
your filth!
p.s. There’s a new post on free will just below for those of you who are following this debate.
Not surprisingly, any sense of the existence of the apostrophe is absent.
…but would it necessarily have been better if his email had contained apostrophe’s?
My mistake… I thought you wrote ‘would it have been better without apostasy…” 😉
Ha.
I suppose it would be even more disturbing! And what is writing ‘brain stuff’?
‘I would while away the hours…if I only had a brain…’
I’d be really worried if I received this email. Please take care. And keep writing the brain stuff.
No, but also in my native language Dutch I have a hunch that there is a correlation between incoherent writing and incoherent thinking.
What I find particularly funny is the way that some people who take offense at a comment resort to blaming and insults. Jerry, you’re lucky he hasn’t blamed you for global warming, the economic collapse and the upcoming Armageddon! In fact I actually find it quite interesting and begin to wonder whether it’s (notice – correct use of apostrophe; now if only I can get a semi-colon in this message) an innate response to a perceived threat by humanity. From an evolutionary point of view aggression may be rewarded by driving off the threat to the group (witness males fighting over the harem and for mating rights) so, by extension, as we have evolved this will necessarily become ‘verbal’ rather than physical posturing; (I did it – can any-one who is better at grammar than me let me know if this is the correct usage) basically by resorting to insults we attempt to make ourselves metaphorically ‘bigger’.
I always knew that writing brain stuff would lead to no good, Jerry.
Quite funny that his chronic misuse of “your” makes the e-mail sound like it’s ending formally but that he regards himself as filth.
He regards himself as a sick fuck pedobear jerry, Jerry Coyne’s filth (whatever that means), and Lee Hudson, sounds like he might have multiple filthy personalities.
Wow.
Shorter version:
I AM IN UR INTERNETZ
MISSING UR POINTS.
kthxbai
BWAHAHAHA!!! 🙂
Too bad Jerry doesn’t give out Mollies the way PZ does, because I’d definitely nominate this.
Hmm, maybe I should nominate it anyway…
Love it, is there an image to accompany?
Just the fact that “Lee Hudson” used “your” for “you’re”, misspelled “prommoter” and “Im”, but still managed to get “paedophile” correctly throughout hints that this is a fake.
A fake what???
You can’t fake that kind of stupid.
Ah, as my old mentor used to say, ‘The mysteries of the apostrophe…’
The infinite monkey theorem says hello.
I wanted to be the first to call Poe.
I think you’re right. This just doesn’t taste quite like genuine stoopid.
I think Lee was clear he couldn’t spell “paedophile” on his own, so he looked it up. Too bad he didn’t think to check all his words longer than 3 or 4 letters.
What a disturbed man.
I feel your pain, Dr. Coyne.
Your theory is probably right, I saw this in students when I was a substitute teacher*. The kids would be writing something and use a word they knew was hard to spell so they looked it up, but still made a lot of mistakes with “easier” words.
*Note: I’m not saying the kids were stupid, they were kids and still learning to write.
It’s like his inner vitriol finally gets the better of him in that last little bit before he got dragged away from the keyboard.
“well done you disturbed indivudual!!!
your filth!”
What about Jerry’s filth Lee? What about it? We must know!
They were re-tying his straitjacket! Is ‘your filth’ a polite valediction, like ‘Your Servant’?
And doesn’t he wonder what the wee red wavy lines were, all over his missive?
(Still laughing at writing brain stuff.)
Oh dear – what an unpleasant fellow Lee is. Listen Lee – put the following words in order…
the Mote – Eye – your own – out of – take – first
I love it 🙂
I have a collection of emails like this, I get one a day (at least). Mine tend to be a bit more grotesque which is expected since I’m a gay activist.
There’s one guy in particular, Dylan Terreri, who writes once a week. He makes up the most amusing words. The most interesting is ‘masculivoid’. I think it’s supposed to mean ‘void of masculinity’, but I’m not sure.
cool! sounds like a new superhero or villan, or perhaps an alternate dimension!
LOL. I wonder were he gotz his pHd.
The University of “Duh?”
Walmart?
That is an insult to Walmart even 🙂
Just proves my point those who choose religion for hatred are disgusting creatures.
These people are sick and should be ignored really as they are not worth bothering about.
I’ve said in the past that the free will illusion is pervasive and persistent, I suppose that in light of such an emotional reaction to the notion that man’s will is devoid of freedom that I should also remember to include profound in my descriptors of the free will illusion.
Off Topic: Check out today’s Bizarro comic strip.
Unavailable, unless you subscribe…
I think I need to put that email on a t-shirt 😉
Haha, was the ‘your filth’ at the end his signature?
He really burned you with that “not!”
Lee must have taken really good care not to understand, or think about, a single thing Jerry and others have written about free will to come to his paedophile conclusion. As an aside, what IS it with ‘your’ and ‘you’re’? I can understand the odd typo and brain fart but their consistent abuse and misuse seems to be a shibboleth for the occupants of the darkest and dampest corners of the internet.
When venom reaches this level even the devoted compatibilist will find that freewill becomes problematic.
Jerry’s Kids: Adventures in Neuroethics
Lee had no choice about whether or not to write that letter or spell correctly.
🙂 More precisely, as Prof Coyne would have it, Lee had the illusion of making the choice to write that letter. Same goes for Prof Coyne’s choice to publicise, except he’s smarter and knows it’s just an illusion, but publicises anyway, … or not (whichever). So it’s a bit more complicated for him: he has the illusion of the illusion of making the choice. But he’s very clever so I’m sure he has no problem dealing with that. Better him than me.
Absolutely correct, which is why we should be more forgiving of the author.
Just as Mr. Lee had no choice, commenters here have no choice but to delight in belittling Mr. Lee. Mr. Lee has committed one of the intolerable transgressions against the code of this community, which is to have the nerve to attack someone far more educated and intelligent than himself from a position of stupidity, or perhaps even worse, from ignorance.
This guy does not understand what Jerry is saying, which goes as well for many who are much smarter than Mr. Lee. Many compatibilists don’t understand either.
Mr. Lee is angry because he is a dualist who believes that without free will we can’t make morally coherent decisions or be held responsible for our actions. He perceives Jerry’s ideas and arguments to be undermining a foundation of goodness and righteousness, and naturally being a person who believes he should “do the right thing”, he vented his rage in a way that he hopes will intimidate Jerry into falling back in line with the straight and narrow.
Mr. Lee is unaware of many illusions, including the illusion of free will and most likely the illusion of vision. It is an illusion that we project our sight out into the room to focus on an item of interest. It is an illusion that we see in three dimensions, and that we perceive colors and shades accurately. Yet we have a system of representing visual information that enables us to navigate our environment quite well, regardless of the illusion our brain works to conceal from us.
Mr. Lee is not very unlike a member of the public at a medieval execution of a heretic, who feels that burning a heretic or a witch alive is just punishment. Even though we can see how foolish this is, the witness to the execution perceives it as God’s will, and a purging from good society of something dangerously corrupting, and thus whatever cruelty is involved is dismissed and trumped by the standpoint of righteous indignation and moral retribution.
This is why moral retribution is so ugly. Knowing that Mr. Lee could not help himself from taking the action that he did teaches us that moral retribution against him is not appropriate. We can regard him with equanimity because we know he is a product of his genes and his environment. For all we know, Mr. Lee may have suffered at the hands of a pedophile when he was younger.
We can recognize the possible harm in his very angry and negative diatribe, but we can also deflect any possible harm by not taking him personally or seriously. We can dismiss this letter with indifference because nobody is harmed. Presumably people who know Mr. Lee directly have some sense as to whether he is dangerous and can take appropriate action.
By abandoning moral retribution we can more easily avoid irrational emotional reactions that can lead to an escalating situation of danger. Proper understanding and thinking can preempt the reflexive triggering of unwanted and harmful emotions. We can think more clearly about what the threat is, what the potential harm is, and what action if any may need to be taken as a deterrent to such harms.
We also have no choice in how we react, as many commenting here have demonstrated. The way we react is a decision guided by our intelligence, our knowledge, our experience, our genes, and is a process that unfolds exactly as it must as determined by the structure of our brains.
Jeff,
For what it is worth my matrix of causal determinants leads me to concur.
Thanks. If only I had realized it was Mr. Hudson and not Mr. Lee. But the point is independent of the name. Something in my brain beyond my awareness and control made the substitution.
You’re obviously doing something right, Jerry. Please do not let such eloquently executed attacks on your character get you down. We’re behind you 100%.
Your filth,
Steve
Hmmm…..Lee seems to be a little misinformed. Perhaps a few session of anger management will help his/her brain process information more effectively.
Doubtful that even a life long of anger management sessions will have any impact whatsoever on this person’s brain and its ability to process information more effectively.
I’m afraid I’ve found that it isn’t worth wading through such persistently poor grammar and spelling, because once you’ve mopped up the mess you find that the logic is just as bad.
There isn’t a necessary relationship between the useless spelling/grammar and idiocy, and yet time and time again…
Could be a Poe, but it seems unlikely.
What a poepol!
I think this Email is valuable in that it illustrates something you didn’t go into at length: the notion that if we don’t have “free” will that no one can be blamed for anything they do. It’s bad enough that we would all turn into nihilistic, amoral sociopaths, but we would be blameless in doing so! I believe that this notion supplies the “emotional” power behind the desperate defense of “free” will (the notion that there is no “me” comes at the issue from the “fear” aspect of being without solid rules in this confusing life and also the offense taken at the implication that there is no “me” that runs the show)and demonstrates that the majority of people view morals not as simply what’s “right” as opposed to what’s “wrong”, but see it, from past childhood training, as, “If you do this, you get rewarded; if you do THAT, you get punished.” Therefore they grow up (?) needing to maintain the idea of some sort of “punisher” that would supply the checks that their own mature compassion and sense of personal responsibility simply aren’t there to supply. It ties into a sense of outrage, too, at the violation of what many of us have been raised to think of as “fair”: the “evil” getting punished; most Christians don’t want to wait until the Last Judgment to see the criminal get their just desserts, and the Muslims believe in taking matters into their own hands right NOW and then claiming it was “The will of Allah” after the fact.
Yes, gods ratify everything.
Their `just desserts’… that’s pudding it oddly!
…probably just wants to have his cake and eat it too.
Ok. Let’s have no more of these trifling puns.
Your filth.
As I understand it (free will being mere realistic illusion) poor Lee Hudson HAD NO CHOICE but to write just exactly what (and how) he wrote, as he was rigorously mechanically (pre)determined (perhaps ultimately by the initial conditions of the universe) to write and post it just as he did (and also as I was for me to be writing and posting this comment).
Am I understanding correctly???
+1
I think it’s those who believe the pedophile has free will are more sick. Firstly, they seem to feel some of their fellow human beings are in perfect mental health and are sick enough to harm a child. That is twisted! Perhaps true in some rare cases, but a very twisted thing to wish to be true. More importantly, there is some deep insight in recognizing that the pedophile has a psychological condition causing them to harm children. At the very least the pedophile has no free will and something is making him do this to children. We could be working to cure or manage or otherwise address this psychological condition so that we could prevent future pedophilia. Or we could pretend as if there is no such psychological condition, let children continue to be victims, and then after the fact ruthlessly punish the guy for an urge beyond his control. I think the latter is utterly sick. I don’t want revenge on pedophiles, I want to stop pedophiles!
This is just about revenge. He just wants to harm and destroy someone who harms a child. He has no sympathy for the pedophile himself. Nor any interest in actually protecting any potential future victims from harm.
What a bizarre feeling this gave me! Have you ever seen Clockwork Orange? (It’s one of those really good movies that would NOT make it to Jerry’s top ten.) Your attempt here to turn Tumble Teddy on his head gave me a weird sort of déjà vu of having life all Clockwork Orange in the near future.
Question: If you were the “sick” paedo in this story, which scenario would you prefer:-
1. Some government officials in white coats snatch you off to big prison lab where, using a combination of chemical, sensory and intra-neuro programming, they “cure” you of your behavioural maladjustments, or
2. One of your victims takes a principled stand against you, telling you it’s wrong and she won’t do it, and the unexpected combination of that stand and the memory of how she suffered fills with just enough remorse and guilt for just long enough to commit yourself, make yourself accountable to a group of people or organisation dedicated to retraining you and keeping you away from private contact with children for the rest of your life. (Lets call them Paedophiles Anonymous).
3. You’re caught and punished in terms of the law, you have no change of heart or habit and just never get to see another child again.
Put those in order of preference.
We know one certain thing about this guy: he’s a British pedophile.
Not necessarily, the safest assumption is that he has access to a British dictionary.
Exactly. The British spelling “paedophile” is proof that psychoceramics are international.
He doth seem to protest too much, dothen’t he?
I was thinking that too.
I guess the author of this diatribe missed the finer nuances of your argument, and seems utterly ignorant of what allows his “free will” to write such an intemperate email.
How dare you think and ask intellectual questions. You bad, bad man!
I have been called evil and the minion of Satan and had my Twitter account, email accounts and blogs hacked and shut down.
I am OK with the evil and minion of Satan part.
I’ve had two email accounts hacked and shut down. Seems to be no way of retrieving my emails.
Nope, they are smart and evil. Adopt a bunch of online IDs.
who can blame him?
i don’t mean that Jerry deserves the abuse. I mean that if he has no free will, who can blame him?
gotta make that clear.. 🙂
Such is the imbalance in this person’s post, I wonder whether he has undergone some awful paedophile experience himself, which would in some measure account for the irrationality of his writing.
Poe or genuine?
Either way it takes a really sick mind to first genuinely or poe-wise accept that biologists and neuroscientists are claiming an absence of morality and especially when they are claiming the reverse, then produce something like that execrable mail.
I think it does highlight the sense of moral panic that animates much opposition to atheism, and not just among the unhinged. I think for a large number of people, their opposition to atheism and allegiance to belief really revolves around a deep seated fear of moral chaos. I think people’s attachment to free will also fits this mould. We see in this letter the fears that, I think, lurk just below the surface for many people.
gluonspring,
Yes, indeed.
There is no God(s), but we must not say so.
There is no life after death, but we must not say so.
There is no free will, but we must not say so.
Believe it or not, there are individuals and alliances of individuals dedicated to keeping these truths from the rest of humanity.
The first two are easy problems because there is general consensus what the topic of debate is. The problem with “free will” is that the people arguing are not even talking about the same thing.
Incompatibilists, like Jerry, are using a definition of free will that is the old, magical definition.
Whereas, compatibilists recognize that the old conception is outdated, and yet in our own experiences we make choices, we have intentions.
So we either view our experience as Matrix-like layers of illusion, or we take our experience at face-value and try to understand what it really means to have free will in a non-magical way.
When you do the latter, you will see that the idea of free will really only makes sense in an environment of competing wills. Free will is uninteresting if you are the one and only entity capable of having intentions in the whole universe. Free will is only interesting because there are situations when we are not able to exercise our will freely. Free will is the situational ability to act according to one’s intention, free from coercion or unwanted influence by someone. This is the frame on which free will is real, not magical.
DV,
I don’t think there is general consensus as to what a god(s) is, nor what life after death is either. What we have instead of general consensus would seem to be conflicting and contradicting claims.
Those who believe in God or life after death have conflicting claims on the nature of those two things. But they all agree that they disagree with us that those things don’t even exist.
With free will, it’s a comical situation. The incompatibilists and the compatibilists agree that the magical version of free will doesn’t exist. And they also agree that it is possible for people to act or not act of their own unencumbered will depending on the situation. So both camps are in agreement really. The only disagreement is that situational free will is not good enough for incompatibilists – it’s not real free will to them. Real free will to them is the one that doesn’t exist.
That depends on what you mean by unencumbered.
In the trivial case, when you mean not constrained or coerced externally, sure, I agree. People make choices free of external encumbrance. No big deal here, and it says absolutely nothing of how the brain works. In this case you are viewing the person from the outside as a black box. At this level of observation there is plenty of apparent freedom, and we really can’t distinguish a person’s behavior from how we would predict a person with contra-causal free will to behave. This level of observation is in fact is how we first naively came up with the idea of contra-causal free will and dualism.
It is true that after we became aware of deterministic brain functions, we continued to behave in this same way. Compatibilists think this is a big deal, for reasons that aren’t clear, but it would be very peculiar, as strange as quantum mechanics, if learning about deterministic brain function actually changed the way people are observed to behave.
If you peer inside the brain though, unencumbered will is not true. The will is not free of causation. It is not willed freely, without constraint, making choice A as likely as choice B, with some internal “self” free to choose on a whim for no reason. This is the illusion we have. The outcome of a decision in reality is determined by the state of the brain, i.e. it is encumbered by brain structure, history, genes, and whatever else can effect the deterministic process. If choosing between two options, one option will be chosen with probability 1, and the other with probability 0. We just don’t know enough to predict these probabilities in advance. Viewing human will this way I have to say there is no free will of any kind, just intelligent decision making. We do what we want, but we simply can NOT will what we want.
For some reason compatibilists are happy to call this ‘free will’, even though there is nothing that it is free of. It is not free to alter itself from the result that is determined by brain structure. There is no compelling reason based on the phenomenon itself to call this free. It seems to be that calling this non-free ability ‘free’ is the only way they can claim compatibility, which seems more important to them than having descriptions of brain function that agree well with reality.
i think you missed the point i was making above about free will being interesting only in the context of competing wills. it is not at all an interesting concept in terms of freedom from causation.
DV,
The same could be said about free will. Those who believe in [contra-causal] free will all agree that they disagree with us who point out that free will is an illusion; that there is no freedom to the human will.
I think it is very interesting that we don’t have ‘free will’, because everything we observe about our behavior would lead a naive observer to conclude we have it. It’s fascinating really, that intelligence can create this appearance of freedom where there is none.
I agree… the free will illusion is very interesting… it permeates the human experience through and through.
P.S. It sure did seem to interest this Lee Hudson fellow.
That’s it. Moral panic. It’s like that spoof documentary, ‘Brass Eye’. I hated it, but it made some good points. (Questions were asked in Parliament, so many people complained.
Time for an insomniac to try to sleep (5-52am, UK). Thanks for having me. Goodnight all.
The larger point is that usually unbalanced, usually older male, bullies now dominate public discourse and pop media.
By their threatening behavior they destroy principled discourse, their goal, and scare away the more informed and gentler voices. It’s like letting the homeless, mentally ill folks take over your neighborhood and coffee shops.
The Tea Party folks are a good example.
I think the idea that the “Tea Party folks” dominate public discourse or pop media is ridiculous. They don’t even dominate political discourse. Like the “Occupy” folks on the left, they’re a marginal political movement.
Sure they do. Extreme right wing nuts who control Congressional debates and activity, control the Republican Party via funding from billionaires, control public discourse via Fox News.
Of course, they are marginal, unbalanced, white-skinned, suburban older guys with anger management issues but that’s what counts now. The more extreme – the more money, power and media anyone gets.
I’d have to agree with BfB.
Look at the Republican party. It’s no longer the party of Eisenhower. How has this radicalization been effected? The reasonable folks are quieter, more reluctant to wax vociferously dogmatic about this or that. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, fools and fanatics are more sure of themselves; wiser people are full of doubts. So, the squeaky wheels get the grease, or at least the attention, and the Overton window moves in their direction.
Dennett and Grayling have both said that conservative religious views are being expressed much more loudly and fervently these days.
That is better trash talk than your average NBA game.
What I can’t understand is how some people can learn to read and write, and still not learn to think! It takes a special talent to be ‘an accomplished moron’.
🙂 Where’s the Like button?
Hmmm, I’m not so sure about that. Look at G W Bush – utterly talentless, yet ….
let’s just say Lee was bored and skipped his grammar lessons or he was trying out what he learnt in the last class.
Jerry needs an email filter that sends such straight to trash folder.
No, don’t filter the emails! Think of the entertainment they provide.
aw, how sweet. he spelt ‘filth’ correctly 🙂
Just be relieved you’re not a pediatrician, Jerry.
Is it only who thinks, perhaps, that Lee should feel better about himself and come out of the closet?
“From: Lee Hudson [email address redacted]”
Why? 😉
Perhaps out of courtesy to the clearly cognitively challenged.
I must admit I was being a little bit facetious and, on reflection, redacting it was probably a good idea.
The worst that could have happened was that some impulsive lurker(s) in this group might have bombarded Lee Hudson with extreme sarcasm** – which of course would be no worse than what he did, and which, one might argue, was no more than he deserved. But I guess we should aspire to higher standards than that.
**though, one would hope, rather more coherent than his flight of fancy.
He is either a noble Christian or he is not. Care to ask him?
Or an ignoble Christian.
“Brain stuff”. Lol.
He seems like a nice guy
Now who is it who wishes to accommodate people like that? I want them to stand up and be counted.
“your filth!”
And yours!
There is evidence that punishment is counterproductive. That also means that natural selection cannot have selected for a will to punish. Punishment is the result of superstition.