Here’s a comment submitted by reader “Jane,” who of course won’t ever post here again. But it’s interesting to see how easily people misunderstand what I think about free will. I made one of “Jane’s” comments a post on December 3, which included the classic sentence, “Jerry has to deny praise and blame because he did nothing in his life and let his parents down.” A reader sprang to my defense (thanks, but no need, really), with the quote that begins her post.
“If your parents were disappointed in you they must have had ridiculously high expectations. You’ve got a science doctorate, a job as a professor at a university, and you are a published author.”
but jerry never was a daddy, which is what most parents want from there kids. Hes a public speaker about how blameless humans are for there attrocities. I bet dad is REALLY proud. Still Im just waiting now for jerrys next sick article defending the school killer recentely. After all ACCORDING TO JERRY he had no free will can accept no blame whatsoever. Yes you read right, the school child killer of 20, is BLAMELESS!!!! according to jerry coyne. I hope you posters enjoy reading the site of this sick fuck.
Jane, if you’re going to troll here, at least try to understand what I’m saying, which is that of course there is blame for what one does, and punishment must be meted out for bad deeds. But of course “Jane,” who hasn’t yet learned to spell, just wants to fulminate.
The internet is full of these morons. Bye, Jane!
I wonder how long it will take until a SNL clip is linked to from here.
Not long at all….” JANE U IGNORANT SLUT”….U KNOW NOTHING ABOUT JERRY….HE IS TRULY ONE OF THE MOST BRILLIANT MINDS I HAVE EVER MET AND IF HE IS A DISAPPOINTMENT TO HIS PARENTS IT IS THAT HE WASTES TIME EVEN RESPONDING TO TROGLODITES SUCH AS YOURSELF. KENNETH R. SANDERS V.M.D.
Did you have to go for the slut thing?
“Jane” might not even be female. Also, there is absolutely nothing wrong with women who enjoy sex or have multiple partners.
About this long…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k80nW6AOhTs
Its a SNL skit. An ancient one…
Ceiling Cat has requested none of these type of links.
unfortunately, you don’t know with YouTube until it auto-embeds it or whatever.
FYI
Okie dokie, sorry. I don’t see a delete button though? Guess I shouldn’t post before coffee…
For the rest of the world who live outside the USA and aren’t familiar with ancient tv shows, it’s just another insult.
Just so you know, SNL and Ackroyd’s intent was to parody just the kind of attitude you found offensive.
How about fixing the caps lock key on your computer? Or did you really mean to shout?
I’m a non-native English speaker, and I commit my fair share of spelling and grammar errors. But even I feel almost personally offended by the atrocious spelling and grammar of comments like this. What did the English language ever do to creationists and their ilk to deserve this? The utter lack of effort in that regard by Jane, an apparent native English speaker, is maybe a good enough reason for banning her from commenting here ever again.
I wonder: do Jane-type people on non-English language websites have a similar disdain for grammar and spelling?
Yes, of course.
Example for German:
http://www.geo.de/GEO/heftreihen/geo_magazin/sprachwandel-was-reden-wir-denn-da-73127.html
Other magazines had the topic also, but not on cover.
That was never a requirement or expectation that I had for my kids. That was something that they could (and would) decide for themselves.
And really, on that free will thing – I am one of those who disagrees with Jerry on free will, but I would never accuse him of defending killers. Any honest reader of Jerry’s site knows better than that.
“but jerry never was a daddy, which is what most parents want from there kids”……..SOUNDS ALITTLE LIKE RELIGIOUS DOGMA….GO FORTH AND PROCREATE…TO ME.
I still don’t know why free will is the only mental ability that is illusory. What about imagination, memory, reason, etc.
Memory is profoundly illusory and self-deceiving!
I remember reading about that somewhere…
Easy to demonstrate mental illusion. Attach a bike light (or something small, similar) to a string, and swing it rapidly. It is a point of light, but if it spins fast enough, you will see a complete circle, instead of the individual point of light. The mind creates its own illusion of reality.
For a good book on the history of neuroscience as well as a discussion of “free will”, read the recent book (2011) “Who’s in Charge?” by Michael Gazzaniga. As a quick and easy example of “free will”, he asks you to tell your brain “Time to go to sleep” at night, and see how quickly it obeys your command. Obviously, to anyone who’s tossed and turned, YOU are not able to give your mind successful commands!!
“Jane” and her ilk are simply upset and angry that the idea of an eternal afterlife has been shown to be a feeble fantasy and not really there when you die.
Over and over again Jerry has said that the environment is a crucial part molding ‘free’ will, and this environment includes such things as community expectations an punishment.
And what about cases where a killer is mentally ill? Does ‘Jane’ think that Gabby Giffords’ shooter had the same degree of ‘free’ will as ‘she’ does?
This person does sound religious. Does religion cause poor thinking skills, or it is a result?
I think this kind of behavior is a product of ignorance, moralistic egoism and letting ones emotions trump their reasoning. Religion encourages all of those things, but it sure seems that some people are more predisposed to those conditions than others.
In a very real way, particularly in the short term, it is not only easier to be ignorant and to let your emotions trump reasoning, it also feels really good to viciously denigrate others for being immoral when you “know” that you occupy the high ground. I have heard it said that this pattern of emotional response is addictive. If I remember right, it has been referred to as “indignation addiction.” I am not offering this as a verified phenomenon, but it is interesting. Jane sure sounds like she was riding an indignation high.
There is a huge amount of evidence that fundie religion causes profound cognitive impairment.
1. Michele Bachmann. Two degrees, one in law, passed the bar. These days she shouldn’t try to cross the street without her minder.
2. Internet trolls. We see them everyday. Poor spelling and grammar and nonsensical and disordered thoughts.
3. Even the statistics show it. Fundies score low on IQ and achievement tests.
I noticed this myself and originally posted it as half a joke. When you collect the data, it holds up too well.
The mechanism is obscure. It could be the result of cognitive dissonance or just a refusal to think and face reality.
Speaking of a lack of understanding, check out this sunday comic strip.
The link doesn’t work (unless you pay to subscribe!)
It requires a login to view.
“native English speaker” – As an Englishman, I hope not!
If you don’t believe in a deity controlling your every action, then how can you be accused of regarding humans as blameless?
Apologies for the corny moniker btw. Got into an online debate with a YEC and adopted it just to wind him up when replying to me. Petty I know.
I like your style WiseApe. Anyone who would get wound up by that most definitely should be wound up.
Here is why we should rethink our states’ concealed carry laws. This upstanding citizen is probably able to easily buy and carry a weapon in public. You never know when she might have to protect herself againt invididuals with persecution complexes and bouts of uncontroled aggression.
Yes, and that is a real problem in the United States. Not so much for the more intelligent societies in other nations.
Well, to be fair, Jane doesn’t have free will either. And if you had been born in her exact position in the universe, you would be her and posting such things. You obviously threaten her for some reason, probably because you threaten her worldview. Sometimes I think the loudest and most aggressive speakers on any topic are the ones fighting internal doubts. Verbally trying to ‘beat down’ doubts in the form of other people, if you will. I can’t help but feel some sympathy for such people, they’re more confused than anything.
Two other interesting points from “Jane’s” little rant:
1. only humans who breed are good.
2. apparently the adults who died in the recent tragedy don’t count.
That is a weird mind-set right there.
Grania, 1+
Off topic (because I don’t know the correct way of contacting you:
Short announcement from the Pope regarding the World Day of Peace (1 January 2013) :
Source: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/peace/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20121208_xlvi-world-day-peace_en.html
Has gems like: “There is also a need to acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union;”
or
“The path to the attainment of the common good and to peace is above all that of respect for human life in all its many aspects, beginning with its conception, through its development and up to its natural end.”
I feel bad about the problems that are being created by the recent and current generations, problems that will have a negative impact on future generations. The United States society (christians particularly) has been especially egregious among developed countries in creating and ignoring the impact of those types of problems.
Over population by humans is a huge problem that is being push onto future generations. Over population is a problem that will either be solved by humans intelligently or by the natural environment forcefully. Jane’s descendants will truly hate her for her lack of forethought.
While Jane’s parents may be proud of her for unknown reasons, Jane’s descendants will likely be proud of Jerry but, not Jane.
Very hard to imagine what Jane is really trying to say here. Her complete lack of understanding as to why any person may wish to carry out such an awful abuse on the lives of children and teachers is apparent. It is highly likely that the killer in this abysmally sad story had a severe mental illness. His so called free will or rational objectivity was most certainly absent. The problem is that finger pointers like Jane also display psychopathic tendencies as her diatribes shows. Jane is probably a very devout religious person who has no sense of reality either. I do hope someone can help this poor delusional girl. It’s all too late for an insane young man.
Let’s be careful with that…
http://freethoughtblogs.com/ashleymiller/2012/12/14/when-you-tie-shootings-to-mental-illness/
There is no way that a sane person would engage in mass murder. Correctly asserting that the killer was freaking nuts is not intrinsically an ‘othering’, it is an acknowledgement that ‘but for hard diligent work at understanding myself and reality’ this is a failing that I cannot assume I am immune to. Sanity is not something that some people have and others do not. Sanity is something that everyone has to work at.
Everyone is subject to having a diminished ability to think clearly and accurately, whether it is a mild case of low-blood-sugar or a severe biochemical mess. Everyone is also subject to the errors in thinking facilitated by having an inaccurate or poorly informed understanding of reality.
Sanity is something worth struggling for. To suggest that someone sane would be able to go and kill 20 children, seven adults, and himself, makes sanity into something undesirable. If I truly believed that a sane person would be able to kill like that I would go off of my medications and belligerently refuse all attempts to help me be sane.
I saw that at Pharyngula, too, but I have to agree with Prof. Pedant. I think the execution of such a massacre is a clear indicator that something upstairs was wrong, something upstairs was not normal. Noting this is not tantamount to painting all those with mental issues with the mass-murderer brush.
What Jane doesn’t realize is that where you come down on the question of free will (never mind, for the moment, that it’s as incoherent as “north of the North Pole”) is that all it does is shift your approach to dealing with criminal behavior from guilt, imprisonment, and punishment to assessment, sequestration, and rehabilitation.
There’s no room for retribution in a world without wild willies.
b&
There doesn’t seem to be room for rehabilitation, either.
Jane is a crude idiot, of course, but the “no free will” stance raises very troubling and difficult ethical questions. (That doesn’t mean it’s wrong.)
If our actions are determined by our environment, would it not make sense that a rehabilitative environment would be more likely to result in a less-criminally-inclined individual than a retributive one?
Honestly, I can’t imagine any other conclusion….
b&
That’s not at all clear to me, but in any case we wouldn’t have any choice in the matter.
Whether our choices are real or illusory, the fact remains that only those who “choose” to get out of bed in the morning actually do anything.
In other words, it is wise to pretend you have a choice, even if you’re only fooling yourself, even if you know that you’re fooling yourself.
Cheers,
b&
If one is serious about the “no free will” stance, “choice” goes out the window. There is no such thing. All language involving choice is then loosely metaphorical, like saying that a computer circuit “chooses” a particular state. Therein arise the ethical problems.
I don’t believe that fooling oneself is a good way to live, even, and even especially, if you know you’re fooling yourself. That sounds a lot like religion.
Not at all. We are fooling ourselves when we use general relativity to describe gravitation, because we know it is a mere effective theory.
In the same manner “will”, or “choice”, is an effective, predictive theory among sufficiently complex systems that make choices.
I don’t know if absence of “free will” shifts the reaction to abuse, any change certainly would have to stand on its own (and it seems it does). But it may be easier to understand why different approaches works.
Another point here is if you retain “will”, the concomitant “guilt” feelings are still present.
In fact, I would guess there is a physiological template. (So perhaps they are retained anyway, at least as long as we are taught to activate the template.)
If so, it can certainly be retained as a means of behavioral change.
But it comes down to effectivity and harm IMHO. If we can avoid unnecessary harm of “guilt” and retribution, it would be better. Ask the no-free-will utilitarian Harris, I think he would agree.
No choices are not an illusion, making decisions is what brains are for. It’s just that we don’t choose to be who we are, that’s up to our genes and the environment.
The fact that our choices are determined is a good thing, because if they were not they would be random. And our brain is the place in the universe, where the determination of our choices takes place.
Yes, it does, and that’s exactly what we do, as well.
Of course, our decision trees are a lot more complicated. In particular, they incorporate feedback loops, and we’re also capable of creating mental simulations to predict the likely results of different choices.
Personally, I think that, what people are pointing to when they say they’re exercising their free will, it’s that last bit. They imagine a number of different choices they might make, attempt to predict the likely outcomes of said choices, and then pick the optimal solution. That process is entirely deterministic — every bit as deterministic as a Google computer driving a car. But it’s the process by which we make important choices, and it gives us the illusion of contra-causal free will.
When Jerry writes of turning back the clock and doing it all over again, that’s exactly what we do in these mental simulations: we imagine the outcome if we do this, play it out however long, then turn back the clock on our mental simulation and re-run it with a different initial choice. (And, of course, it can be a complex branching of multiple interacting choices.)
Where the free will advocates go off the rails is when they think that their mental simulations are happening not in the real physical world but in some sort of disembodied spiritual realm. They further go off the rails when they fail to realize that, even if such a realm existed, regardless of its physics, it would still have to be some mix of that which follows rules (is deterministic) and that which doesn’t (is random), neither of which permits the type of get-out-of-jail-free card they’re looking for.
Cheers,
b&
This is confused. Of course we have choices. The result of the choice simply does not depend at all on something we could reasonably call “free will” as an entity that causes or makes our choice.
Compatibilists will argue with that, since they are happy to consider a very complex network of properties, abilities, and long term plasticity of the human meat computer and conclude that it amounts to “free will”. But there is no thing we possess, as the popular imagination for thousands of years has envisioned it, some unique human quality, that gives us a property we can point to and say “that is our free will”.
The brain makes choices, but the result of those choices is determined by the structure of our brain, our genes, our education and development, the cumulative effect of every moment of experience we’ve ever had during our lives. All of this results in the unique mind that for unfathomable (unconscious) reasons likes blue better than red, or likes to get out of bed in the morning, or doesn’t like to get out of bed in the morning.
The depressed person, who can’t bear to get out of bed in the morning, can’t simply will themselves to change their behavior. Instead, assuming it is a deep depression, they must go through a long struggle to reprogram their brain to make different choices. If they decide to undertake this struggle, that’s not “free will” either; it’s because their brain, as it is, calculates that it is in their best interest to get out of bed in the mornings.
But there is no freedom to simply will this and have done with it. If the brain’s decision to change a habitual behavior will succeed, it will only be after a long process of trial and error, of failure and repeated attempts, until over the long run the brain adjusts and develops a new way of working. It’s more like patiently learning to play chess or the piano than it is “free willing” a change. So the closest thing we have to free will is the ability to decide to reprogram our brain, which is not just a matter of will; it’s a matter of embarking on a lengthy project that may succeed or fail depending on whether we continue to make the assessment during that project that it remains in our best interest to continue. The difficulty of making the change may make us decide to simply give up, which amounts to a choice not to make the effort because the goal doesn’t seem worth the cost. This isn’t free will, it’s our brain and body running up against it’s limits, or incrementally extending them.
There is choice, which only requires a few moments of observing human behavior to see. But there isn’t “freedom” in the sense that “we” can independently, on a whim, decide to go against what our brain wants to decide based on it’s nature. There is no freedom in these choices, though our brain does generally take our interests into account, and makes it’s best effort to do what is best for us. This is subject to the brain’s limited ability to accurately assess what is best for us, but it does a pretty good job.
If we could choose according to the popular notion of “free will”, then getting over grief, heartbreak, depression, addiction, or other motivating factors we face would be merely a matter of making a decision. Most of us know that is not the case.
To say we have no choice is a misunderstanding of what it means to say we don’t have “free will”.
Thank you, Jeff Johnson. My understanding of the issue is in complete agreement with your definition, but yours is the first clear explanation I have read that explicitly states how action choice selections by individuals comports with neurological discoveries about brain function and its impact on theist concepts of free will.
I fear, though, that the term ‘free will’ is in somewhat the same predicament ‘theory’ finds itself. Theory is clearly defined in the dictionary, but it is incorrectly used where hypothesis is suited — by the scientific/academic community as readily as by lay people — and discussions about what is or is not theory all too often come to a standstill far short of comprehension as a result.
‘Free will’ suffers a similar shortcoming, in my opinion, and I think one may add the terms ‘falsify’ and/or ‘falsification’ to the list as well. At least this is the case based on my experience in (too many) discussions with anti-science conservatives of all sorts. Not only do the terms suffer from lack of commonly understood usage, that very unfamiliarity makes them useful confuse-the-argument ammunition for intransigent liars for jebus and any other monkey-wrench anti-progress luddites.
It’s true that there is confusion about the meaning of free will. From Mirriam-Webster online:
noun free will:
1 : voluntary choice or decision
2 : freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention
Compatibilists like to think that #1 is the real definition, and the only one that matters (because it’s the only one that really exists). This compatibilist free will understands that the voluntary choice or decision is made by deterministic factors internal to the person, and that these choices only appear to be uncaused if you view the person as a black box. People do many things that are uncaused by visible external factors. What is important is that their choices originate inside of themselves using the resources they possess, a brain and a body, regardless of the fact that they are determined by complex internal brain functions.
But I think most people on earth think of “free will” as the second definition, the definition that really matters to people (or actually that they believe really matters). And people generally understand this to mean that even looking at ourselves internally as subjective beings, our decisions aren’t caused by anything other than our will, which we tend to view as free of causes. The subjective human experience is that “we” originate causes, “we” are a kind of mini-prime-mover. Most humans alive view this as a kind of divine gift of freedom that allows them to choose things with no cause, and to take responsibility for those choices inside of a divine drama.
This mini-prime-mover inside is the illusion our conscious mind believes because we are unaware of the unconscious forces at work internal to our body and brain. We don’t really have this kind of free will, but most humans believe we do.
Ultimately, what is the meaning of a word or phrase? Is it what a specialized group of thinkers, students, and professors say it is, or is it what most people think it is? Compatibilists must be prescriptive with respect to the term “free will”, but I think real linguists overwhelmingly prefer the descriptivist approach to meaning. Prescription of linguistic correctness and meaning is the province of fussy grammarians, not linguistic researchers. By the descriptive meaning of “free will”, what most people think it means, I believe we must say that we do not have it.
If we use the phrase “I signed the contract of my own free will”, we mean two things: 1. that we weren’t coerced, 2. that we chose to do it. People think they both “make a choice” and “have a choice”. In other words they think they make a choice (definition #1) because they aren’t externally coerced, and that they have a choice (could do differently) because of definition #2. And most people on earth think this second definition is the important uniquely human one, and this is what they mean when they say they “have free will”, a statement that differs from saying they “do something of their own free will”.
Blurring these distinctions seems to create all the arguments over compatibilism, which is dependent on ignoring definition #2 as an anachronism. But this second definition is the one most people fervently believe they have, but all determinists agree they don’t have.
I have a question that I hope will straighten out the remaining confusion I have on this topic. When people make a decision that precedes an action on their part, e.g. Stanza’s at the school last Friday — including his long sequence of decisions over many months required to place him at that school Friday with the means to accomplish his ends — how do ‘make a choice’ and ‘have a choice’, specifically apply to each step on his path? At this point, I think the explanation is that Stanza did something of his own volition, but that he does not have free will. However, something about this perception I have seems off, and I can’t quite put my finger on what that is.
I am not familiar enough with the concepts of compatibility and determinism for those terms to provide an answer for me. What would be an accurate explanation for victims’ family members if they have that same hindrance? Could you word your answer as if you were addressing them, or perhaps as an expert witness for the defense if Stanza survived and was on trial? I ask this not because I dispute your explanation, but instead because I expect it is the only way an explanation can be worded that will penetrate the hard shell of enculturation I am obviously encumbered with. It might even help me to discuss this somewhat intelligently.
This is starting to sound like Sophisticated Theology. You should be embarrassed by it.
The entire argument for “no free will,” as I understand it, is physical determinism. I’ve seen written here, quite often and without irony, words to the effect that when one supposedly makes a “choice” one could not have chosen otherwise, and that the impression that one could have is an “illusion.” That is not what I call choice. That is an illusion of choice.
I’m not arguing that the no free will proposition is false. It may be true, but in that case it’s necessary to face up to some disturbing and unpleasant consequences, including but not limited to ethics.
I don’t think the consequences would be disturbing and unpleasant – Society needs to face up to the fact that people’s actions are very much the consequence of their genetics heavily modified by the environments in which they are raised, rather than just assigning “blame” to individuals and ignoring the causes.
Pragmatically speaking, the value of deterrence in law doesn’t depend on free will, in fact an appreciation that events have causes highlights why deterrence is so important (cf Pinker, Blank Slate).
No, I’m not embarrassed by anything I wrote, and I fail to see how you could equate anything I wrote with theology. You’re going to have to explain how you arrive at that conclusion, because I’m baffled by it. Either I wasn’t clear in my word choices somewhere, or you didn’t read it carefully.
I assumed determinism as so obvious it doesn’t even need to be mentioned. It’s been discussed here so much I figured it went without saying. I just wanted to address this confusing statement that we don’t make choices. There is an oversimplification here that I was trying to address. The following remark:
<blockquote
If one is serious about the “no free will” stance, “choice” goes out the window. There is no such thing.
is in danger of being wrong and misleading unless you are using the word ‘choice’ in the specifically limited sense of “not being able to do differently”. The problem is that people often take this kind of statement to mean that we might as well give up, we have no control, or that we are puppets. And to say that we can’t choose how we want to deal with criminals, as you apparently did, is just more of this confusion.
People feel themselves trying to change and improve themselves all the time, and it’s hard for people to square the idea that we are deterministic with this sense of being able to decide, say, to take up a new hobby and over time master it, or deciding to quit smoking, and after much effort succeeding. These are behaviors that people want to attribute to free will, and they are behaviors that people find it difficult to explain if we have no free will and our choices determined. We really do have a will, in that there are things we want and desire, but it’s just not “free” in the sense of being able to rise above natural constraints and make choices arbitrarily.
There are different meanings bound up in the word ‘choice’. I think it’s perfectly consistent to say we make choices, because, say, if we go out to eat and are faced with a menu of several options, we manage to select the one we want to eat. That is a choice. It’s obvious everyone does this. This sense of choice focuses on the output of the process of analyzing a set of alternatives and arriving at one member of that set because it satisfies certain criteria better than the other alternatives.
Another sense is to say “we have a choice”, which I distinguish from “making choices” as described above. To have a choice contains the sense that we could do things differently. We can’t. In this sense of the word ‘choice’ the meaning focuses on the inputs to the decision process, and ignores how the decision making process actually takes place. One imagines that any of the alternatives could be selected, perhaps with equal probability, and that there is freedom to choose anything “I” want to. This is the illusion created by our subjective experience. That is the freedom we don’t have, but we generally think we do. Just as you describe in your second paragraph, when we choose (make a choice) we could not choose otherwise (don’t have a choice) because it is determined by the state of our brain. We really are making a choice, but we are under the illusion that we do it freely and could have arrived at a different result.
Everything I wrote is consistent with the view of a deterministic brain, so I really don’t know what you read or thought you read that made you respond the way you did.
There are no disturbing moral consequences here either, though it can seem that way if you haven’t thought enough about it. It is a common religious-type panic to think that lack of free will means lack of responsibility, and that believing we have no free will would somehow cause civil society to crumble into chaos. This strikes me as total nonsense, a kind of superstitious fearful thinking comparable to thinking that understanding the heart to be a muscle that just pumps blood would cause us to lose the ability to love. There is no problem with clearly understanding how the brain works, and the only thing we have to lose are old misconceptions, like the misconception that not having free will jeopardizes our ability to take responsibility or hold one another responsible.
I agree with everything Ben said on this. We only lose emotional retribution, vengeance and the will to punish for the sake of meting out justice. Instead we can punish by imposing restrictions and requirements for the more rational purpose of deterring and rehabilitating. When you think about it enough there is nothing disturbing here, and I don’t see it as bad for society, but rather good because it factors thoughtless instinctive emotional rage out of the equation. It is a step of maturity for our society to master the primitive emotions of moral outrage, which is part of a crude pre-rational justice system that involves a direct link between offense, anger, outrage, and violent punishment. Instead we need to rationally address the real causes of problems. I’m not saying we know enough about society and the brain to fully make that transition now, but it seems we are moving in that direction, and there is nothing disturbing about this transition. To me it is the opposite of disturbing, it is encouraging.
Sharks and bears may not have “free will” either– that doesn’t mean we don’t protect ourselves from them.
Rational people aim to limit the suffering caused by others whether it’s an uncontrollable compulsion or not.
Pedophiles surely aren’t using “free will” to CHOOSE their attraction to children– Nor are threats of hell enough to curb the compulsion of pedophile priests. That is where the legal system steps in. It limits the choices such people have when in regards to how much suffering they can cause others.
“Nor are threats of hell enough to curb the compulsion of pedophile priests.”
Exactly!
Typical reflexive response from a retribution fetishist.
c’est ne pas une volonté
well, as they say: don’t feed the trolls,
BUT
since free will came up – Sam Harris’ lead essay for his book Free Will is prescient of the past few days, though difficult to stomach re-reading right now:
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-illusion-of-free-will
basically, brain tumor / brain disorder is a (perhaps untested?) material explanation for, well, many seemingly inexplicable behaviors.
Arguments from ignorance are just too common.
People certainly don’t choose to be sociopaths or to have mental illness. I doubt Jane’s freewill is involved in her(?) dim-wittedness and loathsome personality either.
But we can choose to enact laws, taxes, and regulations to make guns (and bullets) less readily available. Guns destroy many more lives than they save. They make it too easy for a crazy or careless moment to destroy lives;it isn’t just the children’s lives that were destroyed with this recent tragedy; it’s their parent’s lives as well.
It is especially bothersome to me to see that those with the strongest opposition to firearm regulation are the ones that I find the most unstable and irrational. It scares me to think that people like “Jane” with a loaded weapon at the ready.
Having met (briefly) Jerry and known of him for a number of years, I’ve never for one second considered making any effort towards addressing such questions as this. The idea literally has not crossed my mind, and now that “jane” has raised the question, I still struggle to see what possible relationship it could have to the (main) topic of this website.
Which makes “jane’s” interest in the matter decidedly disturbing. I hope that Jerry has informed the appropriate authorities to have “an eye kept on” this worrying character.
Is this a common opinion outside religious fruitloopery? On a survey of the relevant people I found mild disappointment in one parent, and the other one I’ve never bothered to inform (though I think that she knows about it). I never considered my reproductive choices to be any of their business.
Come to think of it, I’ve never even considered asking my parents, grandparents, siblings or other relatives about their reproductive plans. What interest of mine would it be?
I think the fundamentalists resent childless couples because God commanded Adam and Eve to multiply, and because they apply a kind of Calvinist logic based on the idea that children are a sign of God’s blessing. Therefore who is childless must be cursed by God.
And perhaps there is another reason they feel threatened by people who either elect not to have children or are biologically incapable of having children: approving of childless couples undermines their anti-gay argument that marriage is for the purpose of reproduction only, which is really an odd contradictory position for a religion claiming to be about love and spirit, and expressing an active disavowal of flesh and what in their view are the tawdry pleasures of a material world.
For the Christian, life is about spirit and love, service and worship, sacrifice and devotion, until you come to fundamentalist Christian marriage, and then it must be exclusively justified in terms of biological reproduction, and they insist on enforcing an entirely carnal distinction of gender symmetry rather than ennobling marriage by emphasizing the bond of love between two humans, both children of their imagined God, regardless of their genital particulars. They hate gays so much they profess a betrayal of their own philosophy of love, sharing, and sacrifice in order to exclude them.
So, it’s all bound up completely in the lies that they’ve told to themselves.
Madness. Pure madness.
But ALL of them tend to (have, in my case and generation) press their ideal of woman/motherhood on each unlucky girl born into a religious family.
The pervasive overpopulation propaganda cannot be stopped by any argument (in my case an autosomal dominant hereditary illness, AND abuse); it stops only when each contact is severed.
I do not know how harsh it is on males.
And I cannot stop myself to go into the “free will”- issue: we former abused children KNOW that we will repeat the behaviour under stress, therefore there MUST be a legal right to have no children, and it should be called ethical to accept higly probable predictions instead of the illusion of the holy family as everyone´s lifestyle!
I think we hear about free will so much that most people think we would have acted otherwise. I don’t know much about ‘free will’ but for all it’s worth, I don’t think it is free, that our environment plays a bigger role in our actions.
Too bad Jane can’t be civil about her disagreement with Jerry and has to include his parents in his/her response.
I hope we have had the last of her and we need not insult her, she will think we aren’t any better.
Free will is one of those topics like objective morality, that baffle me as to why people think them even worthy of discussion: You can’t lift yourself up by pulling on your own bootstraps.
This so typifies the crudity of the fundamentalist mind, unable to make finer distinctions of meaning. For this blunted conceptual gravel pit that is Jane’s mind, there is one monolithic boulder called “blame”, and there is an absolute binary switch that turns it off entirely, or else pegs it at maximum volume.
Thus comes the childishly simple minded conclusion that absence of free will must imply absence of blame, since for example we don’t blame bears for attacking children, or stones for falling on children. These are simply natural processes.
But humans can be blamed. In fact Christians derive a great deal of pleasure and sense of superiority from blaming people. Sin, guilt, blame, and punishment are elevated central pillars of Christian doctrine.
So anything that appears to threaten the idea of blame, guilt, and punishment must be attacked mindlessly.
And mindlessly is accurate, because real understanding here of course involves appreciating that the word “blame” has more than one meaning. We can of course blame the sun for blinding our eyes and making us drop the fly ball, or we can blame the fact that we can’t run fast enough for us losing the race. In neither of these cases is their sin, so their can’t be anger, hatred, retribution, and feelings of being morally superior to the reviled object of blame. It’s just a physical cause of an event or action.
How disappointing for the Christian. That takes all the fun out of it for them. Obviously Jane is having a great deal of fun venting her pent-up rage at what she feels is a worthy target for her “holier than thou” game. One must wonder what is making her so unhappy. Perhaps God has not fulfilled her expectations, so a scapegoat must be found. Perhaps it’s good that she has this outlet. Who knows? She could be armed and dangerous and we’d rather see her spray venom in pixels than spray bullets in a destructive rage of God commanded vengeance. And of course that wouldn’t be an act of free will on her part, but still we could blame the fact that her mind is infected by a parasite, aka religion.
Of course rational people understand that when someone is a danger to society, even if their actions were not an option that they could have freely chosen to avoid, they can be blamed and held responsible and steps can be taken to eliminate the danger, including putting them in prison for life. And of course in the case of the shootings in Newtown, the point of blaming the perpetrator is entirely moot because he is dead. The important questions are what can we do to prevent this kind of thing from happening again in the future? In order to answer that one needs to understand the causes that drove this young man to kill so mercilessly and coldly. To attribute it simply to free will, or to Satan’s influence, is to leave one absolutely clueless about the causes, and powerless to propose remedies.
Actually, to prevent it, it is enough in these cases to simply remove guns. The impulse driven usually drops the idea when all they can get hold of is knifes or steel pipes. (Swedish research, IIRC. Though there are _some_ mass knifings, but rarely lethal.)
And as the statistics of the rest of the world attest, US is an outlier re guns and their use for mass killings.*
* I find the spring article on the usual US reactions [I lost the reference, but I assume it is doing the rounds] chilling, since once again the cycle repeats itself. Innocents with the same names are blamed, politicians step up and are sorry, the gun apologists says it is too early to take preventative measures (but when Sandy et cetera hits, no one says _that_), et cetera. Even the input from international voices like mine stays the same.
But in the end exactly nothing comes out of it. This too, will be no exception. The frequency can only become larger with a growing population. The tail too can only become larger, the maximum number of killed in one event increasing by random constraints.
Meaningless killings and powerless remedies indeed.
Either the same day or within a few days (I’ve seen conflicting reports) of the US school massacre, a man in china slashed and stabbed 22 kids at a school there. They all survived, although some with serious injuries. Gun ownership is illegal in China, so the mentally ill or just disgruntled-at-the-world have to use knives. There was a picture attached to one of the stories of police training teachers how to respond to one of these attacks: they were effectively holding off the assailant with a long pole with a semi-circular hoop at the end. Obviously not very useful against someone with an assault rifle.
Unfortunately, I don’t think meaningful gun control in the US is possible, at least for the foreseeable future.
Certainly limiting access to semi-automatic rifles and large magazines would make mass slaughter of this type or the horrible case of Anders Breivik in Norway less common. Most gun deaths involve a single victim, I believe, whether accidental, self-inflicted, or intentional murder. One statistic I’ve seen not too many years ago was that the UK, despite its stricter gun laws, had a similar per-capita murder rate to the US, but of course these involved guns far less frequently. But they lack the large number of accidental gun deaths, and I don’t know how the suicide rates compare. There is some truth to the notion that if you want to kill you can find a way without guns. But certainly this kind of large scale lethality is out of reach.
I own a few pistols. I first bought one when I had some reason to fear that a drug dealer suspected me of informing the police on him, and some friends convinced me I could be a target for a violent assault. I took a class designed for concealed carry permits, which gave me the fundamentals of marksmanship, defensive use of the gun, and the practices of safety that are essential. I found I enjoyed target practice, and though the original danger is gone, I take some comfort knowing that in the extremely unlikely event that a homicidal maniac invades my home, I might be able to defend myself and my wife. Or if I stumble upon a public shooting, I might save some lives because I usually have a gun in my car. I don’t carry one at all times, but when I thought I might be a target for vengeance I did.
Years ago, before ever owning a gun, I supported hand gun bans for all but those with a professional justification for ownership. Now I see the other side of that argument to a degree, but I’m not one to support the militant right-wing obsession with absolute gun freedom.
At a minimum we can ban assault rifles and high capacity magazines. These may be fun to shoot at a range, but outside of that context they have no place in sport hunting. They have one design goal, and that is to kill a lot of people at a great distance over a short period of time. I’m sure there are ways to accommodate hobbyists by keeping these locked up at gun clubs for use on the range only.
I’d enthusiastically support regulation on other guns at the level of at least how we regulate cars, which are also very dangerous equipment everyone is trusted to own and operate. Every gun owner should have training and be able to pass a safety and skills test, and every gun should be registered. The “gubmint’s gonna take our guns” paranoia of the American right is insane. They have no idea that they’ve won this fight politically and legally several times over, and now what we see is people being manipulated by gun manufacturers and their lobbyists to pump up profits, which has had the effect of popularizing a very corrosive Frontiersman/Southern Rebel persecution complex attitude that makes people think and say stupid things. Nobody is worrying about their automobile freedom, and cars aren’t even in the Constitution.
Frankly, when I bought my first gun I was shocked and a bit scared by how easy it was. One morning at work a co-worker convinced me I should protect myself, and during my lunch hour it took about twenty minute to get a 9mm semi-automatic pistol with two 15 round magazines and a couple of boxes of ammo. I walked ought of that shop with a lethal weapon I had no idea how to use. I signed up for a class right away, and that made all the difference in the world. I wasn’t scared of the gun anymore, and I knew how to avoid accidents and use it with confidence. But I felt scared about how easy it was for any random fool to pick up a gun. This is a golden age for gun lovers in America, but I can’t believe we are going to forever place the pleasure and convenience of hobbyists over and above the need to protect innocent lives. There is a lot of middle ground between outright bans and our current near gun anarchy of redneck paradise. We need to explore those compromises.
A peer-reviewed 2009 study by the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine concluded that people in possession of a gun were 4.5 times more likely to be shot during an assault than those who didn’t have a firearm.
In the words of the study: “On average, guns did not protect those who possessed them from being shot in an assault. Although successful defensive gun uses occur each year, the probability of success may be low for civilian gun users in urban areas. Such users should reconsider their possession of guns or, at least, understand that regular possession necessitates careful safety countermeasures.”
And, more or less relevant, is the fact that the Newtown gunman’s first victim, his mother Nancy Lanza, was a gun owner. From the Daily Mail:
“Last night it also emerged Nancy was a member of the Doomsday Preppers movement, which believes people should prepare for end of the world.
Her former sister-in-law Marsha said she had turned her home ‘into a fortress’. She added: ‘Nancy had a survivalist philosophy which is why she was stockpiling guns. She had them for defense.”
I know no divine free will exists as part of an ensoulment endowment birth package. I believe that retributive punishment for behavior, based on the concept of deviation from abuse of divine free will ‘choice’, is contrary to intelligent policy. I can (sorta) get how ASPD disorders result in behavior selections by afflicted individuals that are outside acceptable societal norms — I sorta get it I think, but I possess the trait of empathy those individuals do not, so (fortunately) I intellectually comprehend the description of the disorder but do not truly grok possessing it.
That said: I have read Sam Harris’s work and that of others on free will, and followed discussions like this one several times on numerous blogs. And I still don’t really get it.
If free will has nothing to do with the long string of decisions a shooter makes, up to and including trigger pulls from first to last when shooting first grade school kids or mall shoppers or theater goers or post office workers, what words explain how free will manifests in any of that long string of individual decisions in that long horrific sequence in a way that is comprehensible to myself, let alone to a theist? And explaining this to survivors of victims? I suffer from a disconnect that I would be grateful to be enlightened about.
In a naturalistic account (computational theory of mind), our minds are software running on the hardware of a material brain. That makes our minds no different in principle than say a chess program: Given the same set of initial conditions (e.g. time to calculate a move) and the same opponent moves, the software will always play the same game.
If our moral system, for chess, decrees that sacrificing pawns in the opening is evil, then would there be any point in punishing a chess program for doing it? The program could argue, in it’s defence, that given it’s software and the opponent’s moves it couldn’t have done otherwise and that it wasn’t responsible for the software it had been programmed with in the first place.
The one thing that would make me feel let down as a parent, hang my head in shame, ban them from the house for thanksgiving and disinherit them would be if my kids did not know the difference between ‘there’ and ‘their’.
That would really, really, suck.
Mike
“Jane”, my niece, whose diapers I changed, and whose first steps I saw, was one of the teachers killed. I go to her funeral in a few days. She was one of the lights of the world. This will be a burning pain in my heart for the rest of my life.
Your trivialization of her death, and the deaths of the other teachers and staff, and of the deaths of the children, for your ego-aggrandizement, the utter narcissism of your straw-man argument to paint _yourself_ in a positive light nauseates me. If you are not a vile filthy hypocrite, you will return and post an apology here and learn something.
Just like the gunman, you think the lives of these people are your ego-playground. YOU, are not only not part of the solution, you are part of the cause, you and your vaulting lying rationalizations.
You and your kind, that feed your egos off of this kind of thing, make me sick.
Apologize. Learn something, get a bit more adult, and APOLOGIZE.
cbooth,
With your post the abstract headlines become more real and human. I hope you find the strength to face this grief, to suffer through it and persevere.
It is troubling that people not at all connected to this tragedy can so easily spout their opinions about it publicly, when there is such heart wrenching grief at the personal level for those more closely involved.
This is a kind of dark and serious McLuhan Moment. Very little to say. It’s a matter more for feelings than words.
Bahhahahah. You crack me up! These ppl are so afraid of anything that is not there to tell them over and over again that they R SO SPECIAL. This one gave me a huge laugh! Thanks jerry
Sorry this is just a test: 🙂 (:
To Jeff Johnson:
I don’t think you’re taking the implications of the no-free-will proposition seriously.
The essence of it is physical determinism — that the present state of the universe proceeds ineluctably from the past state, as does the future state from the present. Our thoughts, feelings, and desires are epiphenomenal dross — impotent, incapable of affecting anything. We live in a illusory world where we THINK we have choice, but we don’t in any meaningful sense.
I find this terrifying and repellent, the more so because it might be true. It makes a bitter joke of hope.
I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but I suspect it isn’t, although I have no proof or even a decent argument. I do know that our present-day understanding of physics is not only incomplete but inconsistent. When cosmologists take fantastical notions like parallel universes seriously, and we don’t know what makes up the vast majority of the universe (dark matter, dark energy), and general relativity and quantum mechanics are irreconcilable, I find it arrogant to think that deterministic Laplacian physics is the final word, and I hold out hope that a materialist, naturalistic philosophy has room for free will. But maybe I’m fooling myself.
I think you are confusing determinism with fatalism. And randomness (assuming quantum mechanics isn’t deterministic) is hardly going to help. The idea of libertarian free will isn’t just an illusion, noone has been able to coherently explain how it’s meant to work.
One thing to consider is a little thought experiment – Imagine you were suddenly transported to a different universe similar to this one, but with different starting conditions. Would you suddenly be unable to take decisions? No, of course not. So, why do you imagine you can’t in this one?
Determinism is fatalism. They are equivalent. Also, quantum physics, as understood today, is deterministic.
I sometimes despair of the naive view of physics demonstrated by biology people on this website.
@Stephen
No, determinism is *not* fatalism. As Dennett puts it (see Freedom Evolves), people have very strong intuitions about determinism, but those intuitions are wrong. That’s what I was trying to illustrate in the second para without writing a WOT.
Here’s another way of looking at it: Our choices are determined, but the place in the universe where that determination occurs is in our brains. If our choices didn’t refer back to the characters we were created with, then they would not be *our* choices. I am different to you, because I was created differently and my choices are determined by the way I was created and what happened to me after that; which is to say by me.
*And* I didn’t say that *I* think quantum mechanics is indeterministic – David Deutsch has almost convinced me that Many Worlds is the most sensible way of looking at QM and that is deterministic, of course, although in an odd way.
Of course it may be that you want something that isn’t possible under determinism, but if so I don’t think you will find it.
I’ll admit that determinism and fatalism aren’t precisely equivalent. Fatalism is defined in various ways, but the basic idea is that certain events are unavoidable, but nondeterministic phenomena (like free will) are not explicitly excluded. Determinism is a stronger claim. If you are a determinist, you are by default a fatalist.
@Stephen
The idea that determinism assumes fatalism, is a relic of religious thinking (as is the incoherent concept of libertarian free will). If there was an omniscient god that knew how all choices would work out in advance, then yes we would indeed be predestined to make particular choices. But in the absence of god (or anything outside of the universe), it is the universe that determines itself, as it evolves, and our mind is the place in the universe where our choices are determined. If that wasn’t the case, then what would be the use of that big lump of grey matter between our ears?
So our minds look at our present perception and past experiences in order to calculate, then and there, what to do next. It’s true that we can’t choose otherwise than the way we do, but that would be a *restriction* to free choice, not an enhancement, because it would mean we would be choosing to do something that we didn’t want to do.
“The idea that determinism assumes fatalism, is a relic of religious thinking”
No, it’s merely logic. Fatalism hold that SOME events are unavoidable. Determinism holds that ALL events are unavoidable.
@Stephen
This is a common stumbling block: Here’s a good short blog post, which explains the distinction: http://philosophyonthemesa.com/2009/03/24/determinism-is-not-fatalism/ and gives an idea of what it means to be compatibilist. IMOP Daniel Dennett deals with these issues simply & Well. i.e. in Freedom Evolves, which I mentioned earlier.
I think whether the human mind is deterministic, and whether the entire unfolding of history from the big bang is deterministic, are two entirely different questions. I feel very confident that our mental abilities are the result of deterministic biochemical processes in the brain and nervous system. The entire Universe is a much more complicated question, and it seems there is quite a bit more room for debate on that question. We can consider the implications of the brain being deterministic without answering the larger question, but let’s just assume for the sake of argument that everything is determined, and Laplace’s Demon is a theoretical possibility.
You said I’m not taking the implications seriously enough. It seems to me you are taking them too seriously. There is a big difference between being a leaf blowing in the wind, which is entirely subject to external forces, and being a human being, only partially subject to external forces. Our internal complexity and our self-propelling metabolism allows us joy, curiosity, a sense of identity and accomplishment, and so much more. Our complex deterministic system, our body and brain, is still our own unique complex deterministic system.
Our contributions matter. Let’s say our Universe is a closed system, and entirely deterministic. Now suppose some external force for whatever reason intervenes and removes you from our Universe instantaneously, an event with origins completely outside the system of predictable deterministic events we are living in. That would change things. In other words, you have a role to play, you matter. And that remains true even if no such external force exists, or even if that external force is also completely determined within a larger system. And hope still matters because even though events may be determined, we can not predict them.
Humans have lived for many thousands of years with hope even though they believed that omniscient Gods knew everything that would happen in the future. It’s no different if we dispense with the God and replace it with a theoretical computer simulation that could predict our futures. Children are still excited about their Christmas gifts even though they know Santa has already chosen them, or their parents have already bought them. Consider the lottery. If the drawing were held early inside a sealed vault, and no human was allowed to know the result until the final day announcement of winners, would people still play even though the winning numbers are already determined? I think they would, because nobody knows what the numbers are, so people can still hope that the unknown yet fully determined outcome may favor them. The nature of human hope is more about what we ourselves don’t know than it is about what is knowable or not knowable in principle. We don’t usually want to hear the spoilers before watching a film, but even if we do, a good film is every bit if not more enjoyable. I enjoyed “The Sixth Sense” as much or more the second time because I was able to see the narrative tricks used to create the illusion, and I caught the tiny clues so easily overlooked the first time through. We create our own meaning and pleasure with our minds.
The compatibilists are fond of saying that even though we are determined, we have the kind of autonomy and control that are worth having, and they are right even if calling it “free will” is misleading and confusing. We have much more, including joy and sorrow, love and desire, and yes, hope. Just being part of this grand dance is something worthwhile even if it is well choreographed by determinism because of the vast complexity and variation.
Your observations of epiphenomenal dross and illusion are accurate in a very real sense. These are the despair of the classic existential crisis, and they strongly resemble the complaints that the religious make about the meaningless world of the atheist. These thoughts also strongly connect to the observations Buddha made about physical existence, what is known as “impermanence” and “emptiness”. He observed that everything is temporary, and does not have intrinsic nature or value, but all objects are rather “dependent arisings”. In other words all meaning is relative. A table is just a collection of molecules occupying space unless a human imposes the concept “table” on it and views it in terms of its utility to humans. The same is true of love or curiosity. Spock can’t grok love, can’t even imagine why it would be considered good, because he’s not human. Human meaning and human value is created by human minds. Is that really a problem? I think it’s kind of exciting to realize that we differ from a pile of chemicals because of the additional energy and information we contain. We are the result of sunlight shining on a chunk of stardust for an extended period of time. Who cares if it is deterministic? Is the art of Jackson Pollack too deterministic?
And even if everything is totally determined, it is nonetheless beautiful and endlessly complex. If you watch waves splashing on a shore or a mountain stream flowing over mossy stones, every water molecule’s path is determined, and yet there is an endless variety of patterns and shapes created. This is because of chaos. When the forces acting on a system are in equilibrium, at an inflection, an arbitrarily small perturbation can entirely alter the future evolution of the system. Every time a wave of energy passing through the sea splashes upon the shore there is a unique pattern of foam and water droplets thrown into the sky. The big bang is a unique splash of energy too. And each life form is a distillation of the sun’s energy splashing upon this chunk of stardust hanging in space, each life form a unique pattern created by the river of light flowing over our planet. I love this Universe, even if it’s all as deterministic as waves crashing on the shore. Should I be embarrassed for trying to add a little poetry to the cold dead meangless wasteland of determinism that the pessimistic godaholics see when God is removed? I don’t think so. This determined Universe is fabulous.
Jeff, that’s well thought-out reply It made me try to imagine your point of view. Thank you for taking the time and trouble. You hit the nail pegging me as an existentialist.
I will not grant you the liberty to suppose that the universe may be nondeterministic, but all the stuff underneath, like our brains, is. That sounds like woo. Pick one.
I’m mostly interested in the nature of consciousness and qualia. Perception. Logic. Language. Culture. Blog posts. (Apologies to Jerry.) Are these empty vessels? Illusions? What are they FOR? Why do they even matter in a deterministic universe? Does evolutionary theory have anything useful to say about it? I don’t think so.
“Like our brains, is deterministic,” I meant to say.