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Neuroscience, Psychology Eroding Idea of Free Will
pragueexpat writes "Do we have free will? Possibly not, according to an article in the new issue of the Economist. Entitled 'Free to choose?', the piece examines new discoveries in the fields of neuroscience and psychology that may be forcing us to re-examine the concept of free will. The specifically cite a man with paedophilic tendencies who was cured when his brain tumor was removed. 'Who then was the child abuser?', they ask. The predictable conclusion of this train of thought, of course, leads us to efforts by Britain: 'At the moment, the criminal law--in the West, at least--is based on the idea that the criminal exercised a choice: no choice, no criminal. The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.'"
Awesome! Just in time for Christmas, too!
and you'll solve the problem.
This sounds like something right out of a Hollywood movie. I seem to remember that it didn't work out exactly as planned.
to put into practice the most invasive practices of the "free" world.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
The whole idea of free will is an artefact of religious thought: If god is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, why do people do bad things? Answer? Free will!
Without the religious angle, there isn't much to free will. This is just another example of physical determinism, which is even more pathetically weak than it's religious counterpart, because it replaces a omnipotent puppet master with the laws of nature. Is nature taking away your ability to choose? Do the laws of physics require that you consume this twinkie instead of that ho-ho? It reduces quickly to absurdity.
Free will is like the Cartesian solipsism brought on by cogito ergo sum, where you prove your own existence, but lose all the rest of existence at the same time. What type of person does it take to sit down and wonder whether or not they exist, and if they do exist, does the rest of the world exist?
Do you have free will? Does it matter? Would you ever know the difference? The pedophile cited in the article couldn't use it as a defense in his trial, because the legal system doesn't give a damn.
I normally am not a proponent of Occam, but this is one of those cases where it's just so apt. What possible explanatory purpose is served by adding or removing free will?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Minority Report, anybody?
... concentrate on solutions! Gotta develop 'prozac for pedophiles'.
$signature =~ s/$signature//;
The idea of a free Wii sounds much more interesting.
i hate it when i misread the headline
The convergence of life sciences with physical sciences is nothing new, and there really shouldn't be so many "aha!" moments like this.
The Political Programmer
until quantum physics is either discredited or modified, there's a definite place for "free will" in science.
at the very base of quantum physics is the measurement problem: when a measurement is made, the many quantum possiblities of particles collapse into one actuality. so far, no one has any explanation of what determines which possibility becomes the actuality, and some physicists believe the choice is made by the conscious observer.
-b.
Who needs futuresight when you can just lock up everyone who doesn't seem likely to grow up to become a societal drone?
Haiku for you!
Without references, the article is worthless.
"The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.'"
Uh oh, I'm in trouble. I have personality disorders that mark me as anti-social and violent tendencies. I have them both under control, but should I start wearing my tinfoil hat again?
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
Typical Slashdot parroting of horrible science reporting. One mildly interesting case does not do much to advance a theory - it may provide a starting point for further investigation, but that's about it.
I won't claim to be smart enough to solve the whole 'free will' debate, but personally I hope free will exists - it (in theory) allows us to help people improve themselves. Otherwise, as soon as someone is shown to have criminal tendencies you might as well just put a bullet in their head and dump them in a hole somewhere.
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Early scientific advances such as Newtonian mechanics were closely correlated with astronomy. Astronomy established that the earth was a very small part of a much larger universe. As a results, creation mythologies that had once been a central part of most religions were de-emphasized and no longer taken literally by most people.
Now, the central feature of most religions is a notion of rewards and punishments - that people get what they "deserve" after they die. It is likely that advances in computer science (particularly AI) and biology (particularly neurobiology) will result in a major shift in attitudes toward the notion of free will. As a result, religions will come to de-emphasize the notion that people get what they "deserve" after they die.
The basic problem with free will is illustrated by the following. Imagine that a computer program is eventually written that can simulate the human brain with sufficient accuracy that its behavior is indistinguishable from the behavior of a human brain. By hypothesis, this computer program will have the same amount of "free will" that a human brain has. The problem is that the behavior of any computer program (that is, how the program responds to inputs) is totally determined by the underlying structure of the program. This view, that human behavior is is determined entirely by the physical structure of the human brain, is at odds with the notion that people "deserve" to be rewarded and punished for their behavior.
Note that discarding the notion that people "deserve" to be rewarded and punished does not mean that a system of rewards and punishments will not affect individual behavior. In particular, it does not mean that society does not benefit by implementing a system of rewards and punishments to modify individual behavior.
The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.
I think I speak for EVERYONE on the planet, except the idiots that lead us, when I say: What The Fuck???
If we have no free will, then you also can't blame people for their actions. Though a new application of it, this concept has surfaced as one of the key problems philosophers have had with the Abrahamic religions - If god has even the teensiest capacity for mercy, it can't very well send you to some form of hell for doing what it already knew you would do, and indeed made you to do.
The same applies to a society's criminals. If a person has no free will, then they exist purely as a product of genetics and their social conditioning. Unless the UK wants to start a eugenics program, that leaves us with laying the blame on how society raised someone in the first place.
Thus, without locking up everyone for creating the conditions that lead to criminal behavior, you need to stay well clear of that particular slippery slope.
And all of that presumes the government would act in the best interest of the people, rather than its own perpetuation and the self interest of our leaders. Which, if you believe that, I have a bridge for sale on the cheap...
"at the very base of quantum physics is the measurement problem: when a measurement is made, the many quantum possiblities of particles collapse into one actuality. so far, no one has any explanation of what determines which possibility becomes the actuality, and some physicists believe the choice is made by the conscious observer."
Yeah, well in Britain the conscious observer is the Government, and they've decided you're fucking guilty.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
I have Bipolar disorder type 2 and hence there are times when I do stupidly risky things (such as shocking myself with a toaster.. yep that was a great idea). I'am not dangerous to anyone but myself, but as this reads they could lock me up because I have one mood swing where I turn very agressive and refuse to listen to anyone or cooperate (even though it's just words I've never been violent to anyone).
Is it fair that I get locked up because one a month I spent a day telling people to go fuck themselvs and verbally abusing those close to me who try to help? I don't think it is.. but how I read this, I would be in very deep trouble for something I have no control over and effects me less than the average time a guy spends horny a month which effects them in a different way but with about the same direct effect on their beahaviour (wanting sex isn't the same as hating the world, but neither can be controlled).
People need to learn that mood disorders are very difficult to deal with and if you act differently to people like us then you make it worse not better. If you just ignore it and side step/try not to take offence then after an hour or two it tends to fade and everythings back to normal.
I like muppets.
Does this scare anyone else? I mean, I'm not British but what kind of a precedent would this set for the rest of the world? Not every sociopath commits a murder, men are able to supress certain sexual feelings, other disorders are treated with medicine.
Also, would this mean that they would lock up every battered woman? Every Post-Traumatic Stress disorder paitent? Everyone whose ever been molested as a child? Because we all know that paedophiles come from molested children, or at least the arguement could be made. There's no line thats able to be drawn.
Warning: Corny karma killing post above.
there are people who do criminal acts because of an illness. The sole factor that should determine whether they should be sentenced to treatment or not is whether treatment will help them or not.
Well physical determinism never seems to hold when you add living things.
Why does the planet revolve around the sun? Physical determinism. Why does Britteny Spears roam around in public with no panties? You're definitely moving into non-euclidian geometry there.
I do find the quantum physics angle pretty interesting...There has to be something we don't yet understand to explain how we can exist in the first place...Not talking religion here, but, in terms of physics and chemistry, living things are pretty weird.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
This is where the definition of a criminal breaks down, if you make it about what the criminal choose to do. It has to be about what the criminal did and how likely the criminal is to repeat the action. Whether or not the criminal choose it is irrelevant. I happen to believe in free will, because it makes me feel good. I am perhaps being intellectually dishonest with myself in this belief, however I feel my outlook would be pretty sucky without it, though I am still exploring ways not to believe in free will and still be happy.
I see the following possiblities:
1) All Human desires and activities are controlled by things like this tumor. No one had free will, everyone does what the secret biochemical commands tell us to.
2) Someone with that particular tumor loses their free will and is forced to abuse children. If you get it, you will abuse them, no matter what. This would not mean that normal humans don't have free will, just those with that tumor
3) Someone with that particular tumor is subject to strong, but resistable biochemical commands to abuse children. If you get it and are not strong willed, you will abuse them. You have Free Will still, but are going to find out how strong a person you really are.
4) Someone with that particular tumor enjoys abusing children, but has no 'biochemical command' to abuse them. If you get it, you only abuse the children only if you are weak willed. This is no different than what happens when you find a briefcase of money. Some will keep it, others with more ethics will turn it it. Why? Because both people have free will.
Without a lot more evidence, this incident says little about free will. Assuming that the worst case #1 is true is ridiculous. There is zero evidence to indicate it is true. My experience in the real world indicates that #3 is most likely to be the case.
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I don't see anything wrong with believing in free will.
If there is no free will, then it obviously doesn't matter whether you believe there is or not (or what you believe on any matter). It seems psychologically healthier to believe in free will (because you then feel you have some control over your destiny). If there is free will and you don't believe in it, you might make suboptimal choices based on your illusion of not having a choice.
I think that covers all the cases.
Practically speaking we have to treat a human as an atomic unit with regard to action. If a human has a brain injury that makes him go around killing people we have to incarcerate the human, not the brain injury. Whether some sub-unit of the human caused another sub-unit of the human to do something is a philosophical argument.
Where some interesting law might be established is in the cited case, when the tumor is removed, does continued incarceration serve any useful purpose to society?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Eroding Free Will? Hardly.
A physical problem (ie, tumor) may be an impediment to a normally functioning Will, but it's non-sequitur to leap from that to claiming Free Will doesn't exist.
This is what the "reasonable person" notion is supposed to address. Can a jury collectively decide that a reasonable person would consider the subject's actions to have been carried out with an understanding of right/wrong and consequences? In other words, if the person's mental state (due to something like a tumor, or other demonstrable physiological influence such as off-the-charts post-partem depression, etc) is such that reasonable people can agree that the person can't grasp what they're doing (or have done), then you've got one situation. If the person is reasonably understood to get what they're doing, and choosing not to sweat the consquences or be gambling that they won't get caught, then you've got something else.
Never mind the specifics of a given country or jurisdiction. Juries are sometimes asked to decide if someone was crazy/sick or not, period. Sometimes that backfires. When someone's behavior is so obviously headed towards a trainwreck (especially when you've got tumor-induced predatory peadephilia going on!), anyone close enough to that person to see it happening sure as hell should be acting to stop it. If they can't they need to involve someone who can. Something that dire implies a lack of capacity that should involve medical intervention anyway. Problems with the old meat computer are tricky, though - since obviously you can have people walking, talking, and appearing to operate on some level even as their decision-making machinery is getting twisted way out of proper use by some badness (or, hysterical devotion to a particular operating system, but that's a special case).
However: I suppose I'd rather err on the side of caution and not back things that take us farther towards prior restraint when it comes to subtle behavioral things. I've also known some good-hearted and utterly harmless people that exhibit some (at first glance) awkward behavior that some mom could easily misinterpret. We can't have someone hauled off on her say so, no matter how honestly she's protecting her kids. Let reasonable people - in the form of a jury - make the call if it's after the fact, and let medical professionals in tandem with specially trained judicial panels tackle the before-the-fact stuff when someone is truly acting dangerous. The rest of the vague middle ground is going to have to go into the Shit Happens And You Have To Be Reasonably Alert About People category.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
They specifically cite a man with paedophilic tendencies who was cured when his brain tumor was removed.
So now his choices were not his fault because of a brain tumor??? This bothers me because increasingly everyday more
and more people take less responsibility for their actions. Shall we have the court order CAT scans for every law breaker to determine
Whether or not a brain tumor/chemical imbalance/etc.. was at fault not the person?
Reason #32767 not to use VB6: Integers are 2 bytes... Think about it!
I'd be really interested to see if there's a correlation between a person's belief in freewill and the rate of dishonest or immoral behavior. It really seems like believing in determinism over freewill has the potential to serve as a very convenient excuse.
If it's not us behind the proverbial wheel, then we shouldn't be the ones to blame when somebody gets hurt, right? We can't help it, it's all physics, or chemicals in our brains, or God, or my upbringing, or whatever.
I try to believe in a mixture of both, personally. Realistically, I know that our actions are subject to the influence of physical and chemical forces on our bodies, as well as the environment we are exposed to, etc... But I think it's irresponsible to not at least try to take some responsibility over your own actions.
As a cognitive psychology student (I'm doing my thesis, I'm not in first year ;-), I can certify that this is complete and utter fud.
We're able to predict (with a 5% chance of error, as everyone who's studied statistics knows), a whole range of things, from your reaction times, to the opinions you're likely to give, and all sorts of things. And now we're making a do about a single person with a brain tumour? Yes, a lot of things you don't choose, you do them because you're human, or because you're ill, or whatever. But that doesn't change free will. It's like saying you've no free will because you can't quack...
It might be that the concept of "free will" is obsolete, and I would definitely agree that we should find a way away from concepts of (eternal?!) soul. However, I think the brain is such a complex system that no simulation, with definite predictive capacities, of a particular instance would ever be possible; what I mean is that even when we can build brains from scratch, we could still never predict the behaviour of one specific person, just because we wouldn't be able to sample all the relevant variables to input the "simulation" that would generate a prediction about his/her future actions. People could claim for statistical correlates, but you can't really imprison a person for that, can you?
Yeah, because "likely" and "certain" are obviously the same thing in the British government's eyes.
Even if you dispense entirely with the notion of free will, locking up someone before they've committed a crime just because they might is the antithesis of justice.
And it's exactly what I would expect out of a government that seems to be using 1984 as a "how-to" manual.
I swear, the British and the Americans must be in a race to see who reaches totalitarian bliss first...
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
I think i have spent too long camping outside bestbuy
It goes a little further than that. The guy in a bar could be able to control his temper or snap the other guy's neck, but either choice would be the result of physical processes in his brain. Concious thought would be just an illusion.
Must something determine which possibility becomes the actuality? Can't God play dice with the universe?
and some physicists believe the choice is made by the conscious observer.
I've often wondered about this view. Conscious observer? OK. Then what constitutes an observer? A scientist with a PhD? That's an observer. A grad student? That's an observer. Undergraduate? Yeah, that's an observer too. Some guy off the street? Also an observer. A retarded person? Yes? Then a chimpanzee? Or how about a cat with a gun aimed at its head with the trigger wired to a radioisotope? Does the cat count as an observer of the isotope? If so, then it damn well is either alive or dead and definitely not both. Is a housebrick an observer? Because it'll sure as hell collapse a superposition. Researchers in quantum computation have the devil of a time preventing decoherence; if the secret was just not to look, surely it would be easy.
If we're proposing that the observer needs to be conscious - as opposed to just being a system far larger than the quantum scale with which the quantum-mechanical system interacts - then just how smart does it need to be?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I think the point of this article was not to make any statements about physical determinism -- free will becomes a rather meaningless concept on the basest philosophical level (who can tell if they have free will?). The real point was finding the dividing line between mental health and mental illness, which is an incredibly contentious subject.
A study I read once compared serotonin levels in prisoners who committed violent crimes versus prisoners who did not, and found a significant difference -- so since these people showed some physical anomaly should they be allowed to plead insanity (essentially saying that they are not responsible for their own actions)?
The truth is that everything comes down to whether you can classify someone as deviant only because they deviate from 'normal' human physiology or 'rational' human behavior. I don't know the answer.
There may be several alternative options which can work better than just filling up prisons or asylums or whatever. Locking people up would just drain community resources.
* To commit a crime takes both motive and opportunity. So if you know someone is likely to commit a crime, especially if you know what type of crime they would commit, you can monitor them and prevent them from having the opportunity. It would be more like probation.
* If medical science could isolate exactly what part of the brain causes someone to be inclined toward criminal behavior, you could make them undergo brain surgery to have that part of the brain removed or give them drugs to disable it. (Of course that reminds me of another movie in which the drug idea didn't work: Equilibrium)
Whether free will exists or not, you're not going to be able to demonstrate it with sexual attraction. That gets into the whole "born that way" or "lifestyle choice" argument.
There are better ways to demonstrate free will. Usually by noting behaviour that changes when the person believes someone else is watching them.
Prior restraint has been roundly rejected by the Supreme Court! And lets not forget, Dude, that owning a water...rodent within...within...states...That's illegal too.
Why does Britteny Spears roam around in public with no panties?
The Internet is built on a foundation of pornography, and cannot exist without porn, especially hot celebrity porn. The Internet is also everywhere, and contains the sum total of all useful knowledge, and can therefore be said to be omniscient. An omniscient entity cannot cease to exist.
Therefore, in order to avoid the paradox of something that cannot cease to exist ceasing to exist, Brittany Spears, being a hot celebrity, could not avoid appearing in Internet porn at some point.
... I choose to believe that I have free will.
Isn't it much more likely that I really do have free will, rather than postulate a
vast, complicated conspiracy by God/evolution/nature/my brain to fool me into thinking
I have it?
And, if there isn't free will, there's no use in claiming not to have free will, because
you were obviously pre-determined to think you have free will. Hah! Beat that one.
What's the alternative to free will, anyway? Think about it. If you assume there is
no free will, then all sorts of really nasty things could follow as a logical
consequence. Given the choice I'd rather assume free will - it makes living
much better.
We already have newspeak and over-analysis of everything and everyone; so the next logical step is to simply view anything considered societally undesirable as a physical or mental condition that exists to be cured. This way we can be freed from having to teach morals or values and simply "cure" problems through medication or surgery.
...you are responsible for your actions.
If free will doesn't exist, why are you trying to convince me? I'm already constrained by my genetics/brain chemistry/upbringing to find you guilty as charged. Sorry, don't try and change my mind about it, I don't really have a choice......
If it does, then we are behaving appropriately.
If it doesn't, then we never had a choice anyway.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
Not only quantum physics, but there are other phenomena, such as weather, that are well understood mathematically, but can't be predicted and aren't subject to simple causality. It's not that we don't know enough to know whether it will rain three months from now, it's that it can't be known whether it will rain three months from now. To repeat a popular saying, "It's not decided that far in advance."
So chaos in general provides another "out" for free will. Perhaps emotions and free will are something like chemo-electrial 'storms' in the brain that are influenced by various inputs, but not directly caused by anything, and certainly not predictable.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
First evolution came on the scene, and science was used not only to oppose the beliefs of religious authorities, but to try to disprove God. Galileo and his followers never tried to disprove God - the evolutionists do - many upon many are atheist and use the theory of evolution to try to prove there is no God.
Now they say there is no free will. No moral responsibility either. Next, no consciousness without the body and no soul. When we are dead we cease to perceive (and cease to BE) and even when alive, have no thoughts or will aside from what biochemistry determines. Finally, they'll say there is no God. See Ps 10:4; 14:1 for the truth about that. Scientist that think they own the Truth should read 1 Cor 3:19 for wisdom.
The world will be seen as a Newtonian fully deterministic machine. Too bad quantum mechanics says that isn't true and there really is a "ghost in the machine".
Information theory says information can not be created, only lost. Entropy is forever increasing. So where did the original order and information come from? You can try to set the starting value of entropy as low as you want, but you can't set the starting amount of information as high as you want, it just doesn't make sense. We are rolling downhill according to conventional science (entropy and information wise) and are not getting any push up (as that is impossible within those models) and there is a point beyond which we cannot fall (no information, no energy differences, "heat death" of universe - actually very cold). Nothingness wouldn't be higher than that, so how did we start "up the hill" to begin with?
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
This is what happens when you let silly people write up an article about scientific matters! They extrapolate an isolated case to the whole population. Videogames kill people, anyone?
Let's see how long will it be before some retarded and spineless politician uses this piece of shit as a basis for one of those Orwellian laws the British are so fond of.
Firstly, this is not "news". The debate of determinism vs freedom of will is older than anyone reading this or their grandparents. There have been an extraordinary number of 'discoveries' like the one described, and pulling out this one is just a way of reintroducing the age-old debate.
Secondly, the 'no free will' side is by what I have seen almost universally adopted by people holding opinions on the left field of politics. Why is this? I think it's because judgemental bourgeoise notions like "He works hard, therefore he is a moral person" - "He steals from others, therefore he is a bad person" disappear completely. Morals becomes a meaningless concept - I could run out on the street and shoot every one of the primary determinists through the back, and "punishing" me would be meaningless, because my actions are determined and caused by the events I have experienced in life and my own brain structure. At the very least I should be rewarded to stop me for feeling bad for something out of my control. For people who see free-will ethics as cementing conservative structure and punishing food thieves who only redistribute in the just direction, this is extremely appealing.
Thirdly, adopting this strand of thought demands a complete reformation of society. Showing porn to underage children is no logner bad. The shower, after all, could not help him- or herself. But if the parent beat this person up, then that would not be bad either, as the punching with the fist is out of the puncher's control. Racism would not be good at all, and even if someone suggested that racists should be exposed to nice people with the disliked characteristic, the suggestion would be without moral value, it would simply be a causal result of the _suggester's_ personal experiences. The revolution of thought to take this to its logical conclusion is vast beyond imagination. That does not prevent it from being worked for by aforementioned parties due to its more immediate and easily-imaginable concepts, such as getting criminals better treatment. I can therefore see it appearing regularly as a supportive aside for these goals only, though not as a general movement.
Fourthly, the last time I devoted any particular philosophic thought to the question, I concluded that the question is irrelevant and meaningless - because if humans have free will then so be it, and if not, then we are still forced to pretend they have, because the consequences of not doing it (ironically, the causal consequences of affirming deterministic causality) would be too bad.
Fifthly, I hadn't really thought of the implication (as said, the implications are vast) that you would refrain from removing from society a lot of criminals, but rather remove a lot of people who haven't committed any crimes but who have undesirable thought patterns. I see this leading to interesting and funny stumbling blocks and dilemmas, because the people who typically argue with determinism in favour of criminals also (by my private observations) also happen to often be very opposed to imprisoning people for thought-crimes as well.
Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution. There may be passing mention of deterrence or rehabilitation, but the surrounding rhetoric gives the game away. People want to kill a criminal as payback for the horrible things he did. Or they want to give "satisfaction' to the victims of the crime or their relatives. An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as "atonement' for "sin'.
Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.
Basil Fawlty, British television's hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn't start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. "Right! I warned you. You've had this coming to you!" He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?
Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn't surprise me).
But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?
Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.
This originally appeared here.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
So true. I have a friend who's entire family has an 'addictive' personality. His father was an alcoholic/gambler, his mother is a full fledged, kool-aide drinking, spiritual follower, his sister has traded numerous drug addictions for an almost scary dedication to Christ, and he himself has battled a slew of addictive behaviors.
Any single one of them, is more than capable of being a good contributing member of society, if they work at it. But all of them have the same trait that lends them to addictive behavior. It doesn't matter what the subject is, drugs, gambling, booze, MMOs, religion, they will get sucked in by anything that presents itself.
I'm all for helping people through psychology and chemical treatment to try to alter their thought patterns. I don't think those patterns should be used as an excuse by the person for their actions, or as a reason by others to detain that person.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
If someone has an infectious disease that makes them a danger to society, it's not unheard of to quarantine them for the safety of the rest of the populace.
Same principle should apply here - someone with a genetic or medical condition that makes them dangerous should be isolated until they can be cured or successfully treated.
You don't have the right to make any statement criticising any country besides the United States, without first saying something bad about the United States at some level. Failure to do so makes you a troll. This goes for both Americans and non-Americans.
Science would maintain one simple fact: we are our brains. Nothing more, nothing less. From that, logically it follows that if you alter your brain, it will also alter you, your choices, and preferences. Does that spell the end of free will? That is a much more difficult question. Just because this makes a claim against having a soul, no one has proven it demands the end of free will.
I'm not even sure if 'free will' is something you can test for. What is it? What metric do you use? On the philisophical level you might argue against it by claiming all my choices are predetermined. Perhaps I'm no more than an automaton with illusions of making choices. But then who is having the illusion? An interpretation still has to be made of the events to form the illusion, and that still requires making choices. This is by no means an attempt to prove otherwise, but rather trying to point out the difficulties in making any claims either way.
Also, If I remember my history correctly, at one point the Christian church beleived that even with a soul you had no free will. And in ancient Mesopotamia the Sumerians beleived that you were you body (no soul). So really this is a very old argument we're getting around to once again.
Finally, the article does not say exactly where the brain tumor was, which is an important consideration. For example, if it were on his orbital-frontal cortex, similar to Fineas Gage's brain damage, then it unlikely that the tumor caused him to be paedophilic. Rather it took away his inhibition towards such feelings.
Can't the quality of the submitted articles be better than this ?
Anyone ?
What determines if the function collapses or not isn't the existence of a "conscious observer". This is a question best answered by information theory, what determines if the quantum function collapses or not is whether information has been gathered which would let a hypothetical observer make a decision. The observer need not exist, but the information must.
Schroedinger's cat will die or not whenever an automatic system records data in a way that will let anyone determine if the poison bottle has been broken. The cat itself is information enough, there are enough molecules and tissue cells which are in different states in a living or dead cat to determine if the cat is living or dead. The observer isn't needed at all. It's the same with the tree in the forest, a fallen tree has dead leaves which start decomposing and liberating carbon dioxide, which will become part of the atmospheric greenhouse, etc, so there is no need at all for a conscious observer.
Let us assume that a diagnostic test is found which indicates a strong correlation (more than 80%, say) that a person will be involved in raping women. This is proven over a long period of time and no alarming discrepancies in the prison population are found. 20% or less of the people that test positive are not in prison for committing rape and the question arises that maybe these people just haven't been caught.
So, we then have a situation where a simple test can be performed on adolescent males which will show if they are likely to rape in the future. Do you believe that Western society would tolerate not performing the test or just letting people walk around after testing positive?
Better yet, ask your wife, gf or secretary what they would think. I'll bet that the female perspective might be a bit different.
The problem is that very little is as clear cut as the described scenario. But, as you can see with child molesters in the US today, it is getting to the point where the general public agrees with the idea of locking them up forever. Just in case.
The court system in the US (and most of the Western world) is not going to be able to cope very well with the idea of "no free will" or "he didn't have a choice". The legal and corrections system is based entirely on the idea that you do have a choice. And, you chose badly if you are in prison. Period. If there is even a 50/50 chance of proving the perpetrator of a crime didn't really have a choice most people would be very reluctant to put them in prison.
Think about the starving man stealing a loaf of bread. Did he have a choice, really?
At the same time, where some activists would like things to go is to say that poor African-American people in the US do not have a choice - because of their oppression by whites they have to commit crimes just to survive. What would you think of just giving all poor black people a free ride because they are (or have been) oppressed?
Except that it IS determined that far in advance, it's just that we presently have no way of knowing these things that far in advance. Weather is a perfect example, but you're looking at it the wrong way. We currently have only limited ways to watch fault lines, to examine the physical impact of a giant explosion on the sun. There're far too many unaccounted variables, and so we can't be expected to predict with any real degree of certainty the weather.
The Political Programmer
"To whoever modded this as troll: 1. Britain has the most public cameras per capita. 2. It is illegal in Britain to refuse to surrender encryption keys to the police if they ask for them. 3. The proposal to jail people who committed crimes is now entering (even if does not pass) the consiousness of the mainstream. In any other "free" country, it would only be considered by the fringes of society. So was I really trolling? Is pointing out a trend in society trolling? As a comment to THIS article? Really?"
Slashdot is made up to a large extent of fairly conservative types--engineers and corporate IT folks especially--who, beyond their geekiness, are really rather unsophisticated believers in the status quo and anybody who suggests that the latest technological "advance" may not be the best thing for civilization is often modded down as "troll," whether they are actually trolling for any specific kind of reaction or not. There's no moderation category for "doesn't agree with my worldview." Just watch what happens to this posting.
A lot of philosophers have tackled this. This isn't a new concept or discussion. And, as a Calvinist, I can assure you that libertarian notions (think philosophy, not politics) of free will aren't the only conception on the will or free will.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Do we have free will?
If so, let's stop talking about it because we can choose to.
If not, then it has already been determined that we're going to stop talking about it right now, so we can't do anything about it, except stop talking about it.
Before the determinists get all worked up I wanted to just say that I'll believe in free will until someone can explain to me the subtleties of massively complex systems with feedback. That is -- Newton's n-body problem where n = 100 billion (roughly the neural capacity for the human brain).
:)
Why do I think this matters? Because we understand precious little about _any_ feedback system; anything self-referential. Our logical analysis breaks on "this sentence is false". The math of our classical physics fails to give precise results with 3 mutually interacting bodies. And we're ready to claim that we understand the human mind well enough to rule out free will?
Maybe we don't have free will... how should I know? But I think it's a little premature to discount the most pervasive observation across the entire human species without even knowing how these things work.
This premise of this article isn't even talking about all that, though -- they're not considering physical determinism, they're wondering if people can rise above their personality profile. Sure, there are extreme anecdotal examples (like the tumor causing misbehavior) that might say otherwise, but even a small study that looks at people's behavior indicators and their resulting behavior will show that people don't always do what you expect. My guess is it never will. But in any case it is way premature.
To summarize my view -- we don't have nearly enough understanding of anything to discount free will. But if in fact it doesn't exist, the completely pervasive perception that it does is more than enough for me to live and let live as though it does.
Of course, my making that very decision brings up the question of free will, I suppose
Cheers.
The Internet is also everywhere, and contains the sum total of all useful knowledge...
Hey, that's what Wikipedia claims to be!
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
The idea of physical determinism is not a new one. Philosophers have been debating this exact point for a long time now. This entire pursuit is further complicated by dificulties in actually defining free will. The great Scottish philosopher David Hume (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume) even argued that physical determinism and free will are not mutually exclusive. He went as far to say that free will is incompatible with anything but determinism. This is because if things occurred indeterministically, they would occur randomly. As decisions based on free will are not random, but based on aspects of our character and incentives/disincentives, indeterminism would not really work out. Hume defined free will as meaning that should one have a different value set or incentives when making a decision, the decision could be different. Free Will in Hume's world view was more of a hypothetical ability, but an important one nonetheless.
Using Compatibilism (Free will and determinism), people would still be responsible for their own actions. What is a person beyond a collection of knowledge and algorithms (emotional and rational) in a physical shell? If one's value sets are "warped" and the incentives of obeying the law/doing the right thing are not personally great enough, then it should be said that transgressions are made of ones "free will".
I suggest reading some David Hume. People have already thought of this problem and ways to counteract it.
Also, while tumors aren't subtle, most criminal behaviour is a much more complex mesh of incentives and values that are, as any economist will tell you, hard to determine for certain. Jurisprudence still works!
All people between the ages of 12 and 20 will be automatically jailed. Damn teenagers!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Nobody... Anything... Ever.
Think about that for a moment or two... And think of the scope it implies. Anything... no matter how horrific or abominable, no matter what scale, nobody is responsible. ... ever.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
When Orwell wrote, there were still enough brains on the Left to read his work as a warning.
The post-modern Left reads Orwell as if he wrote instruction manuals.
and if I'm wrong, it's not my fault.
His exhaustive book How the Mind Works suggests strongly that what we refer to as "free will" is actually an elaborate lie. The brain (or a subsection of it) fools us into thinking we're running the show, but subtle analyses of brain-injury patients reveals that the ego is the "last to know" what the story is/will be. I have stated this clumsily, but I recommend the patience to read this (hefty paperback) tome.
It all reminds me of Giles Goat Boy, wherein the protagonist declares, "Self-knowledge is always bad news..."
If our thoughts are determined and we aren't built for any particular reason, can we trust our own thoughts? Let alone hold people accountable for their actions.
I wouldn't believe anything because it is true, I would believe in something because it is determined. If you don't believe in anything because of truth, you can't trust your own thoughts.
And the rejoinder to any rebuttal is: do you believe that because it is true or because the atoms are bouncing around your head in a certain way?
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I once knew a girl who was diagnosed with "Borderline Personality Disorder" by one psychologist. This Psych. referred this you woman to a specialist that deals with folks with that issue. She came back and said that the specialist said that she didn't have that particluar disorder.
The other thing is, you can look in DSM-IV at all of the disorders and illnesses and find something that pertains to yourself.
What I'm getting at is anyone can be disagnosed with a disorder and subsequently be arrested by the pre-crime police.
True, some physicists evoke conscious observers (though no free-will observers) to resolve the measurement problem, and they get all the press because of their new age angle. Of course, if you want to make that precise you have to come up with a mathematical definition of conciousness so that it fits into the rest of the Hilbert space theory, and I haven't seen much progress on that front. Is a child concious? How about a toddler, a baby? A dog, a bacterium, an atom?
The measurement problem is beautifully resolved by the many-worlds interpretation: all you have is a humongous wave function that describes everything and evolves under Schrödinger's equation. "Measurements" have no special status. A measurement is an interaction which tends to "clump together" the wave function in a bunch of different areas; these areas we call "different worlds"; they all exist in parallel. Every large thing exists either in one clump or in another or in both, but never spread out in between like electrons often do. So slightly different copies of you exist in various different clumps, inaccessible to you because of the valleys between the clumps. Most cosmologists prefer this interpretation, because obviously if you want to apply quantum mechanics to the whole universe, you don't have room for an outside observer performing measurements.
And quickly back to the topic at hand: free will. You are a probabilistic information processor, just like a chess computer. During the time the computer ponders its decision, it is "free". You are free in exactly the same sense. And probabilistic information processors can be held responsible for their actions; the fact that they will be held responsible is just one more piece of information for them to consider.
"So why worry about it? It's mental masturbation."
Well, I think it's probably worth worrying about if countries are considering jailing people based on apparent genetic tendencies.
But it seems absurd to talk about removing accountability. The mind is a clever little device, and the existence of accountability in a society clearly acts as a deterrent to desires in the mind that are known to be frowned upon by society. It may be less significant a deterrent than people tend to believe, but that sort of fundamental change to the tenants of justice isn't going wash with the public, nevermind the science. And I'm not bothered by that.
I recall for a mechanics homework once, having to work out how long it would take for a pencil balanced precisely on its point to fall over, assuming that it is perfectly upright to begin with and that the only deviation is due to quantum uncertainty in its position.
IIRC, the answer was about ten seconds. Even with the most accurate sensing equipment theoretically possible in this universe, you would not have been able to predict in which direction the pencil would be pointing ten seconds later.
Chaos magnifies uncertainty, and quantum mechanics makes sure there's always some uncertainty around. How long does it take for chaos coming from the quantum-mechanical uncertainties to swamp our meteorological predictions - to make the difference between, say, sunshine and rain? I've no idea, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn it was less than three months.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Wow, after my brain tumor has been removed, I don't wanna plook kiddies! Now let me outta jail, kthx.
Most of the attack on free well I have seen coming from the neuroscience front assume that you must have Cartesian dualism to have free will. In a nutshell, this is Descartes' belief that the soul resides in the body essentially as a "ghost in the machine". The Christian concept of the human person is rather a unity of body and soul, and the concept of strict duality, against which the neuroscientists argue, is clearly inadequate. This situation is not black and white. I believe it is obvious from a moment of introspection that "free will" is neither absolute, nor nonexistent. Certainly, the condition of the body influences the degree to which any decision is "free". Illness, inebriation, addiction, and even simply habit reduce the degree of freedom we have in our actions. To the belief that neuroscience will somehow prove that free will that free will does not exist, I would say that this is silly. Does the body influence our decisions? Absolutely -- anyone who has ever had a drink too many knows this. Does this mean free will does not exist? To assert this is deny all of the evidence of your own existence. Take a look at http://www.nd.edu/~afreddos/papers/soul.htm for greater depth.
You can have free will within a set of constraints.
...."
For example, you play WOW with the constraints of character, ability, location, etc etc etc - Does this make you or your character any less subject to free will?
The biggest problem here is the Aristotilian logic, the binary logic, the assertion that it is either White of Black, that it is either ALL freewill, or NO free will.
The reality is that there is alot of grey zone in this debate, and in this debate we have a lot of urges and compulsions vs the ability to exercise free will. It is a grey zone, a gradient scale, if you wise.
You naturally run into lots of controversy regarding acceptable vs unacceptable behavior, such as in the realm of sexuality. Would you want to "cure" homosexuality with psychosurgury? I certainly do not recommend this option.
This has also been discussed to one degree or another in philosophical and religious thinking. And at least one controversial religious group has made the issue (Urges/Compulsions vs Free Will) a core component of their doctrine. So naturally some people run in horror from the topic rather than risk even the appearance of affiliation with "them" .
The fact of a grey zone, with multiple elements and factors of differing weights contributing to the issue is pretty certain to me. But it also seems that many people lack the ability to conduct a rational discussion on this because of these same factors.
It is not all freewill, but it is not all biologic robot either.
This is also the root of a major political issue, since freewill can be argued as congruent with responsibility, and no free will has been used as an excuse for irresponsible actions. "It was my disease that killed the kids, not me
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Every time you get into a car to drive, you could VERY EASILY kill multiple people. The slightest slip, distraction, or inattention. It happens every day.
/me cancels moderation just to reply to horrible idea.
By your argument, we should simply lock everyone up, or dress us all in giant padded sumo suits and never let each other go anywhere or do anything.
I think Jericho is so obssesed about pigeons because it relates back to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carrier s
Specifically, the reference to "carrier pigeons" convinces me.
Back in the late 19th century in the victorian age. It was widely preached that the mentally disabled had to be sterilized so that their 'bad' genes and disorders will not be passed on and reappear in future generations. HEre is a link about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
The eugenics philosophy ultimately failed because even though its purpose is to lessen human suffering in the future, it required human suffering in the present.
This study being done by the british is just wrong. Although their intent is to better society by lowering crime rates, but the way their 'solution' is all wrong. This study parallels with Hitler's Mein Kampf where he elaborately blames all the downfalls, the crimes, etc on the Jews and Gypsies, as well as the Eugenics movement. Both of these involved seperating the inferiors (in this case, the people with disabilities), and then containing them in facilities away from the 'normal' people.
Its sad to see that people out there think relatively to such old evil ways.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
As the caste system is firmly being embedded in Western culture, it's a logical conclusion that there would be a drive to label certain types of people as potential criminals based on the way they think. I suspect that it will at some point in the future be a crime if you feel that businesses have no right to force you to buy something. Or you will be branded a potential criminal if your mind works in such a way that you do not believe that there should be financial and social inequity between people. Very treacherous ground and about the only thing that makes libertarians seem like they're onto something. The only reason I'm not a libertarian is because I can't just turn inwardly and stop caring about the world around me AND I have no belief that my individual efforts can make a change to the world around me. Things need to be done in groups to have any effect sadly and not too many people want to gather around the homeless and help them...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
You're the quack...
The article is short and for the most part is discussing physiological problems. These are covered, as someone else mentioned, by an insanity defense.
I'm a strong believer that people have free will, at least to a large degree. There are compulsions that some or all of us have, but we also know (at least the majority do), the difference between right and wrong. We choose to do the right thing or the wrong thing. That's free will. I would like to have a lot of money, but I choose not to rob a bank. Others choose to rob banks. That's a simple matter of free will.
Robbing a bank isn't just an issue I pulled out of thin air. I have a relative who has once been convicted of theft and once for armed robbery of a bank. He has "mental issues", there's no doubt. He has, his whole life. And the family tends to forgive him his behavior because of this. That said, he's not mentally retarded. He has a fairly high IQ, actually. He knows the difference between right and wrong and he knew the difference when he chose to do these things. There's no doubt in my mind. Because of that, I'm one of the few in the family who doesn't forgive his behavior. He has a son who has had a father in prison most of his life and there's no telling what effect that's had on his son, and for that, I don't forgive him.
So this is an issue hits pretty close to home for me. There are exceptions. People do have illnesses that can be treated and some that can't be treated, and the insanity defense was created for these people.
It's tough to say where you draw the line, but you have to. Serial killers, with very few exceptions, where abused as children and more often than not, sexually abused as children. So does that qualify as an insanity defense? I'm not really qualified to say, but should society be protected from these people? Without a doubt! Serial killers aren't curable, at least not currently. Even if it were determined they're not responsible for their actions, society still needs to protect itself by placing them under maximum possible security.
But I think there's very little question that free will is alive and well. With a few exceptions, people choose to do good or bad.
Thank you!! You've put into words what I've been pondering on my own for quite a while. I just didn't recognize the context for which it existed.
Now IANAP, though there are several in my family, but I'm wondering whether or not letting my mind wander 'freely' to the very 'Free Will' infinitum you state is available in Quantam Physics is significant?
Are some of us 'wired' for understanding the possible underlying 'workings' of the Universe??
... the National DNA Database being built up by the British government (which includes material from many innocent people), would already allow the identification of those with milder predispositions to anger and violence. It then goes on to speculate about what the government could do with that information, but please note that the article says nothing about the British government seeking to jail people who haven't committed crimes. I am wondering what this claim is based on.I believe that there is a CERN paper on this, that I can't find now. Basically the guy giving tours & showing the bubble chamber would tell people either A or B should happen depending on how he felt that day, since it was 50/50 for the actual experiment, either people were satisfied or excited about seeing a 'special' event depending on whether or not it came out like he predicted. He found that the results didn't quite come out 50/50 - there appeared to be a slight bias towards whatever he told them. IIRC, it's an ancecdotal paper & there was never any controlled experiment looking farther into this.
If we believe that we do not have free will, that would imply that all of our choices are determined by our past environmental exposure. If all of our choices and thought processes are only determined by our environment, then that would imply that we don't have the capacity for truly original thought and reason. If we do not have reason and original thoughts, that would imply that all ideas we come up with are actually a result of our societal environment. Thus, all original thoughts actually belong to the society since they were a product of the society. This, of course, would mean that all ideas such as intellectual property, patents, trademarks, etc do not actually exist because they were not the product of a persons reason, but instead of society as a whole. This means that we would have to abolish these concepts since an individual is not the true owner of their ideas.
If an individual does not own their ideas, our capitalistic society will basically fall apart since there would be no way to leverage ones unique ideas and processes against someone else, since those ideas belong to society and everyone should be able to benefit from them.
If you're curious how this would play out feel free to read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. It starts from the premise that there is this idealogical shift from thinking that we have free will and reason to thinking that we don't and everything else logically follows from that.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
The ability to make choices is freewill. We have known for a long time that circumstances of our place of birth, life experiences, brain structure, etc... impose limits on the choices we can make (A person born in Ancient Greece could no more choose to take a vacation in Miami than you or I could choose to ski Mons Olympus) we still can make choices among the available options present in our lives. And that is all that freewill is: the ability to choose going to work on the last weekday before Christmas (like I did) or take the day off (like the my coworker did).
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
If anyone shows tendencies toward wanting to become a politician, they can be stopped long before they cause any damage. Problem solved.
I'm going to start with a disclaimer: my understanding of quantum physics is largely based on discussion that's come up in the context of philosophy classes (e.g. metaphysics), so it's sort of the for dummies version.
...but it seems like our understanding of quantum probability stems from in inability to account for all of the forces that may be acting upon subatomic particles. Take Heisenberg's uncertainty principle for example: we treat an electron's position as probabilistic because the wavelengths of light necessary to observe an electron have such energy as to move the electron. So, it's mathematically convenient to start assigning probabilities to an electron's exact location, because we don't have the means to say "Ah, there it is!" without moving it somewhere else.
...at least that's the impression I've always been left with when the discussion came up in class. I understand my camp is currently on the losing side of the debate, though. Am I missing something?
Doesn't that seem a bit presumptuous? Sure, we can treat subatomic particles as probabilistic - and in many cases, with out current means, we have to - but it seems a bit hasty to jump to the conclusion that many quantum physicists have, and argue that there's a schism between quantum-level physics - which are strictly probabilistic - and non-quantum physics, which aren't.
Let's be honest: quantum theory just isn't exactly understood as well as simple mechanics. I'm not arguing that quantum behavior isn't probabilistic, just that it seems a bit hasty to claim that it must be so patently different when it's just not understood all that well.
I'm a big fan of video games. Video games get more realistic in terms of physics, graphics, and AI every year. I adore virtual representations of reality as they make me think harder about the real world. Therefore, I've begun wondering, having played many RPGs lately, just how free our free will really is.
For example, let's say you find yourself face to face with a person who has information you need but he is reluctant to tell you. You are fairly personable and charismatic, but you are not very physically intimidating (though moreso than the other guy) and don't have a large bank account. You only have one chance with this person. Do you try to coax him verbally? Do you break the bank and bribe him? Do you try to intimidate him physically? Do you take the safe road based on your "point spread" or do you roll the dice?
That pencil example is pretty interesting. How exactly does quantum uncertainty cause the pencil to fall? The whole pencil's wavelength/uncertainty is extremely small, how can it cause it to fall?
i definitely think the many worlds theory is a possiblity, but i dont think it quite answers everything.
specifically: who or what determines which branch i take when the universe splits? and what is actually happending to one consciousness when the split happens: it the consciousness splitting into many, or is it being duplicated, or were there actually many different identitical consciousnesses since the begining, which are now splitting into different paths?
Reduce, reuse, cycle
This article is just suggesting that we go back to eugenics. Of course contrary to 'common knowledge', eugenics does work. All we have to do is look at the family dog to see that eugenics works, and why humans should not be allowed to perform it.
I choose to believe in free will, and if there is none, then you can hardly blame me, right?
Are we, as a society, just realizing that portions of the brain influence behavior?
Does neutering pets teach us nothing about the influence of hormones and neurotransmitters?
I don't get where the insight is yet.
And there you have it: proof that Wikipedia is the Internet!
(On a more serious note, I've found that I tend to surf Wikipedia today in much the same way as I surfed the fledgling web back in 1994-1995: Read a page, keep following links as they look interesting, spend hours just going from one topic to another. Today's web feels more like a star topology than an actual web: start at a search engine or bookmarks, move to a site, do stuff there, go back to the search engine, look for something else. Hypertext has given way to navigation links. Wikipedia actually makes use of hypertext, so I find myself jumping to interesting related topics instead of going back to the hub.)
Philip Pullman (of the Dark Materials trilogy) would have children believe that to be free is to follow your desires, dislocating freedom from will, and so "The Church" (equipped with a magesterium) is oppressive as it teaches against that.
The nutcases in this report seem to have a definition of freewill that follows no convention whatever.
Whether one is born with gay/black/white/pedo/deaf/pizza-faced/straight tendecies, or devlopes a cancer that produces such leanings, has nothing to do with free-will. Obviously you can't choose these tendencies, but its what you do consequently that invokes the business of freewill. Do you follow your desire to kill and maim, or do you resist it? That's what free-will is about. Do you allow self-pity to overwhelm you and take your own life, or not. Do you tell someone who loves you that you love them for the sake of a screw, or forego the pleasure? A virgin is prized within religious cultures because they demonstrate, in the most basic way, self-control and strength of will, and so will make better parents, be trust-worthy, and likely be truly themselves rather than be purely a product of their environment (ie. peer pressure etc). In this scheme the weak is the one who gives in to their desire in advance of the right circumstances. And I'm not just talking about sex.
In a nutshell the religious and the philosopher are talking about 'Self-Control' or 'the ability of overcome ourselves', our desires and our fears. To refuse the sweetest of poisons, or to grasp the nettle of fear for the sake of that which we recognise to be right (which instroduces the twisty problem of self-deception). The brave man is the one who was most fearful of the dragon, but fought it anyway. The one without fear couldn't be said to be brave.
It may turn out to all be in the brain, but it has nothing to do with what this guy is reporting on.
The question actually turns not so much on the workings of the brain but on two questions: 1)is the universe deterministic or non-deterministic, if not then there's a chance of something like freewill possibly existing, maybe. 2)Is there a spiritual/non-material principle, in which case the same applies (having a soul doesn't guarantee free-will).
If Free Will does not exist, then there is some means in which to know what I am thinking (without direct thought-reading technology). When I can sit in a chair, put on some scanning helmet, and a computer can tell me what number I am thinking of, then I will know Free Will is dead. Until then, the fact that no one knows what I'm going to do next (including myself) means that I am exhibiting Free Will, even if only through ignorance of the fact that I do not have it.
The biggest question I see with the arguements on Free Will is the definitions. I have a choice. I can submit this post or not. Whether my choice is already determined through chemicals and environment is irrelevant to the fact that I see it as a choice, and I can pick either one. What is Free Will if not the ability to make and execute a choice? Even if there exists some way to predict that choice or even influence it does not mean that I did not make it consciously and act upon it.
Learn to love Alaska
A "measurement" is really just a particular interaction (or chains of interactions). The current model of quantum physics includes randomness. Whether a particular interaction occurs can only be expressed as a probability. Randomness does not, however, imply free will. A computer program can include a random number generator making its behavior non-deterministic but that doesn't mean the computer program has free will. Just because a person's behavior can only be expressed in terms of probabilities does not mean that the person has "free will". The person's behavior will ultimately be dictated by random chance (among other things).
Now that I have your attention. First, notice how many comments this gets over, say, an article about the origins of cancer. People are just FASCINATED with neuroscience. When was the last crackpot theory on liver function? Eh?
zo'o ru'e
Not only do we have "free will". We had NO BEGINNING. We'll have NO END. How's that for "enlightening"? Idiot Chirstians (redundant, yes) just got the NO END part.
Now go fuck around and get in jail. You'll be around forever. Morons.
e'e cai
How is a world in which people actually have free will distinguishable from a world in which people think they have free will? If no such difference can be established short of cutting up brains, how can we say that "free will" is a meaningful concept? I know it's important to Christian mythology, but why should the rest of us care?
I've heard it mentioned in relation to criminal justice, for assigning "fault" or "blame"... but we don't punish people because of some fuzzy moral precept (at least, we shouldn't; the state has no interest in revenge)--we punish people because it achieves a certain goal, whether it's rehabilitation, discouraging recidivism or simply isolating them from society for a given period.
The analogy with Basil Fawlty beating up his uncooperative car falls apart because while a car doesn't respond to being hit with a tree branch (except by growing a few dents), people manifestly do respond to being punished, whether they possess the poorly-defined philosophical/theological notion of free will or not.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Do triangles exist? Does PI? Does God?
If free will does exist (because we can comprehend the concept), what are its mechanisms?
"That's a stupid question" is rarely a useful answer.
"The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed."
Has anyone got an authoritative source for this?
How did the very first concious observer collapse into existence?
...the STRENGTH of the compulsion.
We are all, every day, faced with our own little compulsions imposed upon us by our own particular brain chemistry and billions of years of evolution. Almost all of them can be resisted with minimal application of willpower.
But there exist things that can grab ahold of and twist your brain chemistry in such a way that willpower is no longer the answer. Addiction comes to mind - those that are well and truly addicted to alcohol or crack or heroin or whatever will do ANYTHING to get their next hit, and their willpower is insufficient to do otherwise.
Depending on the nature of that tumor, it could make children attractive - one would hope, resistible by anybody with reasonable amounts of willpower. Or it could literally COMPEL someone to carry out acts of child abuse; he could have no choice at all in the matter.
Our brains - and by extension, our personalities - are a mixture of free will and deterministic responses to biochemistry. When someone exercises the "free will" portion of their personality and CHOOSES to do something horrible, then it is right and just to punish them for it. If, however, someone is the helpless tool of their biochemistry, then punishing them isn't just unjust, it is also ineffective.
And yes, determining the line between "I did it" and "the devil (in the form of my biochemistry) made me do it" is difficult to say the least, no more so than because we're talking about a range, not two discrete points - how LOUD are the voices in my head?
Given my experience with addicts, I can say that your "worst case #1" is not only possible, but happens in the wild. There's a reason why addiction is considered a disease.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Do you believe in free will (to the extent you can boil your beliefs to a "yes" or "no")? Leave a note and I'll try and tally the results. I personally think it is a bad concept, but I don't judge those disagree.
And quickly back to the topic at hand: free will. You are a probabilistic information processor, just like a chess computer. During the time the computer ponders its decision, it is "free". You are free in exactly the same sense. And probabilistic information processors can be held responsible for their actions; the fact that they will be held responsible is just one more piece of information for them to consider.
I wish I had mod points for you, and I encourage anyone who does to mod you up. I've been reading through this discussion with growing frustration that nobody seems to get this, and wishing I could think of the right words to point it out. I tip my hat.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
So, why did I read the title as "Neuroscience, Psychology Eroding Idea of a Free Wii" - I mean, that is a nice and deep research into Nintendo freeby effecting brain chemistry.
Well, if the government might lock me up on the basis of a test, I'm going to get a private version of the test first to see what the government is likely to do. Or, I might just think about what the test is and come to some decision as to whether or not I'd pass. If the private version indicates I'm going to be locked up, I might as well rob a bank and see if I can get away with it. Maybe I'm a little more sophisticated than that. Maybe I'll swipe some poor sap's identity who's already been tested. Maybe I'll just bribe the tester, then become a tester myself and take bribes. There's all kinds of potential for mischief there. I thought the war on drugs was brain-dead. These guys have bested that. Bravo!
Free will is a catholic theological concept. Real christians (that is, protestants) believe in predestination, some ot them (the followers of Calvin) even in double predestination.
What is the big deal? Science confirms the validity of protestant theology. We all knew it was right!
I am curious to know what all those dubious christians from the Middle East think. Those are odd religions, neither Protestant nor catholic: Armenian monophisites, Greek/Slavic Orthodox, Coptic, Syriac, Chaldeean, you name it. Whay do they think about free will/predestination? Do they follow the chatolic or the protestant dogmas or do they have their own ideas (unlikely, probably they are not as creative as Western theologians)
There is fascinating reading on the debate over free will in your local library (although your philosophy ares is probably shrinking--do it sooner than later.)
Aside from the philosophical debate which ranges from fun to logic proof nightmare, there are many implications to such a fundamental question beyond just law. A great deal of people rest on the free will side because its far easier and is fundamental to many wide held believe systems (religions.)
If you want to really depress yourself look into brainwashing, conditioning, or military psychology. Where to a large degree there is a half belief that people do not have free will.
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. "Gone through to the other side" means to go throught the void, where you have nothing solid on which to make any kind of a stand or statement about anything. Once you are through to the other side, things become clear again, in a new way. But you still have to get up in the morning. ;)
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The lack of a "free will" was asserted a long time ago. I see here that many people become afraid of the idea, thinking that it means society will decline into utter immorality, not noticing that the "morality" of the 20th century has been worse than it has ever been in the history of humanity. "OHHH IF WE DON'T HAVE FREE WILL THEN WE WILL BECOME HORRIBLE!!!!" I hit you over the head you buffoons!! ./ turns blue), has commonly been abused as a child, by another pedophile. That was NOT HIS FAULT, NOR OF HIS OWN WILL. A pedophile is attracted to children, not out of his choice, he just is. Why are you attracted to women or men? You didn't decide that. Instead of showing these people disgust, and which can only isolate them and make them more likely to act, they should be considered children trapped inside the body of an adult. Perhaps compassion? No, you hold your "free will" and his to be identical.
If it is true that we don't have free will, then the WORST thing we can do is assume we have one, it is a man who struggles in chains he cannot see or hear, how frustrated he becomes, how angry, violent.
The entire notion of a free will has been determined by power structures so that punishment of an individual or group could be justified. The entire economy of religious "sin" rests atop of a "free will". A hungry man steals but he is a thief. A pedophile, (note that when this specter is used to promote net censorship and state control half of
Personally, I believe that if we ever get to the bottom of the whole quantum uncertainty business, we'll find that it's all based on good old determinism.
Whether quantum indeterminism is the random generator that prevents the universe from being completely deterministic and predetermined or not may not be the question; it depends on your definition of free will.
Harry Frankfurt defines free will as a failure to follow higher-order volitions.
An example for a failure to follow higher-order volitions is the drug addict who takes drugs even though he would like to quit taking drugs. According to Harry Frankfurt the drug addict has established free will, in respect to that single aspect, when his higher-order volition to stop wanting drugs determines the precedence of his changing, action determining desires to either take drugs or not to take drugs.
This is a compatibilist view, meaning free will can exist in a deterministic universe.
quantum mechanics has no relation bearing on free will; attempts to link them are silly.
Does quantum physics have a hole? Yes. Does neuroscience have a hole? No. No major neuroscientists believe in a quantum mechanical model of the brain, because we have not yet observed any conclusive evidence that anything nondeterministic is going on in the neuron itself. We can predict neuronal behavior from observations at a level where only classical physics applies. We can build cochlear implants, which take the place of a large number of neurons, using neuronal simulation. Our model is not so far off that we can really postulate, as Roger Penrose, quantum consciousness's main apologist, does, that the Platonic values of good and truth reside in some strange hidden enclave of space-time.
Except for Roger Penrose's mathematical arguments and Stuart Hameroff's conclusions that microtubules could exhibit quantum mechanical behavior, I'm unaware of any research supporting quantum consciousness. And even Penrose and Hameroff have to make assumptions about a "non-computable influence" to postulate free will, since the Schrodinger Equation is basically deterministic. As much as I would like to believe in quantum consciousness, as much as that would simplify things, it turns out that "free will" is probably not what it seems. To understand ourselves, we have to do more than enumerate a list of things we think identify us and then find some quantum mechanical phenomenon with which to identify each.
On the other hand, Benjamin Libet's 1985 EEG experiment showed that true free will is basically impossible. While this evidence does not preclude that we may have C. A. Campbell's minimal amount of free will required for moral responsibility, and no more, it establishes to a reasonable scientific certainty that, when it comes to topics involving the self and consciousness, introspection is often false. By demonstrating that there are other ways of knowing the nature of the subjective beyond introspection, however, it gives us hope for the future.
err, what I meant to say was that quantum mechanics has nothing to do with whether or not people have free will.
The idea of "eroding" the concept of free will is fraught with all kinds of philosophical baggage. And, as some have already pointed out, it doesn't really do much to address the question of what to do with the criminal who clearly commited a crime.
The more pertinent question is whether our justice system should be based on retribution or rehabilitation. Although some small amount of rehabilitation is attempted in our penal facilities, we are largely more interested, at present, in a retributive system of justice. I think part of the reason for that state of affairs is that we have never really been sure how to rehabilitate most criminals.
Now along comes a someone who says they can rehabilitate a pedophile by removing a tumor from their brain. Great! Let's do it. But wait. How far do we go with this? Lobotomies could be viewed as "rehabilitative". Okay, you say, only rehabilitate someone if the system of rehabilitation doesn't have an adverse effect of the perpetrator. So now instead of a prison system full of guards and wardens, we have a system staffed by doctors and psychologists.
I think that's largely where things have been heading anyway.
ps--My favorite line on the topic of free will is "John Stuart Mill, of his own free will, on a half a pint of shanty was particularly ill"
Read any good sonnets lately?
You meager minds, you mental minors...
:D
If there is no free will, then you can't blame the lawmakers for being stupid for throwing people with signs of criminal tendencies in jail since it wasn't the lawmakers' choice but their own genetic makeup that determined they would make that choice. The voters can't be blamed for electing them since it was in their predetermined mutations of DNA that lead to their tendency to elect idiots.
This is just another of Lewis Carroll's rabbit holes. To conceive of free will as an "answer" to a mystery about life as if contriving such a thing makes life make more sense, is absurdity itself and not as much a question of language as it is an indication of the lengths to which people will run logically/litigiously/literally to get away from responsibility. The conundrum is that free will does not equal nor deserve, nor come with absolute freedom. Consequence seems to contradict free will as well it should if there were no power, no law, no judge who acts above our level of control. Consequences can be simple such as choosing not to breathe will likely cause you to pass out if not perish. But consequences can also be complicated such as eroding the rule of law/logic/sanity by giving mercy to fools who propose such sly but socially-denegrating concepts as the notion of "free will" being tied to brain geometry.
There was a field of pseudoscience that preyed upon the populace that was ignorant of truth and based its claims on shakey correlations for a dazzling variety of idiocies. Phrenology had a brief period of relative popular acceptance and based its claims upon studies of the shapes of the human head and irregularities therein correlating to behaviors or traits.
That neuroscience or psychology can "erode" free will is a pure fiction. What made the doctor become one in the first place? How many times during his or her studies did the choice come up to quit medical school and go back to architecture? All that this mockery of good scientific inquiry proves is that we use our brains to think and we use thoughts to make choices, ergo, choices are controlled by our brains. If an outside force affects the brain, choices or more generally choosing mechanisms are affected. No shit, Sherlock. I hope you didn't think our choices were made by our midichloriants
Britney Spears appeared in Internet porn long before she started going around without panties, so your argument is faulty. Internet users have access to image-manipulation software that allows them to create pictures of naked women fucked by a donkey and a crocodile, with the face of Britney Spears.
...boots are the British govt. new source of fear.
e wsid=58921
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?n
What next, banning teeth because they can cause bites? Oh wait, their diet takes care of that.
So Norman the android was right, and Kirk was wrong? Scotty really could die from too much happiness? Oh Logic, you really are a bird chirping in an empty meadow!
Just a thought here, free will aside. The complexities of the human brain seem to be totally ignored in reference to the tumor of the pedophile. There is certainly no doubt that the very uniqueness of each case involving tumors would not lend itself to an absolute judgment, such as the logical path followed by previous posters: That if a brain tumor causes sexual deviance, and that all tumors are equal (this is implied in their arguments,) that all brain tumors should cause sexual deviance. This completely ignores the importance of location and type of tumor.
I would assume that this tumor was located somewhere between the prefrontal cortex and the hypothalamus, most likely the former due to the change in preference. The prefrontal cortex is involved with many cognitive functions, so there were probably many other behavioral changes that took place, but looked over due to the severity of his sexual dysfunction. Move that tumor slightly, and it may have displayed very different changes, or none at all.
Sparks and squirts folks, that's how behaviors are generated. Disrupt the sparks and squirts, and disrupt behaviors.
Sign me up for one! How many friends do I have to spam?
Some genetic makeups may make you *more likely* to make poor (or dangerous to others) choices, but they don't make it a certainty. You may have a quick temper, but you might be able to control it because you know you have a family and a good job, and if you snap that guy's neck in a bar fight, you'd go to jail and they'd be poor.
What if you lost your job because of a bad economy or your family dead in a train wreck to to a freak accident with a mechanical function?
Fate? Destiny? Bad luck? Or a thousand years of bad decisions by your ancestors?
You have less free will that you know or your mind will be allowed to admit.
Your choices only affect a small portion of what we call "sphere of influence". Depending on your position in human society. However, even the most powerful man in the world could do nothing with his free will if say a neutron start ripped through the solar system tearing our protons apart instantly.
No I say... Our choices are simply being absorbed in the fabric of space time as the universe moves about us. The only choice we get in the matter is to choose in what we believe the universe is.
Whereas the universe does not care what you believe in it unless it involves our observation on particle states.
Even then, with heat death of the universe, we have no choice in the matter. Everything you do or say in a thousand trillion years from now will mean nothing because there will be nothing.
Kind of bleak outlook, no?
But once you accept futility of it all... It does make life worth living.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
There are many good books on the perception of free will, but we have to ask ourselves as techies and nerds how to be proactive about this and nip what we can in the bud. For all of the spiffy technologies that have arisen because of mimicry of sci-fi, its not implausible to have homebrew / at-home brain diagnostics in the near future; an early detection unit for tumors would have left some poor child's bowels virgin-pure, and this sick man an innocent.
Fix what we can, and hope for the best for that which we cannot control.
Prevention is the best medicine.
Exactly what is "free will" supposed to mean? It's the ability to choose, free from what?
The answer is, "free from the influence of god". That's why the whole idea was invented, to rationalize the idea of a creator who gets angry at his creations for turning out just the way he made them.
Once a person quits believing in supernatural fairy tales, "free will" doesn't even mean anything.
No physicist believes the choice is made by the conscious observer. The conclusion that physicists have come to is far more interesting: uncertainty is inherent in the universe.
I agree that it sounds pretentious, but than again, I don't understand quantum mechanics myself. On the other hand, I'm not sure quantum mechanists are making such claims. What they are claiming is that: (A) newtonian mechanics doesn't work, and (B) their mathematical framework which treats small particles as probabilistic wave functions does. Whether you choose to interpret that as to mean that small particles really are probabilistic in their behaviour, or that particles sometimes act as a wave and sometimes as a particle, or that there are multiverses to cover every possibility, or whatever..., is a question of metaphysics. At least untill we can imagine an experiment that would settle the issue.
The point of the tumor is that it appears "spontaneously" and it can be removed. The exact spot on his brain where it acted could have been influenced by an injury, which wouldn't come unnoticed and wouldn't be cured so readily.
It's not a question of strength of will, it's a question of the nature of one's will. The tumor (apparently) gave him the will to have sex with kids, removing the tumor removed that will. It isn't about your will being separated from your urges, it's about your urges and your will being one and the same.
You can't take the sky from me...
I always wondered why Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" was banned in Great Britain. It's not because of the (artistics and satirical portrayal of the) ultra-sex or ultra-violence. It was because of the "Ludovico Treatment." The removal of the protagonist Alex's choice is what the movie is all about. Perhaps they British government didn't want to let their dirtly little secret slip out.
And in the progressive seventies it was almost absurd to think that something like the Ludovico treatment would ever come about. Memories of Nazism and Fascism were too fresh in everyone's minds, as were the new found freedoms exercised in Europe and the Americas during the sixties. 1984? No Way. Never Happen.
Surprise, surprise. Here we are, with roadblocks and sobriety checkpoints so common in the US that the continual eroding of our freedoms has enabled the creation of the Patriot Act, the NSA spying on citizens, and who know what else. Freedom? Not in the US, so why should you guys be free? I never thought I would live to see such a mess. But here we are, we let it happen. Tilt your head back, let them insert the ice pick, and drift off to that carefree life you only dreamed about. Welcome to the future.
My user name was a mistake. Input wasn't restricted, my bad.
I mean, if I have free will, I don't have to worry about it. And if I don't have free will, there's no point in worrying about it. Either way, it makes zero phenomenological difference. Fun for some people to ponder but not of any practical importance.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
The question of whether there is free will or not doesn't just come down to genetics. While it is true that genetics come into play, it is only a single variable. It also involves learning history and environment.
When you start to factor in learning history and environment, the possibility of what traditional philosophy, and even lay people, consider "free will" just becomes silly. The decisions you make are not at random, and you aren't "free" to choose things outside of the influence of those variables. You make the choices you make because of your genetic makeup, your personal experience, and the environment you are in. It is not always easy to predict what choices you may make, but this is a question of not having a grasp of enough of the variables - not of those decisions actually being free.
Science, and all human (and animal) learning relies upon a deterministic model. If our will really was "free", and our decisions truly were simply random, nothing that we do would occur in any kind of logical or sensible manner. We wouldn't repeat beneficial behaviors, nor cease harmful ones. We'd simply trundle around our patch of land making random decisions based upon nothing at all except our "will".
For all intents and purposes, having what would truly be "free will" would be so poorly adaptive to the real world as to be truly ludicrous. You show me a species that has evolved free will, and I'll show you a species in it's final generation.
I will choose a path that's clear. I will choose free will.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
Damn you neuro-surgeon, damn you to hell! I had such high hopes for a better life...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
There's no argument. It's consequence of the fact that we have different sets of laws to describe the Universe at the quantum level and the macroscopic level. And at least in thermodynamics (I am unsure about classical mechanics), one can derive the macroscopic laws directly from the quantum laws. The interactions are so complex, yet so predictable, that at the macroscopic level we can discard the quantum theory and use things like the ideal gas law.
Quantum theory has made some of the accurate predictions in science. Keep in mind that the world does behave differently on the macroscopic scale, and that is the scale that we have evolved to have an intution for. We have no intution for the quantum level simply because there was no evolutionary selection for it. This does not mean there is anything wrong with the theory, or it is misunderstood.
What you're missing is learning science from scientists.
case in point.
Who was it that said something to the effect of: "Either the universe is a deterministic process and so we have no free will, or the universe is not deterministic and subject to unpredictable random noise and so we have no free will." ? The whole idea of free will is dumb.
...
Perhaps if there is trully free will this means that there must exist something supernatural
How do you come to this conclusion? Can you share the logical analysis of your statements?
FalconShould there be a Law?
But where would the fun be in suggesting there exists a time when it may not be appropriate to criticize the USA?
If forums teach us anything, it is that logic and critical thinking should be required courses in the public schools.
Yes, I believe the viewpoint you're expressing is referred to as there being "hidden variables" in quantum mechanics. (In other words, the mechanical inner-workings of the quantum world are actually deterministic, but because of the limitations of measurement we see unpredictability).
This viewpoint has been largely discredited. Otherwise it's just too hard to explain things like particles being observed teleporting through objects they otherwise couldn't have, or single particles combining to create interference patterns as if they are waves going through two openings at once until an observation is used to force the issue. It's best to say that quantum particles exist as a combination of possible locations except at times when the proper "observation" is made.
True randomness doesn't help the cause of free will anyways. Why should a person being at the mercy of random events be any more free than one at the mercy of determined ones? (Saying that it takes a consciousness for an observation is plain bunk as well.) The real question is whether the choices of an individual come from beyond the individual or within him.
Happy people make bad consumers.
We need evidence. If someone has a condition which they can't or don't treat, and it leads them to commit a crime, they are responsible for that crime. Moral judgements depend on your specific moral framework. Laws should not be based upon morals, but upon protecting people from each other.
That said, we also must be protected from the government, and we must particularly protect those who are different from the majority - as the majority is usually able to take care of its own. As many statistical factors as there may be, we only know that someone is not overcoming those factors once they commit a crime.
"I couldn't help it" is not an excuse. Neither is "He won't be able to help it" a crime. If we are able to determine correlating factors, these may absolutely be used to justify providing resources which the individuals can take advantage of. They should not be used to force anything on anyone until they have committed a crime.
I disagree that free will and determinism aren't at odds, because without free will your thinking and decisions are nothing more than deterministic chemical reactions in the brain. With free will, we can alter the chemical reactions to produce the decision we want, without free will we are slave to however the reactions happen.
That is, the laws of nature are stochastic, not deterministic, there is room for the unexpected. Sometimes people call the totality of the laws of nature 'God' or 'Gods', depending on their taste (this is called pantheism)
Einstain said that "God does not play dice'. He meant that the laws of nature (that is, God) are deterministic, not probabilistic. In Enstein's view of the Universe there is no free will, only predestination, essentially the same basic idea as that promoted by Calvin and Calvinism.
Many other scientists are strong believers in probabilistic laws, for example, originating from quantum mechanics (but not only from there). They believe in a Free Will World, where probabilistic laws rule. The Catholic Church is also a strong promoter of Free Will. Although they may not realize it, Catholic Theologians believe in a Probabilistic God; in contrast the Protestant God (especially the Calvinistic God) is deterministic.
What this discussion and the article seem to assume is that without "free will," there is no responsibility for actions. But what do you mean by free will? That you can actually do anything you want? If you say yes, how about this one: are you able to WANT to do absolutely anything? Do you have to have both of those abilities to have free will? Put another way, how free is "free" will?
The Bible portrays a God with free will, right? I mean, if God doesn't have free will, who can? We might say that of course God can do anything, but can he do evil? If God cannot possibly do evil (as God is the definition of Good), then are you sure that even God has free will?
On top of this, I see no way around the idea that God (as omnipotent, omnipresent, omni-lots-of-other-stuff) is absoulutely in charge over everything that occurs. (We call it sovereignty.) But we are also held responsible for our actions. The statements about Pharoh in Exodus bring this out pretty clearly. God punishes Pharoh for his stubbornness in refusing to allow the Israelites to leave Egypt. But then God says he will "harden Pharoh's heart" so he'll continue to refuse.
There's something here beyond what I can fully understand here, but the excuse "I couldn't help it" doesn't seem to carry much weight. I must conclude that I am resonsible for my actions AND that God is sovereign over all things that happen.
In the end, God will be the recipient of worship, praise, adoration, etc. because of His perfection. Would we see this perfection without the experience of humans doing the wrong things? No. So, even though we (even I and all other Christians) continue to do the wrong thing sometimes, and must bear responsibility for those things, they ultimately bring about good: the worship of the one true and perfect God.
Brunuscle, This was Roger Penrose's argument, no? Penrose goes a little further and states that the smallest elements of the brain actually are below the threshold at which quantum laws start having an effect. Thus quantum effects can have a real affect on our brains. In this way, free-will and determinism can exist side-by-side in a Cartesian manner, and Penrose even provides the mechanism for how this can occur. To explain the phenomena that the Economist cites, such as tumors causing violent behavior, we could use the analogy of a damaged vehicle that behaves in ways contrary to the driver's intent. The driver doesn't lack free-will just because the vehicle refuses to respond correctly, or even drives off into the highway median. I'm not sure if this is completely satisfying, since it puts off, in a sense, the question of what free-will is. But it does provide an explanation of how free-will is possible without contradicting deterministic natural laws.
Wow its soo funny when someone pokes fun at a certain type of /. troll, only to end up having that exact type of troll walk right into the trap, completely oblivious of the irony.
I rest my case.
There are several things fundamentally wrong with the Economist article. First, correlation does not prove causality--just because the individual discussed in the opening paragraphs performs badly when the tumor grows dosen't prove that he had no choice, merely that the temptation was greater. Second, the article is based on classical mechanics and aside from a minor mention the article essentially ignores all of the very significant ramifications of quantum mechanics. For an excellent but very challenging treatment of this subject read Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics by Henry Stapp (no affiliation, no Amazon kickback). Short explanation: changes in physical state in systems such as the brain require quantum mechanical processes that involve state changes which are free (meaning unpredictable by any currently known physical process).
bit by bit until they stop diddling the kiddies. Problem solved. Thanks, science!!!!!
To play Devil's Advocate...
Where is the line between "can't know", and "don't know". How can we know if "yet" s possible until we already know. You operate under the assumption that we can know everything, but how can one offer proof of this position?
You then have problems that enter in such as Godel's theorum, and Turing's halting problem, systems where it is impossible to know certain aspects of the system fully.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
A common logical fallacy people make is assuming that because existence is rationsl, that it must also be pre-deterministic. Well, that is not true, and I think it is reflected in the fact of human action. It is also reflected the fact that society has laws. If people were destined by circumstances, then law in societies wouldn't be so relavent.
It is not a cooncidence that the same Moses who defied all circumstance to stand before the pharoah and demand "let my people go", was also the Moses who brought the 10 commandments down from the mountain. Free will is way more than a religious doctrine, it is part of the nature of existence and the universe.
I'd have to dig out the old textbooks to recall all the details, but here's the reasoning as best I remember it:
For a perfectly sharp pencil, even the smallest deviation from the perfect vertical is enough to cause it to fall. If a perfectly sharp pencil is standing up on its point on a hard, smooth surface, then we can be 100% certain that it is absolutely vertical, and also 100% certain that it is not moving away from vertical in any direction - otherwise it would fall. The uncertainty principle forbids that knowledge. The surer you are of the angle, the less sure you are of its state of motion, and vice-versa.
The uncertainty is extremely small for an object as massive as a pencil, but gravity magnifies it, and the larger the deviation from vertical gets the greater the unbalanced force becomes, and down comes the pencil. In a real scenario the quantum uncertainty would be far outweighed by, say, random thermal motion, air currents, radioactivity, cosmic rays and so forth, maybe even the solar neutrino flux - but in the idealised world of the physics homework problem, it's still enough.
The actual problem was about computing how long it would take a pencil to fall, given an initial deviation from the vertical. The quantum bit was just an interesting case: 'the minimum uncertainty of the angle due to quantum mechanics is thus-and-such, how long will the pencil take to fall given a deviation of this size?' or something like that. I don't recall having to actually write down the wave equation for a pencil.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.
e l_stone_verdict/default.stm .
Recently, this idea seems to have been prompted by the case of Michael Stone, who was convicted of murder in Kent of a mother and children. One young daughter survived. Interestingly, most of the evidence against him crumbled in court. What convicted him was a confession heard by a fellow prisioner several cells way. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2001/micha
A quick google has found this: http://www.scandals.org/michaelstone/index.html which documents how unsatisfactory his conviction seems to have been.
The breakdown of a determinstic universe it does not mean that there are no rules, only that the rules are not deterministic but stochastic.
For complex systems, from the underlying, microscopic, probabilistic laws, (quasi) deterministic law may emerge for macroscopic systems which give us the illusion that we live in a determinisic world.
If this article is correct, then so are all the old Race Hygiene theories are as well. So do they try to tell us that ...
russians can't help drinking vodka, brittons are prudish and everyone that moved to to USA a 100 years ago had a predisposition for becomming obese!? And if so, I guess the only sensible thing to do is to knock everyone that you dislike hard over the head. Because if one kills bad genes then those will become extinct. Those poor creatures can't help the fact that they were genetically handicapped, but we have to eliminate them just the same. Right? (Note! I'm rejecting the ideas of the article; I'm just trying to be sarcastic!)
Forget that! We need them in state schools.
Why is your first concern for the privileged few?
As a quick bit of background, I've been doing a lot amount of reading on biologically based neural network models recently...I'm trying to get back into school and pursue a doctorate in them. Over the course of my research, however, I've pretty much reached the point where the idea of free will is untenable. It is my firm belief (backed up by all the research I'm reading), that we can mathematically model will - along with all other aspects of the brain. This is essential to the success of a strong AI. Essentially free will demands the existence of a soul or spirit, something which is not bound by the laws which govern physical matter, yet can interact with and direct incredibly complex physical systems.
There is, however, a very big difference between a system being deterministic and it being predictable. The only way to guarantee that you'd know what I was going to do in a situation would be to have an exact copy of my brain (or a sufficiently accurate model), which could be exposed to _identical_ inputs to what I will be facing in the future. This requires knowing the future actions of all the others whose actions might impact me in any way...which requires knowing the actions of everyone who might impact them, and so on. The way complex neural networks operate, there are a great many situations where a subtle shift in input (which includes input from other internal circuits) produces a drastic change in output.
Essentially the idea that we can use our current limited understanding of human cognition to separate and punish the criminal element prior to their becoming criminals is downright scary. Similar ideas were floated when phrenology and eugenics were in vogue, and today's propositions are no better informed.
What you're saying doesn't make sense. You're saying causality and the physical laws of the universe are sometimes suspended. It's like saying you can step out of a ten story building and sometimes not fall, just like in cartoons. Either you have gravity, or you don't. Either you have causality, or you don't. And either you have determinism, or you don't.
Like others you're presenting a fault dichotomy, "it's one or the other". But in physics it's doesn't work that way, not all the tyme. Take light as an example, either it's a particle or it's a waveform by your standards. Yet light is both a particle and a waveform. Depending on what you do with it or how you measure it light can be either one of the two.
FalconShould there be a Law?
This is a fitting story for hannukah.
could it be?
Lyme Disease, neurosyphilis, and other low-grade long-term brain infections can also be extremely evil. Mainly because they're subclinical and don't present with scary symptoms like high fever or unconsciousness, but they can cause a whole range of symptoms. Seizures, paralysis, behaviour changes, etc and so forth. I had chronic Lyme for a few years and it felt like my will to exist was stripped away. Hard to describe, but sort of like a continual case of the flu but moving through yellow shimmering molasses. Really fuckin wierd and unpleasant. Not to mention electrical shock-type sensations in my head, inability to focus my eye on text (but my vision itself was fine), wierd twitches, a propensity to get easily angry, and even prostate cramps with unknown (neurological?) cause. Thank g*d I got cured (more or less cured myself) of that shit - I don't think I'd be here now had I not researched it and recognized the symptoms!
-b.
Prof. Farnsworth's "death clock" that could predict one's date of death was "occasionally off by a few seconds, what with free will and all". Fry sticks his finger in the machine, an unseen date flashes and Bender shouts "dibs on his CD collection".
there is a serious philosophic treatment on the subject of free will, here:
The Philosophy of Freedom
Is it possible to find a view of the essential nature of man such as will give us a foundation for everything else that comes to meet us -- whether through life experience or through science -- which we feel is otherwise not self-supporting and therefore liable to be driven by doubt and criticism into the realm of uncertainty? The other question is this: Is man entitled to claim for himself freedom of will, or is freedom a mere illusion begotten of his inability to recognize the threads of necessity on which his will, like any natural event, depends? (The Philosophy of Freedom, 1918 Introduction)
You don't need free will to justify punishment. Assuming that we don't have free will, putting criminals in prison still server an obvious deterrent effect. A deterministic mind will use the knowledge of potential jail time when deciding to do something or not.
Ah but prison and punishment doesn't deter "all" crime, if it did then we wouldn't have any crime. You could also say that even if a person knows s/he is going to be punished they may still do it, if they think the costs of doing so is less than the rewards of doing it they may very well decide to do it. Then there are others who don't even take into consideration the consequences of their actions. Now I'm not saying potential punishment doesn't prevent some crimes, I believe it very well does, but it doesn't prevent all crime. And some punishments may have the effect of making some crimes worse.
FalconShould there be a Law?
at the very base of quantum physics is the measurement problem: when a measurement is made, the many quantum possiblities of particles collapse into one actuality. so far, no one has any explanation of what determines which possibility becomes the actuality, and some physicists believe the choice is made by the conscious observer.
Actually, the act of observation simply occurs in every possible quantum universe, but to the observer it appears as if the other possibilities have vanished. That's the way the math works, and it's silly to assume that one "real" universe is all that exists, and that somehow probability magically works with entanglement to always produce consistent results. All the consistent universes exist, and the observers in each universe can understand what happens in the other universes although they're physically unreachable after quantum states collapse into separate universes.
Free will is just the collective hallucination of observers in every possible universe, each believing that the choices he made actually effected the universe. In reality, each observer's choices are decided for her by the universe, after which her brain thinks it has made a decision. So in a sense free will exists, because every conceivable action happens in some universe, allowing the brain to think it has made a free choice in all cases.
Nevertheless, there are numerous possible explanations about what really happens in the box and there is absolutely no reason to believe any of those explanations expect possibly to reject those using Occam's razor as guidance.
Unless someone figures out some new ways of messing with the universe (by changing what appear to be fundamental constants), it will never be possible to actually open the box to see what goes on inside. By that I mean that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle guarantees that we will never be able to observe things at that level without disturbing the system we're trying to watch. (We would never learn much about ape society if, in order to observe it, we kept dropping nukes into the forest.)
As such, it's folly to say that particles at the quantum level are inherently probabilistic. Just because the rules are different from the ones we know at a macroscopic level doesn't mean they're not deterministic. That's religious talk. It's saying that because we can't see the specific events that those events must be magical.
Of course, it's also folly to try to determine what those deterministic rules might be. No possible system we invent could ever be tested.
Cow Cube
You cannot "write a deterministic program that behaves in different ways depending" upon whether it THINKS someone is watching it.
Then there should be no such thing as jail. There should only be hospitals. If we don't have free will, then all "crime" is merely the result of illness, of the human machine being broken in some sense. Essentially, if neurobiology and psychology can prove there is no free will, then instantly all human evils become medical conditions that should be treated. When you look at the trajectory these two sciences are taking, that's clearly where they're headed. Psychologists, especially, tend to want to medicalize all behavioral problems in my experience. This road has some pretty fucking scary logical consequences. One being that it puts the shrinks in charge, because they have the capacity to decide who's "broken" and to prescribe remediation.
Wait, the naked woman has the face of Britney Spears, or the crocodile? I don't know whether to be offended or aroused...I'll call it offousal!
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
Yeah, I read it as a free Wii as well. An "l" is sure close to an "i".
Gallileo had just had his ass handed to him by the church. He pretty much HAD to add that part, no matter how weak it may seem out of context.
You got this mixed up. It was René Descartes that came up with "Cogito, ergo sum". Galileo Galilei got into trouble witht the Vatican because he supported Nicolaus Copernicus's theories of the solar system. This went directly against the religious beliefs that the world, earth, was flat and the center of the universe.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If you caught idiots such as them on an honest day, you will find that they intentionally push their 'views' farther 'right' than they themselves believe, as many foolish people cling to the idea that 'the truth is in the middle', and by pushing their slander they hope to shove the public to their view points
This is just a pet peeve of mine, to see people make claims like yours above, about people who seek the middle to find the truth. Quite often the truth is "in the middle", which is to say, both sides of such a divide often have very good points that all need consideration.
The fallacy people fall for is thinking that the spectrum of which the middle is correct is the spectrum of commonly espoused positions. It's not. It's the spectrum of POSSIBLE positions. You're absolutely right that the middle of what are presently called Liberal and Conservative positions is nowhere close to 'the truth', because what we call Liberals are actually fairly moderate. There's a much, MUCH further left position that could be taken (anarcho-socialism, the complete abolishment of all notions of government and property, where everyone is free to do and take what they please, regardless of it's effects on others) and between THAT position and it's farthest-right equivalent (fascism or corporatism, what I like to term "tyrano-capitalism" in contrast to anarch-socialism) that the moderate truth lies.
Right now, the most liberal position along the interpersonal axis (referring to the Nolan Chart here) that anybody is arguing is a fairly moderate position - that there should be governance of some sort, to keep people from doing certain kinds of bad things to each other, but that government should be very limited and generally allow people to do most things they want to do, so long as nobody gets hurt. So the "middle" between that and the hardcore social conservatives in this country is actually a very conservative position itself, because nobody is crazy enough to argue the far-liberal side, but plenty are crazy enough to argue the far-conservative side, so the public get a false impression of where the ends of the spectrum are and thus where the middle lies.
So overall I agree with what you're saying the conservatives are doing, but it's not foolish to believe that "the truth is in the middle". The middle just isn't what people think it is, because they don't tend to consider possible positions that people aren't screaming about all the time.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
(I just hope the reporter posted an erroneous article summary)
What I described is the Copenhagen interpretation of the uncertainty principle, and it is widely accepted.
''So, it's mathematically convenient to start assigning probabilities to an electron's exact location, because we don't have the means to say "Ah, there it is!" without moving it somewhere else.''
Einstein believed the same thing and, in 1935, helped to publish the EPR paradox in an attempt to forward his view. Basically, (by which I mean I'm goin to butcher this) it proposed quantum teleportation and said that since information can't travel faster than light, the quantum states must have been predetermined. (see Griffiths 'Introduction to Quantum Mechanics' in the AfterWord for a more detailed description) Their view, the hidden variables view, was proven wrong in 1964 by J.S. Bell. He created an inequality (called, suprisingly, the Bell Inequalty) which took into account any and all *localized* 'hidden variables' that may exist, thus creating a physical test for the hidden variables theory. When the test was performed it showed decisively that localized hidden variables are impossible.
'' there's a schism between quantum-level physics - which are strictly probabilistic - and non-quantum physics, which aren't. ''
Also, I don't think that any physicist would say that. Classical mechanics just deals with really energetic objects which therefore have very localized wavefunctions. Is it 'possible' for a Landrover to tunnel through a speed bump? Definitely. Is it probable that such an unlikely event would happen? Even given time scales as large as the life of the universe? Definitely Not.
First, a comment: Philosophically, free will is held in tension with destiny. Destiny = environment, the genetic lottery, and yes, brain tumors that affect your personality (genetics does that, too, so a brain tumor is simply an extreme example of that). Free will = what you do with destiny. A deterministic universe and a quantum universe allowing free will both have destiny.
From this you can see that free will vs. determinism can't really be inferred from the issue of people with brain tumors. A serial killer with bad brain chemistry and a horrific childhood may have exercised free will when he killed someone before mutilating them instead of after; destiny may not have provided the option of not killing, but it doesn't eliminate free will from the equation. The question is not whether or not the universe is deterministic, but whether the brain tumor should be considered a mitigating factor.
Now, why does free will matter? Psychologically, it matters because without a belief in free will, people have theoretically no ability and therefore no motive to make ethical decisions, which erodes the desire to bother with ethics and morals. For example, even if you believe in human-induced global warming (I know some here do not), what does it matter that you drive an SUV and leave the lights on if there's no free will? Without will you have no obligation to the next person. You might be a "good" person by accident and find that a comfort; you might be like Einstein and find it comforting not to believe your choices matter since they're pre-determined; but you can't take any credit for it. People, whether by choice or accident, tend to like thinking they matter and like taking credit.
Apart from this issue, the article seems incomplete. I'm studying neuroscience and one of the factors creeping into the neuroscience paradigm is quantum mechanics. Physicists recently demonstrated that a dismissed-by-most-neuroscientists theory that electron tunnelling might be responsible for some aspects of smell was entirely possible. From a Nature article: "the smell signal in olfactory receptor proteins is triggered not by an odour molecule's shape, but by its vibrations, which can encourage an electron to jump between two parts of the receptor in a quantum-mechanical process called tunnelling." In other words, the neural process involved isn't a lock & key macroscopic process, but quantum sensing becoming quantum action.
There are other avenues of research being proposed that involve the brain both responding to and also creating quantum mechanical events. Since this leads to the possibility of indeterministic quantum events being involved in macroscopic events such as choice, you can see that this question is far from answerable at this time. Picking one or the other would require making an assumption not verifiable with our current level of knowledge.
Does it matter if we have free will or not as long as we believe we do?
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
While it was never implemented fully, what was introduced and what we still have today is that the sentencing part includes what to do with insane people. First the case is deliberated in court and a verdict is reached. If the accused person is found guilty a psych exam is performed and a decision is made as to if the person should go to jail or be sent to a mental institution.
Perhaps you are starting to see the problem.
In order to be sentenced to mental care, you have to be guilty. Sweden holds the dubious distinction of being the only country in the world that doesn't think you need to be sane to be legally responsible for your actions.
As you can imagine this brings a few problems. If you have to be guilty to receive care then a motivation for why you are guilty needs to be found - motive is essential in judicial rulings. In order to resolve this problem they invented something - I shit you not - called the "possible hypothetical motive". In essence it means that since motive is meaningless for a crazy person, the court invents a motive based on the worst case scenario. If you accidentally run over somebody with your car you will be found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. If you are insane and run somebody over with your car because the little green men told you so, you will be convicted of premeditated murder.
The severity of sentence is proportional to the severity of crime. In order to get sentenced to a long time of mental care, the crime has to be really hideous. So absurdly, when the court sees that the person standing trial really needs medical help, they have to show that the crime was premeditated. So even petty crimes committed by insane people get labeled as premeditated grave atrocities. This is so that when the sentencing part of the trial comes the court can sentence them to prolonged care.
Perhaps the greatest absurdity is that the sanity of the person is first evaluated after the verdict - and hence not at the time of the crime. Temporary insanity doesn't exist. Sane criminals when convinced play insane and get sentenced to care instead of jail. Great examples of the effects of the absurdity are cases where a person commits a crime, is found insane and sentenced to care. On leave from the mental institution (yes, in Sweden both mental patients and criminals get short vacations from their sentences on a regular basis) they commit another crime. This type the psych evaluation finds them to be sane and they are sentenced to jail. So they leave from the mental institution in order to go to jail - and are returned to the mental institution once their jail sentence is up. If you speak Swedish, read Maciej Zaremba's excellent article series on the subject, called "Rättvisan och dårarna" - it won this year's Swedish journalist prize.
So you believe in free will then? It seems to me one or the other has to be true, because they are at odds and I believe they cover the whole gamut
First let me say I don't believe in destiny, or fate. However destiny and freewill aren't at odds. While a person may not have control of what happens some people do have some control of what their reactions are. And I do mean "some" people as well as reactions. Myself, I used to be able to control my own reactions pretty well but now I don't. For instance I used to be able to do a lot of planning and follow through. However now because I am a TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury, survivor I have a problem with impulse control. No matter how much I plan I can't always control impulses I may have. I take what steps I can so I can handle my impulses, luckily I rarely have any I can't deal with, but I know if I will ever be able to gain control of all impulses.
Falcon
Ooh, this was one of the impulses I just had to see through.Should there be a Law?
This might just possibly be refering to plans close a loophole in English law
0 ,,836476,00.html
that (IIRC) means that if you have a mental disorder that makes you
violent toward others, you can only be detained if your condition can
be treated medically. If the docs can't fix you because you have a "personality
disorder" (whatever the blue rubbery duck that is), they can't keep you
in a secure hospital and and you get to roam the streets until the voices tell
you to knife someone.
Unfortunately there have been a number of cases in the UK where someone
who fell into the untreatable catagory ended up killing people, for example
Michael Stone who was convicted of killing Lin and Megan Russel in 1996.
The Guardian has a FAQ on the proposed changes in the law:
http://society.guardian.co.uk/mentalhealth/story/
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
How many times have you heard it that humanity is irrational and then thought about creating a rational basis for thought? Every attempt to create a base justification inevitably involves choosing an arbitrary basis that is taken for granted. If you can't honor the concept of free will, then there is no mechanism for the conscious mind to accept that any basis is chosen, and irrationality is fundamentally irreconcilable. To the conscious mind, without free will, all justifications for any action are baseless and thus my suggestion to end this paradoxical indecision, though baseless, is also immune to any sort of rebutal. Of course this holds true everywhere else to and thereby defines all actions as moot.
By free will, humanity has irrationality as a starting point for logically resolving the goals logically derived from that basis. In short, without free will, humanity can't even have irrationality. We'd all be machines with no point to anything in our conscious minds. We may very well be machines, but my point is just that it's impossible for a human being to function entirely and not believe in free will at least somewhat.
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
that he had free will before the tumor was removed, and that his free will was removed along with the tumor.
:wq
I'm no lawyer, but isn't: "you do the crime. you do the time." a more sensible middle ground?
Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Believing something doesn't make it true. Not believing something doesn't make it false.
Someone, please, correct me if im wrong, but isn't it just as likely that, in the process of removing said tumor, we cured him of his pedophileness? (that even a word?)
Yes, the tumor may have caused him to become a pedophile, but seems to me, he may have just been one anyway, and in the process of removing the tumor damaged that part of his brain, and ended up 'curing' him of it as a result.
The person is the child abuser. We all have thought problems. I, for one, for some reason or another, whenever I'm in a train station and I'm walking next to the tracks behind the yellow line, I constantly envision myself jumping down onto the tracks. When I'm near the edge of a cliff, I envision myself falling off the cliff. It seems that whenever I'm in a position in which I could die by doing something, my mind imagines me doing it. I'm not sure why it happens, but it happens and I can't change that.
But DO I take an action that will lead to my death? Of course not. No matter how much my brain imagines it, I just deal with it and continue on. Jumping into an oncoming train would be extremely stupid, and there's really no satisfactory reason for me to be doing such a silly act. I can make this decision because I am a human being, and humans have free will. It doesn't matter how much you crave doing something -- it is ultimately your choice whether you give in to your urges and imaginings, and you must ultimately take responsibility for those consequences. Sure, it would satisfy some psychotic idea in my brain to go and throw myself in front of a train, but I know that it would be foolish and I'm quite frankly not quite up to enduring the consequences that would result from that action. Everyone has to evaluate the consequences and ultimately CHOOSE which option to take. And if they choose to molest a child because that would satisfy some psychotic tick in their brain, despite the fact that they know that what they're doing is immoral and illegal, then that is their choice and they ought to be ready to take responsibility for the consequences that ensue.
Wilder Penfield discovered something remarkable in an early experiment. A subject whose brain is stimulated with an electrode can be made to repeat a behavior over and over--moving an arm, for example--but from the subject's point of view, the behavior seems entirely willed. The electrode makes them do it, but they think they've chosen to do it.
That's not the way the brain works. Take the case of Phineas Gage, a railway worker who had a 1 1/4" diameter iron tamping rod blown clean through his head. He lived, but what is even more strange is that not only wasn't he a vegetable, but his behavior was completely altered. He became gruff and irritable, had no impulse control, and took to swearing a lot. Now, perhaps this is just a case of removing all (or most) inhabition. Maybe he had really wanted to swear his whole life, and now he couldn't stop himself. What if the person in the article had had pedophilic impulses his whole life but had managed to control them until the tumor?
For a very interesting look into the wacky world of what can go wrong in the brain and how it can affect one's personality, read Neurologist Oliver Sack's book, The Man Who Thought His Wife Was a Hat.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
...then it does matter
How many trillions of dollars are spent on the occult, spirualism and religion every year? How many people die or are tormented due to religious conflicts and dogma?
And since if there is no free will then:
- rewards and punishments in an afterlife make no sense - since everyone's decisions are determined by their environment and their genetic make-up. Why punish or reward what is basically an extremely complex automation?
- criminals and other offenders deserve a little more understanding and efforts at rehabilitation than if they knew in advance that they were going to perform an 'evil' act and deliberately did so anyway.
So, if there is no free will, then most religous concepts of good/evil, guilt, responsbility and an afterlife are clearly wrong.
Just don't appear in a courthouse saying you read this article in the Economist and it wasn't you who broke the law but "your faulty brain"...
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
And the secret to immortality is to not die. Simple, right?
You've merely restated my position. You haven't shown how to write a program that can believe it is being watched.
Thinking up a name for the program is not the same as writing the program.
Here's a guess: The Physicalists have it basically right. Freedom, like objective morality, like God, IS simply a useful illusion to a cerebral cortex burdened by a capacity for self-regard. And, we'll end up proving it. We'll prove it in the same sense in which we've proven that light responds to gravity: with testable hypotheses and repeatable measurements (we don't yet have the tools to measure the things needed to generate the hypostheses needed to spawn the tools needed to make the measurements needed to find the answers... yippee! Science!)
And here's the kicker: All of the doomsday prophets who claim things like "If science disproves freedom, then all mighty nihilistic hell will break loose" have it exactly wrong. What our species needs is HUMILITY. And that's what we'll get when we finally learn that we are 100% animal, 0% God. Morality, law, guilt, norms, all of these things will still work. We will recognize them for what they are: Concepts that exist (as just that, concepts, patterns of neuronal activity stable within a brain and analogous between brains mediated by action, shared by language) in order to help us "all just get along". Morlity is for society. Society is for the flourishing of the life. Life -- it just is.
For anyone who is interested in finding out about a third possibility, I have two words: non-reductive physicalism.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Thus the typical left-right axis of thought is an example of one dimensional analysis
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I can see a Christian interpretation that includes determinism (and in fact there were deeply Christian deterministic scientists. Newton believed the universe to be a great machine, but he also was a Christian who believed the nature of the universe was hidden in scripture).
This is how it goes: God designed and planned everything. This is why there are prophecies, etc. God knows who is being saved and not being saved beforehand, but humans don't. Human free will is a paradox—you might say ultimately an illusion since God knows the outcome—designed to allow humans to be tempered by learning how to make choices and grapple with evil (there's a whole branch of theology devoted to just the problem of evil). Humans think they are making choices, but God has the entirety of time in front of him, and the end is already decided. This is why a fundie who believes he is "saved" doesn't necessarily believe he has to back that up with good works.
Personally, I think an indeterministic universe puts more pressure on religious people by making their choices matter.
Replying to undo a wrong moderation.
;-)
To make this slightly on topic, Perhaps it was karma moderating my free will decisions.
fuck that guy and his child-molesting tumor. burn them both.
Lock'em up is better for Adolf's culture, why waste money to develop a cure (like removing a tumor).
God bless Adolf one and all. Ya know it would be cheaper and better for Adolf's society to just terminate anyone with a sub-human affliction.
Keeping the animals alive in a cage is just inhuman when technology will allow painless fast extermination at a lower cost to Adolf society.
All religions today would agree it is far better to humanly put the defective/deformed animal to sleep in a gas oven.
Also, there is no profit in developing medical cures for any affliction, and these sub-humans are a danger to everyone.
If you approve or do not understand my final solution yet, then you indeed do have the sub-human affliction scheduled for destruction [eventually].
!HAVEFUN!
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
It's been shown in the past that physical conditions can have a definitive affect upon mental processes. Super/subsonic noises, electromagnetic fields or even various varieties of music can in some ways affect the moods/personalities of people. I'm not sure how this would pertain to paedophilia though, as most of the prior cases affect what is more an emotional state (angry, frightened, paranoid, etc) whereas paedophilia could be constued as a specific thought pattern.
In reference to the parent, though, my dad once mentioned that his good friend's mom had a similar case. She was the nicest woman in the world, until one day when she suddenly became a horrible bitch. Nobody understood why, but a few months later she died suddenly. An operation unveiled a brain tumor which they figured has started putting pressure on various areas of her brain around the same time as her personality suddenly changed. She hadn't complained of headaches or anything similar, so I'm assuming it wasn't a pain response, but rather a reaction to the physical damage done to her brain by the tumor.
In fact, the entire question of free will versus determinism is silly.
What exactly do you want when you yearn for free will? Uncaused actions? That is random behavior and completely irrational. There is no choice in that concept, just random events.
The problem is that you equate free will with non-causality. Basically your argument makes free will into a non-deterministic random number generator.
Proponents of free will don't typically claim that their freedom comes from randomness. I think you can really only define free will it by what it isn't. It's not deterministic. It's not random. It's something else. For a lot of people, that means it's a mystery. But at least they acknowledge that there's something supernatural going on.
If you aren't going the supernatural or random route, then the only remaining answer is determinism. I'm reading this entire slashdot discussion and wondering why the hell it's so hard for people to choose an answer. I think it's because they really, really hate their choices.
The purpose of law is to CREATE crime, and thus, criminals.
Behavior, coercion, violence, whatever, is one thing. Crime is another.
Crime - like war - is the health of the state.
Again, the essence of the state is: "You do everything we tell you to, and give us everything you have, and we'll protect you from the bad people inside and outside our borders - and if there aren't any bad people, we'll make some."
The state - ALL versions - is a protection/extortion racket depending on human fear, nothing more or less.
Chimpanzees apparently aren't capable of understanding this, unfortunately.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Hold steadfast to 'old fashioned' conservative values [dogma believers] are mentally dysfunctional adelophobics, their irrational fear of the unknown would leave them standing outside a building in freezing rain.
...) are criminally accountable for any resulting deaths and/or social/cultural damages. These idiots are incapable of having an honest day.
....
Those who play 'lip-service' to those values in an attempt to gain power and control (like Rush 'water boy' Limbaugh, Anne 'happy widow' Coulter, George Bush, Dick Chaney
Watch out for them nuts, they fall out of the trees all the gaul-dang-fycking time killing people and destroying many things like values of honor, honesty, family, community, caring, sharing, integrity
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Yes, the consciousness requirement is bogus. A proper "observation" must be made to "force the issue". Great explanation.
And bravo on pinpointing the "real" question? So... what's your answer?
~joNDoty
But whether the input comes from a quantum noise source, a pseudo-random generator, or a script, the program response is completely deterministic. Even if its response invokes a quantum noise source to make "decisions", it is still completely "deterministic", i.e. cause and effect driven.
The concept of free will says that *some* (not all) of our responses did not have their source in the cause and effect chains of this universe - random or otherwise. Note that just as we cannot change the world, but only a smart part of it, so our free will does not control our entire mind and body - only a small part of it. Most of what our mind and body does is involuntary and automatic. (And thankfully so - I have enough to do without managing my digestion.)
Note that free will is not the same thing as your desires. Part of the concept of "original sin" is that our mind and body are broken, so that our will does not have as much control as it should. Disease can rob us of mental control, just as losing a leg inhibits our ability to walk. We cannot always tell whether a crime was a choice, or uncontrollable - as in the case of the man with a brain tumor. Sometimes, a bad choice leads to loss of free will - as happens with addictive substances. Traumatic experiences, or brainwashing can erode free will. The fact that free will can be lost, does not mean that it didn't exist in the first place.
It is certainly scary to hear people deny the existence of free will, "I'm sorry to do this to you, old chap, but I can't really help it. It's the result of my genes and my upbringing." The nanny state leads inevitably to a totalitarian state by gradually removing responsibility. If the common folk are still aware of any free will they have left, they have forgotten how to use it. As C.S. Lewis pointed out in "The Abolition of Man", it is ironic how Man's conquest of Nature leads to Nature's conquest of Man - men without free will, controlled entirely by natural processes.
Free Will as a concept is mostly humanistic in basis, as it means that you are a free agent, completely capable of creating your own destiny (not God's destiny for you). A Christian (they should anyway) believes that before they were such, they were a slave to sin. In that case, they could do nothing but sin. This doesn't mean that they would constantly break the law of the land (though oftentimes this happens, which is why there's a legal system in the first place, to deter evil against others), but they would break the law of God constantly. This doesn't mean that they're mindless automatons, as they can choose just how evil they want to be, but they'll still be evil.
However, when you become a Christian, your life becomes God's, and so you are no longer a slave to sin. HOWEVER, until you get to heaven, your 'old self', or the sinful part, is still there, which is again why there is law - to deter sinful acts against others. So yeah, as a Christian - more freedom to choose not to sin and more grace if sin is committed, but you still have no free will because God is omnipotent and, to paraphrase: "everything is pre-ordained by God". The reason we have an illusion of autonomy is because, well, we are like little ants compared to God. We have no concept of anything outside our existence, and so we like to believe we are autonomous.
Did you ever read past that in my post? If so you need to re-read it because I did not say that being_watched() is some magic function that someone could write but I have no idea how. It's not even hard, it's just a matter of computers having the correct inputs.
If I have to be more explicit fine. Put a camera on a computer and program it to recognize faces. Hard? Yes, but this isn't exactly Dr. Who type fantasy technology. It can in fact be done right now, although imperfectly.
Ok, so once you're computer can recognize faces, you just have it check if it sees any faces looking at it. Is that such an inconceivable task to you? We can put a microphone on the computer too so that it can listen for voices. Of course you can't tell if someone is watching you just from listening, but it does give you helpful clues about if someone else is present in the room.
Ok, so there you have it, my basic outline of how to implement being_watched(). What's your objection to that?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I'm interested in reading that paper you linked to, but I'm getting completely lost. Could you at least introduce the paper to provide some context? What am I reading here? Thanks.
I have no free will. The law dictates what I am allowed to do with my personal time that does not affect anyone else. We live in a police state whose only interest is exploiting the people.
Free will is an illusion. It simply does not exist.
"We do what we're told."
A lot of new age yahoos have taken this "conscious observer" argument (out of ignorance of what science actually has to say about QP) and are using it to claim that QP proves all kinds of voodoo beliefs, such as you make you're own reality, etc.. Such claims are baseless, but they do help sell a lot of books and public speaking tours, and various herbs and crystals, if not also more than a few paintings of dolphins, whales, butterflys and unicorns...
But a nondeterministic universe does not guarantee that Free Will exists, nor does a deterministic universe necessarily prohibit it (assuming you can even unambiguously define Free Will).
The fact that choice is sometimes mitigated by circumstances such as having a brain tumor or getting your legs cut off or living in a ghetto does not eliminate the possibility of alternative scenarios that depend on your input. Free will is not just the concept of doing what you will, but also of knowing what you will. Do we know the rules in advance, or do we need to investigate reality in order to figure out what those rules are? If choice does not matter, then there are no alternatives, and everything would be the same no matter what your input would be. But if reality can be molded and transformed by your own actions then it can also be studied to figure out what the alternatives are. If you are an organism that has no control over your own life, then your choices do not influence reality, and whatever will happen will happen. But if you have the ability to be flexible and adaptive and you use that ability, then you will be more able to survive in an unpredictable universe.
(I would point out that none of this limits learning from those extremes - good ideas can be found THROUGHOUT the full spectrum - the objective is merely to avoid the error of thinking that a specific view is the only view.)
You will generally find that genuine "free thinkers" (by which I do not mean people who "freely" think what they're told, or who cease thinking once they've freely thought something, I mean people who explore the possibilities freely) tend to be divided into two loosely-defined camps. One camp would be the "middle way" group, who do not exist in the left/right spectrum per-se. Members of this camp probably have nothing else in common. The second camp encompasses a broad range of liberalism, socialism, left-wing-ism, collaborativism, intellectualism, etc. The distinction is that the second group has the notion of an orthodoxy, a set of core tenants that shape any ideas imported, whereas the first group does not and cannot. Neither group is "better" and plenty of engineers, geeks, nerds, technocrats, etc, can be found in either camp or even wander between them. The boundaries are fuzzy at times and do not require passports.
It is worth noting that whilst you will find people who hold some extreme views in both camps - extreme along any spectrum you care to name - you will NOT find genuine extremists in either. Extremism is the antethesis of thought and thus it is not possible to both freely think AND nail yourself to a single point.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Like I said, immortality is easy, just don't die. Maybe you need to re-read that a few times so you understand what I'm saying.
Again, go back and read the "believe" part again. You seem to have missed it, again.
Again, you seem to have missed the "believe" part. What you are doing is "if human is within distance X, do Y, else Z". That is not what I'm talking about.
Here's a human scenario that might explain it to you better.
You're a clerk in a store selling handbags. A girl comes in with her friends. You see them. You turn away. You look back. You see them there, but a handbag is missing and you do not see the girls carrying it.
Now, some people would steal a handbag if they saw you turn away, while other people would not because they would BELIEVE that you would SEE what they were doing.
That's not enough for you? There are more.
Stores buy fake "security cameras" because they give the appearance of the customers being watched and this changes the behaviour of some people. But not all people.
Your example would being either/or. It does not allow for the behaviour to change even though there are no physical cues that observation is taking place nor would it allow the behaviour to change when there is the appearance of observation.
Humans have free will because they can change their behaviour based upon their beliefs of the situation even when that belief is contradicts the apparent situation.
Feel free to, once again, focus on testing for events rather than belief.
Just another form of Calvinism, as philosopher David Stove has noted. Blame the demons, or your genes.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
It's a misguided thought to think that neurobiology can help anything to settle the question of free will. Mental experiences (in this case the desire to abuse children) require a biological substrate (in this case involving a tumor) - this is not exactly a new thought. We always knew that vision (a mental experience) requires eyes (a biological substrate). Neuroscience will tell us that it also requires a few other things like nerves and certain structures in the brain - nice to know, but nothing qualitatively new. Drugs (a physical substance) can dampen, amplify or create desires (a mental phenomenon) - to know how the mechanisms involved in addiction work in detail is of practical value, but yields no philosophical insight.
If, beyond the very convincing, however necessarily subjective evidence given by introspection, we were to look for scientific evidence of free will, we should rather turn to physics: As a physical phenomenon, free will would show up as an effect without a cause WITHIN THE SYSTEM, i.e. the intersubjectiv, physically observable universe. Or, with other words, as a random event. The existence of genuine randomness (e.g. in radioactive decay, but basically in any form of quantum measurement) in the observable universe is pretty much a settled fact in the physical community since the thirties of the previous century. Alas, philosophy (and psychology, for the matter) is, as usual, about a century behind, and still trapped in Newtons mechanistic and deterministic worldview.
Don't get me wrong - of course, the existence of randomness does not PROVE the existence of free will - it's only a necessary requirement (in a less strict sense - for all practical purposes, so to say - deterministic chaos or simply intractability would also suffice). But here, Occam's razor kicks in: Perception (such as the fundamental perception of my own existence as a single individual) is an immaterial phenomenon (albeit with a physical substrate). Introspection shows me to have free will, likewise an immaterial phenomenon. The known rules of the intersubjective universe, as established by physics, allow for observable phenomena without a deterministic cause (quantum measurement), so they are compatible with the idea of free will. The actual existence of free will is the simplest explaination which accounts for all of the above. The concept of free will is no more absurd than the idea of individual perception, just the direction of the influence is not from the physical "outside" to the mental "inside", but the other way around (with the additional benefit that it could therefore be disproved if we found our observable universe to be deterministic, after all).
Of course, there are people who deny both, but firstly I doubt that their mechanistic explaination of how the bunch of atoms that they think they are manages to develop the "illusions" of consciousness, individuality, perception and willful behaviour is much simpler. And secondly, with mental phenomena, the illusion IS just the same as the real thing.
I would like to see a citation or an explanation for that allegation, or even an example. I'm pretty sure you're trolling, and it's rather depressing that you've been moderated so highly. "Innocent until proven guilty" is as much a tenet of the British legal system as the American one (more so, perhaps -- America has Guantanamo Bay...). The police are allowed to arrest people if they having convincing evidence that a crime has been committed, and bring them to trial, but they certainly cannot lock a person up for prolonged periods without passing him through the court system -- and, until he is found guilty, he is regarded as innocent in the eyes of the law.
The British government is mentioned in only a couple of sentences in the article. The amount of data that it plans to catalogue is certainly disturbing, but to accuse it of wishing to lock people up without trial (thus making them "guilty until proven innocent") is to distort the truth. The article is extremely speculative.
All ethical issues are much, much murkier without the same concept of personal responsibility. I'm not saying it's impossible to revise our ideas of responsibility. As a practical matter, it's extremely difficult.
I have to disagree with this pretty much 100%. There are better reasons to lock up a serial killer than "blame" or some childish notion of revenge-as-justice. They're purely practical: "keep this guy off the streets so he doesn't kill anyone". If this really is the best solution we have at our disposal to keep people safe from him, then it's no more "punishment" than the fact that some handicapped person can't walk. If, in some sci-fi future, we could implant a chip in the killer's brain that prevented him from killing, then just give him the option: chip-but-otherwise-free or incarceration. No one should suffer excessively, no matter what they've done. To say otherwise is to admit you're sadistic at heart.
You can look at all reasonable law enforcement from this perspective (where reasonable excludes absurd laws like banning sodomy or prostitution). Just two maxims: be effective, be humane. The concern of prevention is a completely separate (and oft-confused) issue. At any rate, any crime prevention strategy that employs sadistic treatment of human beings to instill fear into the rest of them is obviously flawed.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
What is "behaving as though free will doesn't exist"? It seems like it would be exactly the same. But then, I find the whole concept bankrupt of meaning to begin with...
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
You might be inclined to say "Well, all right, but I clearly took this branch rather than the other, what's the reason?" Realize that your copy in the other branch says exactly the same thing. Both copies feel the same continuity, neither is privileged.
Dang, I just got Flamebaited by a dogmatist, the truth hurts them falling nuts.
... real good!
Makes me feel good about being downrated
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
OK, so most of the postings I've read say we "either have free will or we don't." There were a few mutterings about a duality, but nothing clear and concise. Lemme try to posit something to you.
I'm going to take my wife out to dinner. I know that I'm not going to a seafood place because I'm allergic to seafood. I'm not going to take her to eat Chinese either because just walking past a Chinese restaurant makes mt stomach roll. These two choises are made for me in a deterministic fashion. I suppose I could go batshit insane and gorge on the lobster until they hauled me off to the hospital, but I'm not out to refute all determinism -I just want to enjoy my dinner.
So, locally we have an Italian place and a local greasy spoon. I have free will as to which one I choose, though both exert some deterministic pressures on me, namely, it's easier to eat locally than drive 15 miles to another restaurant -though I have the free will to do so if I want and sometimes do.
I have the free will to fly to Singapore for dinner too, but it is so far to the outside of "normal range of deterministc pressures" that I will probably never make that choice. Itallian sounds good tonight.
So, let's look at the criminal element. There is a child who grew up with a crack-head mother, saw his father twice growing up, both times when the father was between jail sentences. His peers are a set with similar backgrounds. Most of the deterministic pressures are for this child to follow in a similar path to his father and mother. Yet, this child also knows that other choices can be made, he has heard, and maybe seen a rare example of, people use education to get ahead in life. He has free will enough to make a choice for the better, though it is unlikely that he will.
So, back to the story. A man has a "normal" life. Wife kids, family pet.... There are deterministic pressures for him to admire the beuty of young girls and women, placed upon him by the media culture, there are counter pressures placed upong him to say "but to do anything beyond admire is wrong." He lives his life like most men, with this truce between "damn that's hot" and "don't touch this." Yet inside of his head a nodule of tissues are growing abnormally. This tumor is a deterministic pressure. It could be that the tumor is growing in an area that affects his lust: maybe the deterministic pressures are that his lust has grown more intense. He still has the free will to chose othe courses of behavior, everything from hiring a prostitute to masturbating with porn. However, maybe the tumor is growing in the area of the brain where the actual choices between right and wrong are made, and here it is where determinism takes over.
The predictable conclusion of this train of thought, of course ...
Not at all. Even if we can conclusively demonstrate in a case that an organic disease caused the disordered sexual compulsion felt by the individual, that does not remove his guilt for his criminal acts. It may mitigate it, but it cannot remove it completely. He chose to give in to the compulsion, where he could have done otherwise. Millions of people every day resist strong desires, including sexual ones, because of conscience. To say that he could not choose the right thing is to dehumanize him.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
That's a pretty jaundiced view of things. Sure, the state may act like it has an interest in revenge, but that's a failure on the part of the system---are you saying that the only possible reason for a criminal justice system is for the state to exact revenge on citizens who piss it off? What about a criminal justice system based on the other ideas I mentioned, like reducing recidivism, or sequestering dangerous individuals away from society at large, or rehabilitation? I'm well aware that that's not what we have, but to chuck the whole idea of the state's interest in keeping order by any after-the-fact means, punitive or otherwise... are you serious about that?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The subtitle is:
"Liberalisim and Neurolgy".
The link between the two is:
"Nor is it only the criminal law where free will matters. Markets also depend on the idea that personal choice is free choice. Mostly, that is not a problem. Even if choice is guided by unconscious instinct, that instinct will usually have been honed by natural selection to do the right thing. But not always. Fatty, sugary foods subvert evolved instincts, as do addictive drugs such as nicotine, alcohol and cocaine. Pornography does as well. Liberals say that individuals should be free to consume these, or not. Erode free will, and you erode that argument."
In other words his conclusion is that Liberalisim is an evolutionary dead end. Yet the article goes on about "personal responsibility" and "the rule of law" but fails to find any implications for conservatives.
Now for my own troll:
Rational, intelligent people do not go into a brain spasm when confronted with two contradictory ideals. I belive in good food, good drugs, good sex, personal responsibility and the rule of law, everyone I know thinks likewise but they all differ about the definitions. OTOH: I subscribe to Eienstien's view that "a man cannot will what he will's.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Ok, I still think it is shite to spy on people 24/7 and come up with all these probabilities for them to be naughty (Minority Report, Gattaca, etc.) but I think its an impossibility to prevent this type of analysis because of the ubiquity of data collection mechanisms and analytic tools, so just like with drugs (Prohibition, modern-day drug "wars", etc.), it's probably much better to get the process (surveillance and predictive analysis) out into the open and legislate it rather than try to suppress it.
Sun Tzu say, "Only fight the battles you've already won."
The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.'"
1984 was a cautionary tale about the perils of a totalitarian goverment, not a fucking manual on how to establish one!
~Philly
Please, could you elaborate on how you cured yourself of Lyme? I've got a bad case of chronic fatigue going on for 6 years -- clinically dx'd as Asperger's + depression, but I'm not sure that covers my increasing dysfunction. My Lyme test came weakly positive for borrelia but a repeat test was not done because the neurologist insisted it was nothing. And I didn't insist on doing the repeat due to various reasons (confusion on my part, miscommunications with the neuro, etc.). Yet I seem to be developing an increasingly debilitating condition: fatigue; muscle twitches or myoclonuses (minor epileptic activity) in my legs, arms, hands (basically everywhere); narcolepsy-like shocks in my head (almost like dozing off or having a brief feeling of sinking); almost constant (but mild) migraine including light sensitivity, tinnitus/ringing, and trigeminal neuralgia; minor chest pain connected with anxiety or panic attacks; feelings of hypoglycemia (yet my blood glucose levels are fine); major food sensitivities including verifiable allergies (basically Irritable Bowel Syndrome) triggering other symptoms. The list goes on and on. I'm at the end of my tether here, because I don't seem to communicate my problems to doctors and very few tests get done here in "upstate Finland" (wrt our capital Helsinki).
Damn, I thought I was gonna find out about getting a free Wii.
just because we can't predict it doesn't mean it's not deterministic.
Relatively speaking, your 'personality profile' says very little about your identity, and it is not very predictive of your behavior. The current business of psychiatric diagnosis barely rises above the level of Rorsarch tests, phrenology, or Myers-Briggs personality tests. In other words, it is psychobabble that tells you more about the person who designed the test than about the person taking the test. In the case of psychiatry, it tells you that the person who devised the personality profile is obsessed with finding something wrong with you, and they are even willing to poison you in order to make you normal. But psychiatry has no theory of what causes normality, and that is because normality is an assumption that cannot be tested. Psychiatry is in most cases actually more insidious than most psychobabble, because it insinuates by argument from pseudoscience that the psychiatrist understands you better than you understand yourself. I speak only of psychiatry, the business of prescribing pharmaceutical chemicals, not psychology, the more general study of the psyche, because the latter attempts to understand consciousness, but the former has no theory of consciousness. How can it, when it deals exclusively with chemical processes, and consciousness is not a chemical reaction? The life of the mind is an interesting subject of study, but not when it is reduced to a hollow mechanistic process. We are intelligent beings who are capable of introspection and modifying our own behavior. Some, no doubt more so than others, but when you get right down to it the psychology of authority is that authority deserves control and non-authority deserves submission. But science cannot support the legitimacy of one neurotic mentality over another.
You're supposed to drink the Kool-Aid. Not inhale it.
ob pedantic: Jim Jones actually used Flavor-Aid on his people.
Tech Public Policy stuff
So what is causing you all to feel so certain that free will doesn't exist? Is it sociological causes? Physiological causes?
... hmmm, that would explain a lot of the beliefs floating around on Slashdot ...
"Brain tumour epidemic hits Slashdot"
I am anarch of all I survey.
We had that time, in the 1970's.
-- Cheers!
According the Wikipedia article on the Black hole information paradox, information cannot be destroyed. What does this actually mean? Is this in any way related to the Laws of Thermodynamics? Does it mean information is neither created nor lost - ever?
The measurement problem is beautifully resolved by the many-worlds interpretation: all you have is a humongous wave function that describes everything and evolves under Schrödinger's equation. "Measurements" have no special status.
In practice, the many-worlds interpretation solves little. The point of physics should be to explain a particular history that is experienced. Saying "there are other histories as well" is no more of an explanation than "the wave function collapsed into this one".
Any physicist who needs to fall back on a conscious observer needs to retake basic quantum mechanics. It's vey hard, conceptually, for most people to make the connection between the math and the real world. An observation in physics is any interaction, the person plays no role but to get the data from the data taking computer to the laptop. Generally, when some particle in an undefined state runs into something else: a wall, detector, person... the undefined state becomes "known" by whatever it ran into. A person then gets the information second hand out of some light which has been emmitted or something like that. That doesn't mean free will is gone, it just means a conscious observer is not necessary.
Here's why free will is gone:
In physics, we often talk about a particle and a detector. The particle is in some undefined state, and when it hits the detector, the state is known. That's an approximation. If, at the big bang, all the matter in the universe was in one state, that state could be evolved into the present universe. Everything is really in one big state, and we just infer bits and pieces out of it. While what we can know about that state is uncertain, the time evolution of that single, universal state has been determined from the beggining. (in physics-speak: quantum states are exact and have exact time evolution, the probability we get out of those states is uncertain in space and time.)
And lastly, here's where free will comes back:
If the universe is infinite, there can't be a single state with determined time evolution... I think...
In physics we're trained to think in terms of single particles, and the physics experiments used to prove quantum mechanics in classes are all based on one or two particles. Every physicist knows we can't solve three or more. That doesn't mean there's not a single state for multiple particle systems. Spectroscopists and solid state physicists know this. It's not a hidden variable problem, just a problem with our mathmatical tools. Of course, if you don't think the quantum state is real, then disregard this entire comment.
If anyone's got good arguments against me, I'd love to try them out. I spent a year arguing with my graduate quantum professor over this... he won.
The key phrase there is when a measurement is made. In quantum mechanics, the evolution of closed systems is strictly deterministic. The evolution of a measured system is, by definition, the evolution of an open system. And the environment of this open system has Avagadro's number of degrees of freedom (effectively infinity). Such an evolution is random even in classical mechanics, see Brownian motion.
And consciousness causes collapse is a long abandoned belief. It is no more credible to say that some physicists believe phlogiston causes fire or that spinons cause spin.
There is nothing magical in QM that can explain consciousness or give credence to free will.
Britain has legislated to become the first (and hopefully only) Orwellian surveillance society. We are already a surveillance society according to the Information Commissioner.
But it will be 1000x worse should we let the Govt connect all its databases together via the new ID database (NIR). All of the Govt's main policies over the last 6 months have involved coercing the public on to new databases. The most insidious is the forced and secret registration of passport applicants on to the ID database, starting in the next 6 months.
If you want Britain to remain a free country, I strongly urge you to check out the NO2ID campaign.
I once read a very interesting article about the free will (don't know the authors name) but she summarized a lot of good points on the subject. Don't mind if I do not use the correct terminology, I'm translating this from german.
First, there are quite good arguments that the free will cannot exist. Let's define some possible definitions of free will:
1. The absolute free will: It exists outside of the observable universe regardless of the human body. (think of soul).
2. The relative free will: Most of our decisions are made by the chemical interactions in the body, but they are influenced by quantum level noise which gives us a certain degree of freedom
3. The illusion of a free will: We do not have any free will, just the illusion of it
So what's the most possible interpretation?
I think I can safely rule out number 1 here (as we're all techies are we?). At some point the decision has to influence the real world, as an electrical signal in some nerves for example. If there is a connection to our observable universe, that connection itself is part of the observable universe and so forth. That type of free will would have to obey laws of nature and therefore cannot be free.
Number two is a bit more plausible, as there are pure random processes on quantum level. But, as we all know, time is relative. If you travel at different speeds (or in different gravity fields) your clock is faster or slower than the clock of others. That means, a decision which you have yet to make, is already in the past for someone else. In fact, we even have to reject the concept of dividing the time into past, now and the future. Because the "past" for me is the future for someone else. Just because he is at another speed or at another height. Maybe I'm several nanoseconds ahead of you, or behind. So if there is no "NOW" all our decisions are already made and we cannot influence them. - There is no free will
Number three, the free will is an illusion, looks like the most possible interpretation to me. But what does that mean for us?
Now my point: If I have all necessary information about a person and it's environment, I can safely predict its decisions. - The will of that person is NOT free
OTOH, I will never have the possibility to know enough about me to predict MY decisions. Because if I learn more about me, I would have to include that in my prediction and so forth. My brain cannot contain itself. - So MY will IS free
That's called the third person interpretation of the free will. Because my will will always be free for me, but from a third person view it is not free
Summary: Even though I know my will is not free, I will not be able to retrieve all the necessary information to predict my own decisions and therefore have to act like my will was free.
I believe we will discover we're more hard-wired than we like to think
(deny anyone iodine in their diet and they will turn paranoid quickly),
but to imply the end result of this is that we don't have any free will is
simply stupid. I can still decide whether or not to go get a ham sandwich,
even if I can't change whether I like aspargus.
Maxim
That race has already been won by North Korea, China Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, USSR, ...
Do pay attention.
European empires fell through corruption and weakness. Weakness brought on by bein bled white by war. Corruption through the natural evolution of static anachronistic and untenable governmental forms into contorted monstrosities as stunted trees in an ancient forest on rock on high alpine slopes where it was not supposed to grow in the first place. Take the so called 'nobility' traditions in most european countries. These 'upper class' parasites drained trillions of dollars and skewed the economy of 'Great Britain' for hundreds of years; and is still doing it. Any other group that poured molten lead down the throat of their own children (Charles' Dicken's real reference in "A Child's History of England", 1840?, to 'Crookback Dick' probably Richard the turd, I mean third) would have been permanently removed from power. As it is they can have secret organizations murder the most popular and acceptable on their own that ever wore a 'crown' or rated a 'curtsy' just because she was reputed to be pregnant by a moslem and get away with it scot free, using their taxpayers own money to cover up, kill, jail, and/or scatter or discredit the evidence. Even years after the fact. Then there was Jack the Ripper, a son of 'Kween Vicky' supposedly that had his own hard line of 'criminal enforcement' against London's oldest profession. Not to forget Henry the (ate)th who had a lifelong case of the clap and spread it to half England's population. Now these
upper classes are so afraid of a pissant's revolt that they totally disarmed the people, and not content with that have more cameras to spy on its own population than Hitler or Stalin did. Still not content, they now seek to lock up 'personality disorders' 'in case they might offend'. Crap! This is just an excuse to lock up those they cannot under the European Union constitution execute, and those they can no longer dump on another shore as a kind of safety valve like they used to use Australia and colonial America in Georgia. And who is a 'personality disordered person'. Why it is anything or anyone who the brit authorities do not like! Period! The idea of 'personality disorder' is used to eliminate thousands of service members in the United States every year. Sergeant Smith wants Private Glaucus to mow the sarge's lawn at the sarge's house. Glaucus says no, or does it slow. Yup, there is another personality disorder. Corporal Mary refuses the advances of Colonel Smith or Jones....there goes another troop. Another out is to call them crazy. These 'legal definetions' and their illegal, unethical, and immoral re-definition are and have historically been the bane of services in the United States for many years simply because these 'rulings' are not appealable and are currently a way to legally violate the rights of servicemen and women. This is not limited to the military or to the United States. Bet a peek of Britain's legal system and the systems of its so called commonwealth members will reveal widespread practices of this. The next step in England of course is how to warehouse these illegally disenfranchised and kangaroo court imprisoned people....and one exists. They are called concentration camps. The new dungeons. Dont need trials. Dont need lawyers. People are weak anyway. Everybody that ever had spirit either left for America long ago. Or was killed in war. The rest have no weapons anyway so what are they goin to do.......bleat like lambs....well we got their faces on face recognition cameras and they cannot even fart in their own bathrooms without the guv knowin.. Then there are the new muslim immigrants! They get weapons all kinds of ways no matter what the laws. They are willing to die to take out brit targets. Their faces change every day as new ones overload the largest database as if this mattered anyway...BECAUSE THEY WEAR MASKS and dress in sacks to hide rocket lunchers and other junk. And there are millions of them. MORE are coming every day! And as commonwealth member citizens and EU citizens the have the RIGHT. How long be
I'm transhumanist too, but will call you on your crap. e'e sai
You don't give everything to the state. Nobody taxes 100%, and even the applicable taxes are not all reported. Libertarians on Slashdot are repetitive and tiring--we freaking get it. Also, you are STILL an animal--one of your "chimps". Try learning Lojban if you want to act above everyone.
Sharing a greasy spoon could get really old. Depending on how much grease is on it.
I like this new color scheme, the reddish and the blue. Wow. Hope you keep that a long time. Unless of course they figure a way to get the tumor that forces me to think that. What happens if they decide our brain is a really big tumor?
And who th heck put Karma: Bad on my personal data over there? I am an individual with my own slant on things. Does that make me Joe Dirt? My website is a reality website that opened the path for television reality shows galor. Look at the timeline. I went online March 10, 2003 with faxes I wrote my doctors who were dropping the ball. All I lacked was cameras but, my work plowed the road.
I have written webpages about my surviving doctor care in Virginia and the television show "I Shouldn't Have Survived" is now a hit. Who was the first and where can I pick up my award money? Where's the beef and where's the thanks? Indeed, this is a thankless generation. The love of the greater number has frozen cold to a lightpole in Antarctica as we await the coming mini-Ice Age about to gore us through the heart of Manhattan. {I added that to try and take the literary award also.}
Industrial Age 2 + How-to Stop Malignant Cancers.
Humans translate all the senses in chemicals and electrical signals in the brain.To borrow Descartes's example-- a brain in a jar that is fed inputs about the world-- is it not possible that we are just imagining the world and that nothing exists? By that measure, we have ultimate free will, since we create the world out of nothing.
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. Vladimir Nabokov
In the theory we have a problem, because the standard interpretations of quantum mechanics use terms such as "measurement" and "collapse" which they refuse to define, and then they refuse to explain why a collapse would occur, and you get people speculating about a requirement for conscious observers and other nonsense.
It isn't nonsense - there are still concious observers in the Many Worlds interpretation, in fact an increasing number of them (at least in most versions of Many Worlds). This raises all kinds of issues.
Well, it depends what kind of explanation you want. Of course no approach to quantum mechanics can tell you why you experienced history A rather than history B; all it can tell you is what the probabilities of the two histories are. The many world-worlds interpretation gives a (to me) convincing account as to how these probabilities arise from Schrödinger's equation alone.
But there is still a collapse - just for the individual experiencing it. What the Many-Worlds interpretation does is to hand-wave individual experience away as irrelevant (because other copies of you are experiencing something else). To me, it is deeply philosophically unsatisfying.
There are other interpretations which neither require a mysterious conciousness-driven collapse or a proliferation of universes or conciousnesses (such as the Transactional Interpretation). I am surprised they aren't more popular.
Yeah, like someone can both be pregnant and not pregnant. Errr... wait...
This happened to a friend. She had had a pregnacy test and it came back negative so then her doc ordered an xray. Afterwards they found out she was pregnant afterall. Since xray do terrible harm to fetuses she decided to have an abortion.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Sure, but the theory doesn't require them, it just allows for them.
There are numerous versions of Many Worlds, and they way that each does or doesn't incorporate concious observers differs.
True, the subjective collapse that every observer experiences is explained by Many Worlds. So "collapse", rather than the biggest mystery of QM, is simply a phenomenon predicted by the theory.
I would argue that the subjective collapse experienced by each observer really isn't explained by Many Worlds, as it does not explain any better than any other interpretation why any given observer experiences a particular version of events. The Copenhagen Interpretation requires a collapse on observation, the Many Worlds Interpretation requires an uncountable and growing number of parallel universes. Neither seem satisfactory to me.
I'm not familiar with that one, I'll check it out, thanks.
John Cramer is the orginator of the Transactional Interpretation. I mentioned it because it shows how the commonly held belief that you have to believe either in some mysterious collapse due to observation, or in Many Worlds is wrong - there are other alternatives, and the Transactional Interpretation is kind of fun!
Even if choice is guided by unconscious instinct, that instinct will usually have been honed by natural selection to do the right thing.
Oh.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
I understand my camp is currently on the losing side of the debate, though.
As someone else referenced, Einstein had taken that side of the debate, and rather than proving his position he inadvertantly wound up dis-proving it. There is no debate any longer. The "classical view"... idea that an electron has a real hidden position that we are unable to measure... has been proven impossible.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle for example: we treat an electron's position as probabilistic because the wavelengths of light necessary to observe an electron have such energy as to move the electron.
That's a classical-model type explanation. It was once believed to be true, it is still used as an easy non-physicist level explanation to explain the major implications of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, but it isn't accurate.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle does not merely describe a practical limitation to measuring a value, it means that a more exact position value literally does not exist in any conventional sense. The "probability wave" of an electron (or a bowlingball) is not merely some graph of where we know it might be. The wave itself is real and has real measurable effects. Imagine a wave on the ocean with a certain volume of water in it. You can squeeze that wave to become narrow and long, or you can stretch it wide and short, but the volume of water in that wave remains fixed. This is what Heisenberg's is about... an electron wave covers a range of positions and a range of momentums just as a water wave covers a range of width and length. If you squeeze the location-width of an electron wave really narrow, the volume of the wave has to remain fixed and that volume spills out into the momentum-width. If you squeeze the momentum, the volume of the wave spills out into the position direction.
The introductory proof of this is the double-slit experiment. In the (incorrect) classical view an electron always has a real exact position and always follows a real path. If you fire an electron at a screen with single slit in it (and assuming the electron doesn't hit the screen and stop), the electron would take a real single path through slit and would hit a random spot on the wall in back. You can map out the probability-image of where it hits by firing lots of electrons one-by-one. As you would expect from shining a light through a slit, it will predominantly hit the wall in a bright line directly behind the slit and the "brightness" fades off to each side. If you fire an electron at a double slit, the classical expectation is that the electron would always have a single real position and follow a single real path through one slit or the other, and that the probability-image on the back wall would be the simple sum of two overlapping bright lines behind the two slits. But this is not what happens... the classical view of a real point-particle with a real point-location is wrong.
Quantum mechanics says that the electron is a wave, and that the Heisenberg uncertainty wave of positions is real and has real effects. The wave spreads out and passes through *BOTH* slits in the screen at the same time. The two parts of the wave each start spreading out again and begin to overlap. Like a ripple on a pond, the wave is made up of "up and down" displacement of the water. When the up-ripple of one half of the wave from one slit meets the down-ripple from the other half of the wave from the other slit, the sum is zero. The surface of the water is flat there... the surface of space is flat there. There is no part of the electron wave in existance at that point in space. The electron does not and cannot exist there. It cannot hit the wall there.
So if you fire a lot of electrons one-by-one at the double slit, the probability image you get on the wall in back is a series of bright and dark lines. You get bright lines where the up-wave from one slit adds up with the up-wave from the other slit (and bright where the down-wave from one slit adds up with the down wave from t
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
sorry to spoil the debate but the free-will/determinism argument is clearly explained at
...
http://www.egodeath.com/
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.
If you choose not to decide, you still haven't [sung "have"] made a choice. [difference between printed and sung lyrics emphasizes *problematic* nature of free will in the face of the illusory nature of ego-power]
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill;
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose Free Will. [heavy irony - free will is anything but clear; it is centrally problematic]
All preordained [fatalism]
A prisoner in chains [search "prison", "free"]
A victim of venomous fate. [search "fate"]
Kicked in the face,
You can't [sung "can"] pray for a place [search "pray"]
In heaven's unearthly estate.
http://egodeath.com/rushlyrics.htm#xtocid22968
Now if you follow the part of the wave function describing a particular observer, again you will notice that it splits into several after the observation; then you can point to each of the subsequent observers and say: look, this one subjectively experienced a wave collapse to event A, this other one experienced a wave collapse to event B etc. What remains to be explained? Do you, as an observer, want an explanation why you personally experienced a collapse to event A? That, to me, is as if a twin asks "why was I the one born first?" Well, one had to be born first; your brother wonders why he was born second.
I'm talking about the Many Worlds theory in the sense of Everett, also described by David Deutsch.
But even those aren't the same. Some of Deutch's ideas about how Many Worlds works are fundamentally different from Everett's.
it simply defines what they are and proves that they exist.
Not really, as a common 're-interpretation' of Many Worlds is that all but one of the parallel worlds are simply 'potential' and we live in the 'actual' one. There is certainly no proof that these worlds exist.
Do you, as an observer, want an explanation why you personally experienced a collapse to event A? That, to me, is as if a twin asks "why was I the one born first?" Well, one had to be born first; your brother wonders why he was born second.
To a significant number of physicists and philosophers it is not the same question - if it was, they would not have so much difficulty with it, and they would not have made attempts to deal with the time-asymmetric continuous generation of new conciousnesses like the 'Many Minds' interpretation of H. Dieter Zeh and David Albert. To many, the splitting of concious observers is not something trivial.
The collapse by conciousness and the splitting of conciousness are of equivalent weirdness, and both suggest an incomplete understanding of QM, or that QM itself is incomplete.
It also suggests a tendency of physicists to excessively 'reify' mathematics: Just because you use the mathematics and models to solve things, does not mean that the mathematics and models describe what is really going on, and extrapolating to ideas like Many Worlds seems a bit excessive (as, indeed, do other interpretations of QM).
QM is almost certainly incomplete anyway, and what may result with unification with gravity could result in different interpretations. There have been interesting suggestions, like that of Penrose in which Many Worlds can exist on a small scale, but a collapse is forced when the worlds become sufficiently large for gravitational effects to apply.
Anyway, to me, Many Worlds hand-waves away personal experience in a way that reminds me of Terry Pratchett's Discword philosopher Didactylos. His explanation for events was "Things just happen".
No.
Get your science from somewhere better than "What the 'Bleep' do we know?"
Quantum mechanical effects are too small to have an effect.
And even if they did have an effect, what difference would that make? Would we just be robotic automotons with a quantum mechanical random seed? Would that mean we have free will? Or would it just give mysterian ignoramuses a small bit of ground to base their arguments on? (That small bit of argumentative ground reminds me greatly of the 'Nation' of Sealand -- a nation in name only.)
We're robots, people. ROBOTS. Get used to it.
Do I hear protests? Let me elaborate.
We're poetry writing, masterpiece painting, family loving robots. We are robots who get emotional when we hear good music and act like crazy people when we fall in love. We are robots that feel joy over learning a new and insightful idea. We're robots that get depressed over bad weather -- and feel happy again when the sun comes out and the plants begin to bud.
All of those wonderful experiences are driven by chemical machinery. Does we need a god or a Soul to be present? Do we need some immaterial, unobservable, ineffeble -- in short irrelevant and silly -- quantity to make these experiences feel real and worthwhile?
No. Grow up.
This is my right hand; this is my left hand.
Seriously, if you dig past the platitudes you'll find that almost no-one agrees on a definition. So if by "free will" you mean process (input => deterministic and/or random process => output) plus awareness then I'd say yep, free will pretty obviously exists. If you mean some mystical, ill-defined (the vast majority of definitions of "free will" that I've read are either blatantly circular (along the lines of "free will is the ability to excercise free will") or dependant on undefined base concepts) mystical "thing" dependant on a soul then free will is bollocks.
Of course, it's amusing to say that as free will doesn't exist we should "choose" to not gaol criminals. Circular argument, anyone?
Forthly, You were much less significatn in WWI and WWII as your history books imply.
Sources please? Most US history books on WWII make it clear that America would have preferred to stay out of the war, and only got involved in the last minute and was a minority, even on the Western Front. As for WWI, noone describes the American involvement as anything more than peripheral; its generally acknowledged that very few US forces went into actual battle. Your entire argument fits the textbook description of a straw man argument.