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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.'"
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.
The idea of a free Wii sounds much more interesting.
i hate it when i misread the headline
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.
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.
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.
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.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Yes, stupidity.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
Minority report was a PKD short story. Your slashdottian obsession with 1984 notwithstanding, don't disparage my Dick.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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.
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.
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.
\Nobody with the slightest knowledge of science has ever done this. You can't logically disprove the *existence* of God anyway, although you can make a very convincing logical argument that it doesn't matter if he exists or not. The existence of God, as something which by definition cannot be tested, measured, or understood is outside the limits of science. It's the domain of philosophy and mythology.
Information theory says information can not be created, only lost. Entropy is forever increasing. So where did the original order and information come from?
It says no such thing. It'd be trivially wrong if it did, as order emerges from chaotic systems constantly.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
I knew that reading/viewing all that science fiction would pay off someday.
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
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...
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.
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."
Actually if you look on PubMed you'll find a number of experiments that do demonstrate quantum aspects to microtubules and the brain; no, it doesn't prove consciousness is causal from them, but there's something to this; I think at the very least it partly explains memory in the brain. And regarding Libet, well, I'm not sure the arising of the urge to mash a button is really indicative of anything on a grander scale.
Introspection is consciousness. And someone who is conscious of thoughts, urges, as they arise will note they arise for a reason, and that something caused them. So what then is will? Will is acting upon a choice. But who chooses the choices we are presented with, the "good/bad" judgments made about them, the evaluation of the course of action? Who chooses the physical limitations upon actually carrying them out? Who chooses the train of thought and experience even leading up to that choice? Can such a thing really be called a choice at all? Who chooses to have a choice? Certainly things beyond our "will", our control.
And what then is freedom? Freedom from what, for who? There was never any "freedom" in this path to begin with, rather, only bondage to things arising from causes. Freedom can't even truly be used to describe a "go/no go" decision, the meeting of the frontal lobe and limbic system. So what then is freedom? Freedom is in being uncaused, beyond causality, which neither thought nor emotion is. Yet, consciousness remains above both, above causes, conscious not only of the body, but of the mind, and of itself. So truly, who are "you" to have free will at all? Wandering thoughts arising from external events and the structure of the brain? Or consciousness of that happening?
If so, then as Ram Dass said, we don't have free will-- we are free will. Why then, do people consider things they have never controlled, and say "this is me, I am this"?
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.
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.
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!
I belive this idea dates back to at least ancient Rome.
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.
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.
I'm not sure if you're accusing me of making a one-dimensional analysis, but if you are you'll note I did reference the Nolan chart which is a two-dimensional graph of positions on the political spectrum, and I'm fond of using a variety of higher-dimensional models myself. In general I tend to find wherever there is a long-standing controversy, the two "sides" in the end seems to be talking past each other, propounding issues orthagonal to each other; in other words, they're not arguing opposite sides on a single issue, but they're arguing different issues.
A classic political example of this is that some people who identify themselves as "conservative" because of economics issues, and argue against "liberals" because of those same economics issues, may actually agree with those liberals on social or interpersonal issues; and likewise, some "liberals" who argue against "conservatives" on social issues may agree with some of those same conservatives on economic issues. This breakdown of the left-right axis is what lead to the Nolan chart's two-dimensional spectrum.
Myself, I see each of the axis of the Nolan chart itself as a false dichotomy; there are in fact at least four dimensions that need plotting there. It's not just personal freedom and economic freedom; each of those axes can be broken down into two axes of individual freedom and collective responsibility. People who hold positions "against freedom" on some axis of the Nolan chart are often actually arguing for collective responsibility (that is, responsibility to society as a member thereof), which doesn't have to come at the expense of personal freedom and may in fact be required to ensure it. Consider how much personal freedom (as in "freedom from", negative liberty) anyone would have if there were no police forces to keep the strong from simply plowing over the weak; and then consider that those police forces can only exist if everyone is collectively responsible enough to support them. Anyone who supports the moderate social position that there should be police forces, but only to the extent of limiting some individuals from trampling over the freedoms of other individuals, is actually in favor of both individual social freedom and collective social responsibility.
You could be (and people often are) just one or the other, though the tenability of your position would be questionable; you could argue that everyone should be free to do anything and not have to be responsible for guarding the equal freedoms of others (like an anarchist), or that everyone should be mutually responsible for everyone else's social wellbeing but there should be very little personal freedom (like most collectivist religious types). I guess theoretically you could support neither - believing that no one should be socially free, that people must adhere to some particular strict code of behavior handed down from above, but that no one is responsible for ensuring that anybody else must do so. I guess some Christian Anarchists could hold that position, but it seems pretty rare and rather indefensible IMO.
So yes, the truth is multidimensional. I never said otherwise.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
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
I must take issue with your characterisation of Anarchism here.
All but the most fringe Anarchists would agree that all individuals are responsible for guarding the equal freedoms of others. In fact, the voluntary choice of individuals to organise to guaratee each other's freedoms is the very core of Anarchism, see the works of Proudhon, Kropotnik and Bakunin. There is no objection in mainstream Anarchism against the collective of individuals taking action against one who misuses his freedom to trample on the freedoms of others.
Most Anarchist thought rests on two pillars
Note very well that the second point brings up the possibility of there being rightful authority. Even Bakunin said he'd defer to the authority of his bootmaker when it comes to mending his boots. There is a definite bent of meritocracy in Anarchist thought, but it only stretches as far as to recognise authority flowing from expertise. Me knowing something about computers gives me authority to say you are doing things suboptimally with your IT resources, but it does not give me authority to force you to do things my way.
Furthermore, extending from the first point, no human has the right to ride roughshod over the rights of others, as all others' rights have equal weight to theirs. Disregarding what crimes may exist in an ideal Anarchist society (I refer you to Enrico Malatesta for details), crime will exist nonetheless as no human is perfect, and it is right and proper for individuals to take action, both individually and collectively, against those that would abrogate their rights. What distinguishes such action from the common practice of using police forces in conventional societies is that those taking action are not seen to have inherent authority to do so. Their authority only flows from the actions of the abuser, and it ends once the abuse is stopped.
Muddling this analysis is of course that Anarchism appears to appeal to a lot of dissatisfied teenagers, who are already at a stage of life where rebellion against authority is a common mode of thought, and who are attracted to the apparent 'no responsibility' of Anarchism. They are usually the stone throwers who shout 'down with The Man' as they disrupt otherwise peaceful demonstrations. They either grow out of it (subsequently often turning to authoritarian modes of thought in reaction), or they learn more of the deeper philosophy behind Anarchism and start taking responsibility.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?