Two important reasons why belief in absolute free will is immoral

[DFINITLYDISTRUBD]

Oh.:)

[REASON]

Well said, CraigD! :) :)

I would give you rep but the system won't let me.

 

Having read what you said and what I did... this brings us to a conclusion:

 

Krim's thesis against free will is immoral, because it is useless, self-destructive and wrong.

 

Pyro,

 

Maybe I misunderstood Craig but I gather from his post that he is in the camp that does not believe free will exists.

 

If so, he is not likely to be in agreement with you that Krim's thesis is immoral.

 

Personally, I don't find it in any way immoral for someone to share thier position or take a side in what has been a historical philosophical debate. I may not completely agree with them, but in a discussion such as this, it seems inappropriate to suggest that someone's opinion is immoral.

 

I understand that your reaction is primarily a jab at the title of this thread, but if you consider Krim's initial argument, you might find that it is meant to convey that our sense of retribution in the application of punishment, based on a liberalist mindset is what is immoral, not just the belief in free will. Simply stated, punishment should be geared around corrective behavior rather than exacting revenge. It is acting out of a sense of revenge or retribution that is immoral if I understand Krim correctly.

 

While I believe that feelings of vengence are human and would be difficult to overcome, I don't believe Krim's notion is outlandish or deserving of this level of ridicule.

[CraigD]

Maybe I misunderstood Craig but I gather from his post that he is in the camp that does not believe free will exists.

You gather correctly – but within the limitations imposed by the ambiguity of the term “free will” as used in common language.

 

In short, I believe that in the context of pure physics, free will does not exist, but in a practical, moral and ethical context, it does.

If so, he is not likely to be in agreement with you that Krim's thesis is immoral.

I’d describe the argument in post #1 of this thread as logically incorrect, rather than immoral – though again, given the limitations of the language used, am unsure even of this judgement.

While I believe that feelings of vengence are human and would be difficult to overcome, I don't believe Krim's notion is outlandish or deserving of this level of ridicule.

I don’t think any ideas are productively discussed through the use or ridicule. When this argumentative technique enters a discussion, it’s a strong sign, I think, of significant communication failure.

 

This thread contains many examples of the sorts of communication failures described in the discipline of General Semantics that Pyrotex describes in post #30 (of which I’ve been a fan since being introduced to the discipline in the 1990s, though sadly deficient in formal study).

 

For example, the term “free will” has been used in several very different contexts in this thread, both as it pertains to a mechanistic worldview, and as a moral doctrine.

 

Conflicting meanings of the terms “nearly” and “know” in the exchange between DFINITLYDISTRUBD prompted the following:

Please note that I'm not claiming that EVERYONE but NEARLY everyone. Nor was I confining to any specific group(s) but instead all people.

Please note that I still don’t accept the claim – though it depends on your interpretation of “nearly”. I take it to mean something like “99% or more”, rather than “80% or more”, though AFAIK, there’s no official standard.

 

More important that opinion poll results, however, IMHO, the claim raises issues about the use of the word “know” as in “nearly everybody knows”. “To know” implies, to me, in this context, knowledge of an established fact, as in “I know the capital of the United States is Washington, DC”. However, the word is also commonly used to mean nearly the opposite, as in “I know with absolute certainty that <insert deity of choice> exists, and is my <insert relationship with deity of choice>”. I suspect that the context in which DD meant it is closer to this context than the one in which I took it.

 

Part of the “mental hygene” practices advocated by GS consists of avoiding the use of the same word to describe different concepts, by extending it with a subscript (eg: [math]\mbox{know}_{\mbox{established fact}}[/math] vs. [math]\mbox{know}_{\mbox{strong belief}}[/math]), or avoiding ambiguity-laden words altogether.

 

Continued discussion of GS would, I think, depart too far from the topic of this thread, though I look forward to discussing it soon in a new thread. My main point concerning this thread is that it’s essentially deadlocked in the sort of communication breakdown addressed in GS, and comically, in the dialog like “these go to eleven” (a phrase with its own wikipedia entry).

[Kriminal99]

Okay, let's take a different tack.

First, I wish to admit that I don't read your posts very thoroughly. Most of them, I don't even read to the end.

 

Arguments from ignorance

 

I would say that this is all you need to be posting, but you don't actually have to post that you DIDN'T read something, you only need not respond.

 

Do you really believe that it is relevant that other people's posts make you angry and childishly lash out with some unsupported and unfounded claim of their naivety or whatever else?

 

Do you know what else is capable of acting in that manner? Really just about any animal... They don't have the slightest clue what is going on around them. People are accomplishing all kinds of things and discussing all kinds of complex issues around them, and they are oblivious. Sometimes though, they see something that appears to have negative meaning in their little animal interpretation of the world - and they bear their teeth, or extend their claws or whatever else and attack. If only we could explain to those animals what was really going on! But the problem is, they wouldn't have the slightest clue what we are saying! Sometimes you can train them, but if they have already decided to respond so negatively then all communication is broken.

 

What is with you that you don't even read posts, and yet still could think that you have something worth saying in response to them? Do you have rabies?

 

What did Free willl advocates call commitment again? hmmm???

 

I am sorry you didn't realize that a person could just as easily interpret commitment as a feeling (perhaps a feeling with a context if you are having trouble understanding it as a feeling?) or reason driving our behavior as... hey wait a minute what did you think it was that was non deterministic? Oh yeah I forgot free will advocates don't flesh out their theories that far...

 

I DOUBT THE WORLD AND THE MIND I AM USING TO DOUBT IT!!!

 

Determinism has about as much doubt associated with it as whether or not we are even really here as opposed to being in the matrix or a "brain in a vat" or something like that. You have trouble with it because it feels like you are in control. Everyone else's behavior makes sense in the context of their past. But you? Noooo, not at all. You are completely in control. Never mind that you look exactly the same to them.

 

Understanding determinism is like understanding that you have a body and face etc just like everyone else, except instead of seeing a mirror and considering people's reactions to you to realize it, you have to realize that those emotions that drive your choices are not under your control. And for many people, that is just too far of an abstraction without a serious push.

 

That may mean having a lot of experiences where you react to extreme situations then look back years later and realize that you acted on the best available information on the situation at the time. It could mean running into someone who already understands determinism and listening to their arguments.

 

Simple relevance criteria

 

In order for the discussion to be important with respect to morality, all that needs to be the case is that there is a difference in how much immoral behavior is committed when a person does or does not believe in free will. Both sides accept this is the case, so therefore it is very important.

 

Determinists have problems with fools running around blaming everything bad on the free will of others instead of learning ways to influence THE SYSTEM to achieve better results. And they have problems with people running around demanding respect for good things that happened that were really just handed to them by the SYSTEM.

 

Free Will advocates get mad that determinists try to take away their conviction against people they don't like by telling them that the person is acting according to their past circumstances. Both sides deem this a relevant discussion.

 

Determinism opening doors to "choose" from... hrhrhrhr

 

lol @ free will based metaphor. How many doors does determinism open? There is more than one answer to that question, based on how you interpret the question. On one hand, obviously it doesn't open or close any doors to the determinist. The doors you were going to take were already open.

 

What determinism affords you?

 

On the other hand, deterministically realizing that determinism is true makes you a hundred times more competent in your dealings with the world. On one hand you have someone who can't accomplish anything because he blames everything on the free will of others, and on the other hand you have someone who tries to find a way to influence the deterministic system.

 

Empowering free will self defeating?

 

What's that? You thought your "free will" made you more capable? How could you accomplish anything if everyone else had their own free will that prevented you from being able to influence what is going on? Maybe you thought you had free will but no one else did?

 

Perhaps you are one of those free will baptist types. One thing always bothered me about them. You know that argument where god gives us the will to choose how to act and therefore whether or not we go to heaven and hell? Are you more powerful than god that your choices can actually affect anything without being stopped by the free will of others? How can you accomplish anything where people's actions are not dependent on what you do?

 

This is just like that situation where a philosopher has to point out the irony of everyone believing that only themselves and their friends are intelligent, and everyone else is stupid.

 

REAL adversity

 

Oh poor baby? Did daddy not buy you the Nintendo you wanted on your birthday because he didn't make enough money at the factory? Well take heart, because it isn't a total loss.

 

If you had gotten it, the kid next to you that really had it bad might have STABBED YOU AND TOOK IT FROM YOUR PANSY BUTT!!!!!

 

You know, the kid that really had it bad. The crazy mother#$@# who heard voices in his head which he thought were you trying to mock him. The one who was regularly beaten (after his mom of course) because of the crumb on the counter in which all of his father's drunken self hatred was manifested in.

 

It doesn't directly matter how much money you have or where you grow up. It matters how much random punishment you face in your life.

 

There are people who's minds work fundamentally different than yours - those automatic aspects of how you perceive your world are different. You know how you hear your name in a crowded cafeteria and look up to see your smiling friend?

 

Guess what? These people don't see or hear someone smiling at them, because their subconsious mind "knows" it isn't real or a significant aspect of life from past experience. They see and hear the people across the cafeteria referring negatively to the person "in the red shirt" and react emotionally to this. Those people are there for you too, but they don't mean anything to you subconsciously. Your intuition doesn't tell you that they are your number one concern right now.

 

People under these conditions go all different directions. Rats with poor reasoning ability simply die from a heart attack. Some people go nuts and begin a constant struggle with imagined negative behavior towards them as their mind is unable to perceive any structure to the world.

 

I was lucky. When I was a little kid, I saw this movie which I happened to comprehend for some reason. There was a sick mother in a poor family who told the kids who wanted ice cream they could have all the ice cream they ever wanted. The father went with them to the store and the kids told them about mommy's promise of ice cream. The father looked at the few dollars he had in his hand which he needed to purchase necessities and told the kids bitterly that mommy was sick or something along those lines. Then he came home and yelled at his wife. And so I understood that there were causes for negative behavior.

 

This completely changed what happened from then on. A single random event, what happened to be playing on tv that day. Also the random events which allowed that movie to make sense to me. Luck allowed me to be better off than other people who started in similar circumstances.

 

For me to claim it was anything else would be a horrible crime against anyone else who lived through things like that.

 

I find myself agreeing both with the argument that to begin to truly rationally understand reality, one must reject the existence of free will, considering it a semantic null, as well as the argument that to maintain the necessary mental wellbeing to begin to truly rationally understand reality, one must accept that free will exists, and that one is exercising it. This is a classic “good myth” position, which means I must be a moral and epistemological pragmatist. :Exclamati

 

I am sure you realize these are not mutually exclusive nor is the latter separately necessary except to help people like Pyro understand that determinists don't actually believe that, for example, bank robbers should get away with it because their daddy beat them as a child?

 

Kriminal99

 

I've yet reason one or two!!!! wus up with dat?!?

 

Much ado about nothing really. NEARLY EVERYONE KNOWS (apparently there are a few that don't) that freewill

is real....Your arguments are further proof!

 

Freewill: the ability to make your own choices based on whaterer the #3!! you want to base them on! (life experiences, rational thought, irational thought, emotions, or nothing at all "just for the #3!! of it"< my personal favorites .) ...It's one of the very few things that science and christianity actually agree upon!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!( possibly the only thing!)

 

I agree with 99.9% of average rational persons....determinism is a copout...."It's not my fault my whatever made me do it... Life has been cruel to me so I harm others"...sorry bub it's a huge steaming crock of $#!+!!!

 

Determinism implies a strict cause effect universe...unchangeable in it's path...the same cause does not always yield the same (sometimes similar but never identical) effect any where in existance...and worse this kind of bs leads to winers crying that fate is against them and much much much worse than that people that credit fate instead of their hard work and abilities for their success (which is truly immoral!!!!!!)..

 

(The following question is aimed specificaly at the originator of this thread)

Besides WTH do any of your posts have to do with the morality of believing one way or the other?!? (besides the title)

 

And now let's analise this.

Dad rips off teen. Teen makes concious decision to be a freeloader. The teen knows that his dad is a thief and now knows that if he doesn't want to get ripped off again he must be more careful with his money....BUT chooses to be a freeloader.

Still freewill...If something is determined (< odd that word is extremely similar to determinism!) there is no choice.

 

I'm guessing two things about you, tell me if I am wrong. 1) Very young, 2) Very Christian and brainwashed (ever heard of free will baptists? Did you know they were called that in response to a superior yet hard to understand determinist belief set held by puritans, the original American Christians?)

 

Science does not "agree" with religion about free will. Science and religion are not things that agree with anything. They are inanimate ideas. However, many intelligent scientists and theists (people who follow some religion or belief in god) believe in determinism.

 

Understanding determinism may require a level of abstraction that you are not prepared to wrangle with at this point in your life. So you decide to jump off a bridge in response to this thread to prove you have free will. Your actions were determined by the thread. Instincts drive your behavior and these instincts relate to these reasons.

 

Ever had one of those AHA I GET IT!! moments? Afterwards where did that feeling go? Was it turned up really high right then, and then it turned off (the emotion) Or did it just seem to kind of fade in intensity until it was too hard to tell what it was doing? Guess what? It is always there. Your actions are constantly being driven by feelings like that, only you may not call them feelings when they lack intensity. Everything you do, you do because you FELT LIKE IT. Only, you don't control what you feel. Your subconsious, which is a machine, does.

 

You are damned straight that it is ignorant to blame someone else's free will for something you don't like about their actions. You punish someone who robs a bank because you have to in order to deterministically prevent such behavior. Not because the person deserves it due to his bad choices. Determinism doesn't shelter someone who does that, it only helps us understand how to get him back on track.

 

Determinism doesn't tell you not to see what you can do (like hard work) to accomplish your goals. It shows you that you can do things involving other people to accomplish your goals as well.

 

A better question is how can someone with free will accomplish anything through hard work, when someone else's free will determines the impact of your hard work?

[Kriminal99]

And while one's previous experience, wisdom, and knowledge, gained within their previous chain of events, is likely to be influential in their feelings and future decisions, it is impossible to define how they will be used in any given situation among varying individuals to effect future decisions.

 

I agree that you cannot plug all of someone's experiences into a computer that returns his next action with 100% accuracy. But I do believe a few things are possible:

 

I can see the causes of my own actions, even when other people claim it was a poor choice on my part in hopes of receiving "relative" respect. Example: In high school Scott Brady tells other of how a certain kid used to get in trouble all the time in third grade, blaming the kid's free will rather than the horrible home life that kid experienced.

 

I can see causes of other people's actions which contradict their claims of their own "free will" being responsible for their successes. Example: In the movie Talladega nights, Ricky Bobby goes on with his "I wake up and piss excellence in the morning" speech after winning a race in which his submissive teammate gave up any ability to win by sling shotting Ricky.

 

I can gauge people's emotional reactions to a situation, and then categorize them as having a certain understanding based on a general category of experiences that will allow me to predict their emotional reaction (and therefore a category of likely behavior) to a future situation.

 

Example: My new roommate frowns when I converse with him in a reserved manner upon first meeting him. I guess that he is possibly a younger sibling (accomplish much by watching and learning, receive little credit) who will react negatively to any situation in which he is not the "winner". He will probably attempt to say negative things about me behind my back, and be very sensitive to his girlfriend paying too much attention to me. (In this case, all of these predictions were true)

 

As I was crossing a bridge, I was aware that with the simple turn of the wheel, I could send all of us careening off the bridge to our deaths below.

 

People make choices that seem weird to us it is true. But is it true that someone made a choice like this? Or did they do something they felt like they had to and just had reasons that we cannot see or understand? How often do you abandon your car and attempt to walk to Mexico with no reason? Sure I could do it. But I am not going to. What do I know about Mexico? How are statistics on human behavior even possible? Because people simply do not do things like that, or at least not often. People are on an invisible set of train tracks, and they do not even realize it.

 

The specific situation is something that is a little different and quite common. I think about something like that any time I look over the edge of a tall building. It is like a way the subconsious evaluates threats. On one hand, your past experience warns you that the bridge/balcony is a threat. On the other hand, your past experience tells you that bridges and balconies are something that people often deal with without tragedy. So your mind forces you to play out a fall in your mind to see if it seems realistic and be wary of the danger.

 

While I understand Krim's reasoning regarding the immoral application of punishment from a Liberalist point of view, I estimate that it will be virtually impossible to eliminate feelings of vengence from the application of punishment, particularly with regard to those who choose to perpetrate heinous crimes, no matter what determined their choice to do so.

 

Is vengence immoral? Maybe. But I can promise that I will experience feelings of vengence if someone were to rape and murder my daughter. Remember, I can't control my feelings, so in this instance, I would not be able to control my immoral feelings. But I can choose not to act on them.

 

Now Krim will suggest that choosing not to act has a reason; maybe to avoid punishment; maybe because I didn't want to reduce myself to the level of the murderer. But among the various possibilities, including exacting revenge on the SOB, I have the capability of choosing my course of action, which is the "free will" element of my determined existance.

 

I can see how you would feel that way. However if you truly take my point of view to heart, you don't look at the situation the same any more. The potential loss is a problem separate from the cause. You might look at it more the same way you would look at your daughter being threatened by an animal or machine. This type of attitude may make it less likely to happen, as you are antagonizing the person less by seeing him as a circumstance rather than a evil bastard.

 

Their attitude towards you treating them like an evil bastard and the world doing the same despite all the screwed up circumstances they experienced is that they might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. I have been in a situation where I have talked someone out of committing a crime just by treating them like a person and reasoning with them. Not that I wasn't ready to stab the guy if he attacked me anyways - only because I had to.

 

I haven't actually experienced any extreme loss like that, so I don't know how I would react for sure. But if the loss actually happens, the argument become someone trivial in my opinion. You have to do something severe as punishment to deterministically prevent such things from happening in the future.

[Kriminal99]

I present this NOT to persuade Krim (he's cast in his own concrete)

 

A quick response here: I consider arguments that MAKE SENSE. Don't come to me with a bunch of "If the glove don't fit, you must acquit" bs and think I am going to change my opinion. When have you successfully convinced anyone of anything for that matter? You can't even see reality for what it is, it either makes sense according to what you already know or it does not exist...

 

A few pointers:

 

Stating the opposite of an opponents claim apart from an argument countering it - ad hominem/appeal to authority fallacy. Because you are making a claim without support you are implying that the reader should pay attention to your claim instead of your opponent's.

 

Refusing to read opponent's posts: Straw man fallacy, red herring fallacy etc.

It is ok to honestly mistake someones argument during the course of communication, but refusing to read opponents arguments means you are potentially arguing based on fake versions of them that you created to make your argument look better.

 

 

Now, where do you find "CAUSE"?? Which "world" does "cause" have its existence in??

 

Defined by context, It's a function of things a person has perceived where a certain event is always preceded by another event with 100% frequency. We label the prior event a cause. Other types of causation are metaphors.

 

And to preempt the objection, you can't distinguish a cause from a 100% correlated prior event. Sometimes you suspect something isn't a 100% correlated event when you sample across the entire population and thus test to see if you can create a situation where they do not occur at the same time. If you can create it, then it wasn't a cause.

 

BUT--it has its existence ONLY in our semantic modeling of the universe. There are NO "causes" in the atoms and forces and gradients and fields of the universe. You can dig around with electron microscopes all you want and you will never find a naked, pure "cause" crawling around on a dust mote.

 

That would be because a cause isn't an object? Things occur prior to other events with 100% accuracy all the time.

 

And so, the statement that everything (every action we take) has an infinite stream of "causes" behind it that forbid free will -- is patently false.

 

Surrreeee it is... now all you need is one of those suits with the question marks all over it! Nah it's actually pretty common that events are 100% likelihood of being correlated with a future event.

 

That stream may exist to some extent, but it only goes back as far as the boundary between the Map and Territory. Your "causes" are literally "in your head" and you chose them.

 

Correlations between events and their causes exist outside of my head... yawn... is this what you were basing not reading my posts but responding to them anyways on?

 

 

Let's take a closer look at the Territory, the Real World "out there". There's a lot we know about it. We use semantic inventions like "cause" and "effect" to help us understand and explain the events and relationships in it. But discoveries in Chaos Theory and Quantum Mechanics and Probability (see the works of Prigogine) tell us absolutely that this is NOT a clockwork universe. There are many aspects of our world that are INHERENTLY unpredictable, even though the "equations of motion" are apparently deterministic. In fact, most of the really interesting phenomena of our universe are of this kind, including orbital mechanics and weather forecasting. This subject was detailed in other threads.

 

I am sorry that you do not understand what you read about quantum physics, or lack abstract reasoning ability in general or whatever your problem is. The issues of predictability that quantum physicists ramble on about have zilch to do with philosophical determinism.

 

In the 16 dollar ebay book pyrotex mentions and others like it people talk about things like how much processing power you would need to predict future events based on the past. Anyone who even goes down this path obviously doesn't understand determinism. No one ever used determinism to precisely predict future events...

 

Another one is there is no determinism because future events affect past events. Great, untie the knot and determinism is back in working order.

 

All of these are of course speculation trying to understand something which we so far have a poor understanding of, quantum physics. Should we toss out determinism because there are a lot of things we don't know in QM? I don't think so...

 

In typical Pyrotex "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" fashion, the 2 13 dollar ebay books he links to have nothing to do with the subject of QM but is rather some book by someone rambling on about why they like free will and how they think it affects communities, and just about high variance systems in general.

 

Nothing mentioned in any of these books has a damn thing to do with determinism...

 

Krim's thesis is not only useless and self-immolating -- it is also wrong.

 

No it is wrong to log onto the internet and start spouting a bunch of bs you pulled out of your behind potentially confusing readers due to your emotional inability to accept determinism and fear of reading related arguments...

[Boerseun]

No.

 

There's no freewill, nor determinism.

 

You're actually floating in a ball of snot with a data cable plugged into your brain that stimulates your nervous system to play a stream of signals to your brain that you experience as "reality". Ala The Matrix.

 

And don't tell me it's not so.

 

The argument for Free Will, or for Determinism, or for existing in a Matrix universe, is equally strong, and there are no possible evidence or tests that can discern between these three states.

 

Or, of course, I can tell you that you are actually a delusional Gorak living on the planet Feeblefetzer, and you have been locked up in a nuthouse for going on and going on and going on about this planet Earth all the time, talking about discussing Free Will vs. Determinism on a machine and having people type back at you from the other side of the planet... I mean, come on! You must be looney!

 

...and the evidence for this, you being a nutty alien on some strange planet, is also as strong as the evidence for the previous three.

 

And that's why I'm saying:

 

Pick your reality, and go with the flow. If you think the universe is deterministic, bully for you. If you believe yourself to be a crazy alien, good on you, mate. There is no difference between any of them, and belief in any of them will not affect the outcome of any scientific experiment on any level.

 

As a matter of fact, seeing as there are no imaginable tests to discern between these states, if you come to a conclusion regarding Determinism vs. Free Will, and whatever that conclusion might be, it will require some leap of faith, because it will be baseless and without evidence. As such it will not make solid science or even philosophy. It might qualify as some sort of religious sect, though.

[Qfwfq]

Krim, if you can't keep your cool in a debate, that's enough.

 

Thread closed.