Freewill vs. Determinism
This topic has been covered ad nauseum on nearly every page on the internet. But it still generates so much good conversation that I will stir he pot again.
Imagine you are walking down the street and come upon a woman lying on the ground crying. Suddenly you realize she has obviously been assaulted. You rush to her side, feeling an intense desire to help. The thing we would refer to as our “self” stands at the intersection of the lines of input and stimuli with decision and action. By all accounts you will tend to feel that you are the root cause of your own thoughts and actions. Personal choice has led you to either act or not to act. You seem to be acting on your own free will. However, as I hope to highlight this perspective cannot be held in light of what science tells us about the workings of the human brain. At a conscious level we are aware of only a small portion of the information that our brains are processing at each moment. While we are continually aware of acute changes in our moods, thoughts, perceptions, behavior, etc. we are left completely unaware of the brain states that produce these changes. Yet nearly all of us maintain that we are the creators of our own patterns of thought and action. The physiologist Benjamin Libet has demonstrated that neural activity in the motor regions can be detected 350 milliseconds before the subject is aware that they have decided to move. (Libet, Gleason, Wright and Pearl, 1983). More recently fMRI data has been shown to convey that “conscious” decisions can be seen in neural activity 10 seconds before the subject is aware of them. (Soon, Brass, Heinze and Hayes, 2008) These findings make it difficult to maintain that one is the conscious author of their own actions. No perspective which takes into account causality leaves room for freewill. Our internal dialog of thoughts, desires and moods simply pop into minds producing either action or stasis. The reasons for this are left unexplained from a purely subjective point of view. Our belief in free will seems to spring out of our moment to moment ignorance of the causal chain which produces our thoughts and actions. The term “free will” merely describes the feeling of being the author of our own thoughts as they arise in consciousness. Take for instance a train of thoughts like, “I’m hungry. I think there is some cake in the fridge. Well cake isn’t very healthy, maybe cottage cheese would be better,” this example highlights the apparent choices one can make, and they seem freely made. But looking deeper reveals that these thoughts simply arise free of our authorship and yet direct our actions nevertheless. The alternative position to traditional free will is often known as Determinism, and is almost considered a bad word by most people. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has highlighted the confusion most people carry with regards to determinism. “They equate determinism with fatalism.” This confusion produces questions such as, “if determinism is true why should I do anything? Why not just wait and see what happens?” This line of questioning reveals that most people imagine that if our choices depend on prior causes that they do not matter. The fact that I am writing this paper is the result of a choice to do so, if I had not decided to write it, it would not get written. But my choice to do so was unquestionably the result of many causal factors, such as the desire to achieve a decent grade, social pressures and a desire to achieve a goal. Choice is as important as those who fancy free will state that it is. Some people imagine that if we acknowledge that we are not the author of our own thoughts and actions that, moral and political freedoms then become unimportant. But merely acknowledging the causal influences and the fact that we do not know what we will intend until the intention arises, does not lessen the value of personal freedom of individuals to do what they intend or not to do otherwise, regardless of the source of those intentions. This issue is not purely philosophical and academic, meant to be a silly logical exercise. This belief in free will is the foundation of the religious notion of “sin” as well as the underlying commitment to retributive justice. Free will has been deemed by The Supreme Court a “universal and persistent” base for law in our country, also stating “a deterministic view of human conduct that is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system” (United States v. Grayson, 1978). It seems that any advancements in science which threaten the commonly held notions about free will draw into question the ethics of punishing people for their bad behavior. It seems that the primary worry is that an honest discussion of the root causes of our behavior will erode moral responsibility. But does the acknowledgement of underlying causes for our behavior mean that we cannot be expected to take responsibility for our actions? Of course we wouldn’t. We can view human beings as forces of genetic and environmental influences and still not be prevented from talking about moral responsibility, it does however, cause problems for our practices of retributive punishment. Obviously there are people who possess the intent to harm and cannot be helped away from his intention. We need to protect society from them. It is clear from the scientific findings that the people who are the worst criminals we can imagine have some grouping of bad genetics, bad influences, bad ideas and bad circumstances. The role these have played in the bad choices they have made should seem obvious. The question then becomes, which of these ingredients can we hold them responsible for? The justice system (if is to be just) must reflect the understanding that any of us could easily have been dealt a very different hand in life, and given that different hand we could be in their place. It borders on immorality to not consider the level of blind chance which is involved in morality. Imagine a heinous murder in which the killer did it “just for the fun of it”. Yet upon psychiatric and medical examination he is found to have a tumor the size of a golf ball in the medial prefrontal cortex of his brain (this area is responsible for emotional control and behavioral impulse). It would be fairly easy to surmise that he was not in any real sense responsible for his actions in carrying out the murder. He was not in his right mind. We would not prescribe the same punishment for him as we would a perfectly healthy individual. Why not? Would it be moral to deny this man surgery as a ”punishment” for his crime? And furthermore where do we draw the line in ascribing personal responsibility apart from the causal forces which author our thoughts and actions?
Please read Thou Art Physics
There’s no conflict between free will and determinism—the very opposite, free will becomes possible only in the presence of determinism. If your current self couldn’t determine your actions, there wouldn’t be any meaningful free will.
On one hand, free will appears to require determinism, for the reasons you give. On the other hand, this interpretation requires a significant re-interpretation of what “free will” means, that is incompatible with what most people think it means. Accepting the determinism-compatible definition of free will probably has non-obvious consequences.
The difficulty of seeing the determinist view of free will, of understanding timeless decision theory, and understanding what an algorithm feels like from the inside, are all basically the same difficulty. They are all non-trivial.
I disagree with this. I think most people don’t really think about what free will means, but once they think about it they concede that it must mean your personality decides stuff, and NOT that you’re necessarily unpredictable.
Indeed, that’s granted even by advocates of libertarian free will, albeit in a sneaky and one-directional fashion.
Concentrating on just the final paragraph first, because it provokes the most interesting answer IMO.
Really, why?
Not quite. He was his mind; where he refers to the man with a tumor. He was not in tumor-free-man’s right mind. So we punish man-with-tumor, not man-without-tumor, as they are clearly very different people.
Depends which state you live in. By removing the tumor, we are essentially killing man-with-tumor. Replacing him with man-without-tumor, a completely different person. If you live somewhere with the death penalty, that is in fact the punishment you would give a healthy individual.
In what way would that be a punishment for man-with-tumor, the entity that commited the crime? Man-without-tumor would be punished by that, due to continued non-existance, but man-with-tumor would not.
Are you aware of the prior discussion of the topic on this site in particular?
The relevant posts are here.
I’m going to downvote this just because I think +4 points is too high considering you didn’t provide links. I don’t mean to discourage posting such comments without links, and wouldn’t vote one into negative territory, but I think the links add a lot of the value, and should especially be given because you are criticizing someone new to the site for not searching for the old discussions.
I agree. I won’t edit links in, though, because jsalvatier already provided that information and I don’t want to karma-snipe.
I think the comments in reply to this are a really good illustration of how starting a discussion off with confused, unstudied and otherwise poorly framed arguments can doom the entire conversation. It’s like there is a conservation of comment quality- where a reply to a post can never be more than twice as insightful as the OP. Given a sufficiently low quality post any comment that directly engages with it is also low quality.
Agreed, the term determinism is being used in a very non-standard way here.
This article doesn’t add anything notable to the previous Less Wrong articles about free will, and in fact seems to miss the entirety of the philosophical tradition around it. Have you ever heard of compatibilism?
See my post Crime and Punishment, and the follow-up, Separate morality from free will, for my view on why this apparent paradox is not real, but is caused by misappropriating the word “morality” for religious purposes and cultural signalling.
Nice post. Concise and to the point.
The purpose of the justice system is not to punish criminals, it’s to protect society. This is usually done through negative incentives, i.e. punishment. If removing the tumor also removes the man’s desire to kill for the fun of it, then there is no reason to punish him.
There are at least 4 variations of what justice is for—some legal experts will endorse all of them simultaneously. It’s at least the case that if you think one of them is obviously what justice is for, you’re wrong.
Sorry, I was being American-centric, where the system is designed primarily to “enforce the standards of conduct necessary to protect individuals and the community” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice).
But you’re right, there isn’t a consensus on the “best” definition. Deciding which one is best would probably need another post for itself.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the relevant criterion here isn’t what’s best in some abstract sense, it’s what governments actually implement, and to a lesser extent what our intuitions about punitive legitimacy say. Cultures vary, and so does rhetoric, but I’ve never heard of a justice system that wasn’t functionally motivated at least in part by retributive sentiment.
You lost me at “designed”.
I think this claim is either tautological or false. The tautological sense is that almost any goal, including abstract justice or state-sponsored retribution, can be viewed as ultimately contributing to a healthy society, thus protecting people. I would be surprised to find many advocates for any criminal-justice policy admit that the long-run consequences of their policy are bad.
If you take a narrow view of protection, then the claim is false. Advocates of some current or proposed US criminal justice policy often make arguments that leave the connection to “protection” fairly vague. To pick one example that’s been in the news lately, let’s look at capital punishment. I don’t normally hear death penalty supporters talk about protecting society from the person sentenced to execution. They are usually interested in the abstract symbolism or “morality play” aspect of a bad person being punished for their wrongdoing. And you might think the social consequences of this spectacle are worthwhile, but it doesn’t see to be about “protection”, narrowly understood.
See my post Crime and Punishment.
Your question of crime and punishment has nothing to do with the useless debate between determinism and free will (as pointed out repeatedly by many, we, ironically, have no other sensible choice but to act as if we had free will).
It is rather about reasonable ways of protecting people from harm and ways to rehabilitate the offenders, two hard civic and political problems currently lumped together and bandaided by the woefully inadequate penal system.
You may have concluded that crime+punishment should have nothing to do with determinism/free will, and that conclusion is IMHO a good one. But in the real world, crime+punishment do have a lot to do with determinism/free will. Our philosophy and our legal system is riddled with explicit statements about the issue. That is why we call it “crime and punishment” instead of “crime and prevention”. See my post, Crime and Punishment.
This is not true. Susan Blackmore has spoken a lot about his. Quick example:
I’ve done the same thing and have no feeling of free will left. (I’m not even sure I ever had it to begin with.) I find the whole idea of “agency” problematic and free will just blatantly incoherent, even as a useful illusion.
This has neither destroyed my life, nor made me any less moral. Rather to the contrary, I suspect it has improved both aspects.
This exercise sounded interesting, and I wanted to research it a bit more. I found another article by Susan Blackmore which I think relates: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-faith-column/2007/03/free-spirit-god-fear-anything
There is a difference between feeling and acting. Both of you act as if you had free will, which was my point.
Huh? I don’t understand what you mean. Are you saying that you model me as having free will because that’s the only way you can model human behavior? If so, I would say your models are seriously lacking.