[QUOTE=Eonwe]
For me, appreciating and exploring determinism leads to the following:
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Empathy towards others who make harmful/destructive choices.
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Realization that the idea that someone “ought to take responsibility for their actions” is a flawed desire. Of course, we are all agents of our own actions. And of course we make choices based on ineffable chemical interactions in our bodies. There is less of a clear line between “my diagnosis made me do it” and “I am in full and capable control” than we like to imagine.
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I am under the impression that a large percent of the embrace of deterministic explanations are due to reasons similar to those listed by Eonwe and itemized by WordMan in the OP, in the “if determinism holds” section.
These are… hmm, I should resist the urge to say “stupid reasons”, I suppose, although they do annoy the starch out of me… let me say “inappropriatedly applied reasons”.
Before I launch in my diatribes, let’s all agree that everyone is profoundly affected by their environment, their social location;
… and that furthermore anyone who considers themselves in any position to judge the behaviors of another person is also a person profoundly affected by their environment and social location;
… and in both cases some degree of social determinism is involved in why people do what they do; and therefore anything else you see in this post is flat-out NOT a defense of blaming people or punishing people or anything of that ilk, so I’d appreciate it if you’d set that aside long enough to consider the rest.
OK? OK.
Let’s leave the world of partial truths and “some degree” considerations behind and look at determinism as an absolute:
Some people say there is some meaningful sense in which you (and I and everyone else) does things “on purpose”, because they have chosen to.
Determinism says no, there is not, that flat-out doesn’t occur, at all. Therefore no one ever, at any point, under any circumstances, has ever done anything for an intentional reason. Therefore there is no intentionality, anywhere. All things that appear to be decisions, all preferences and choices and tastes and beliefs and willful volition and opinions are but passive reflections of some type of formulaic causality.
And, therefore, (although determinists seldom express it this way) conscious thought is also an illusion. The verb “to think” implies that there is a “you” that is processing things, reaching conclusions, making choices, responding to things on purpose. Determinism, insofar as it says “nope, all that stuff is automatically generated by causative factors”, just barely leaves room for conscious thought as some sort of passive reflection of “decisions being made”, “conclusions being reached”, but there isn’t really anything akin to an active verb going on DOING those things, if you see what I mean. It’s more like an automatic log of automatically caused events.
And, therefore, (although, once again, determinists seldom put it in these terms) identity is also an illusion. There IS no “you” processing things, reaching conclusions. You don’t exist, there is no you that ever chooses or does anything. You have no purpose. Purpose requires volition.
Sauce for the proverbial goose can marinate the gander, I suppose. What about free will as an absolute?
Free will says you do everything that you do because the initiative for doing them resides in you. If you are an individual person of adult age and of male body and roughly 30 years of age living in Cincinnati with a specific life history of events and a set of identity-factors that are recognized by other people in ways that cause them to treat you a certain way, and you have a certain socio-economic class status and you hang out with certain people and you are or are not employed and, if not, are or are not particularly employable, etc (yadda yadda) then so fucking what, free will says none of that has anything to do with your free-will decisions except insofar as YOU choose to take those factors into account when you make them.
Yeah, that’s sufficiently ridiculous on the face of it to drive a lot of people towards determinism, at least an informal, non-absolute variety of it, in reaction.
The real problem with most free will viewpoints is the completely faulty assumption that who “you” are is an individual person, whether of adult age and male and 30 and in Cincinnati or otherwise. That’s only partially who “you” are. Identity is plural as well as singular and actually MOST of what goes on in our individuals heads is a reprocessing, critique, and situational application of a vast body of ideas attitudes beliefs and opinions that are being collectively thought of by huge batches of people in social interaction. In the few cases where an individual is thinking a whole lot of really original thoughts, communication by (or to) that individual is very difficult. We rely on being able to communicate and we rely on communication to verify our own individual impressions, to corroborate them, to tell us we’re not freaking nutso for thinking what we think. This is mostly not telling you stuff you aren’t well aware of, but it’s often bracketed off as if it’s a different subject matter from identity. It’s not. We’re more plural than we tend to think of ourselves as. Actually, “we” is as real as “you” (or “I”). It’s not an illusion. Neither is the singular individual self though (if it were, we’d be back to determinism). But with this much more spread-out notion of identity in mind, let’s re-explore volition and choice and other conscious mental processes.
Free will at its core says volition does exist. It does not require that it be located in the individual person, and it’s not. It’s located in the complex matrix of interaction that is the SELF, which is plural as well as individual, but within that interactive process there is choice, deliberate action, the making of opinion, the formulation of attitude, and eventually the driving of behavior.
