This is what I’m finding.
What I guess I’m looking for is, if there’s a reasons not to ‘hate’ people who’ve done bad things.
Of course we all have a reason to feel as if we have control. I just believe we are complex biological machines acting on our own unique knowledge of what to do with what we’re presented with, given the past is what it was.
[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Crime and punishment is based on a deterministic view of human nature and the world, that a particular stimulus and a particular action will have a predictable outcome. If his past self doesn’t determine the actions of his future self, then nothing we do in the past will modify his future behavior.
[/QUOTE]
The crime & punishment system assumes that by making an activity less attractive by attaching (steeply) negative consequences to it means that potential law breakers decide it’s not worth risking. How is that not fully in the Free Will domain?
What, you want an argument that things like Brownian motion are stochastic?
I think it’s very nice, but doesn’t actually work. Observers in an inertial reference frame aren’t independent of that frame (or time-like curve, if you prefer) - the moving observer is different from the stationary observer, and so never observes the same thing.
Or, more simply, there is no reference “Tuesday” for me to see the invasion fleet versus his “Monday” At that level of relatavistic effects, I only have my internal clock, and shouldn’t even think of comparing it to anyones. Yes, it seems like in my timeline they’ll have invaded at this moment, but I can only know that when I’m seperated from you, it’s not knowledge I can have as I move past you. So it’s only hindsight, and that’s no paradox.
You don’t need determinism for that, just ethics and understanding. Figuring out and understanding why someone did something ‘bad’ almost always leads to at least some forgiveness. That doesn’t mean we should not punish them for the crime; you can forgive someone and still believe they need to be locked up (or even put to death), for the ‘greater good’.
“Free will” is a logically incoherent concept*, so defining what is and isn’t in its domain is difficult. But if someone makes the claim that previous behavior isn’t determined by past behavior, the direct implication is that no threat or punishment or forethought will work, because such a stimulus working is a cause and effect relationship.
*barring “compatibilist free will”, which is basically “let’s admit determinism is true and call it free will”
Yes – the usual view would be that their stochasticity (or rather, our need of describing them in stochastic terms) is merely due to our ignorance of the complete microdynamics; if we had total knowledge of the system’s fundamental constituents and their dynamics, we could describe them in deterministic terms, as at bottom, the system is deterministic. So those systems’ stochasticity is not a property of the world, but exclusively of our description of it.
Not sure I get what you’re trying to say. In relativity, both observers are of course perfectly equivalent – one’s point of view is as valid as the other’s. And of course neither knows about the goings-on in Andromeda as they happen, since it’s quite a bit far away and light from it won’t reach us for some time. The key is that after this time, both observers will agree on the causal consequences – so if in one observer’s present moment, the fleet is already launched, while in the other’s, the discussion is still underway, both will eventually experience the invasion of the Andromedan people (if they live long enough). There’s no question about how the discussion will turn out – if the description from the point of view of the observer in whose present the fleet has already launched is valid, which according to special relativity it is, then the fleet will launch. Anything else would require introducing a preferred frame of reference.
I know I don’t need determinism for that. It’s just important to me to know whether or not people are in destined to be the way they are; instead of pretending that they are, and justify hate or malice.
But past behaviour DOES modify future behavior. It’s called learning, in humans.
I touched a hot stove, burned my nose pickers. Now I don’t touch hot stoves anymore (that is, without mitts, anyway).
Exactly. Human thought and behavior don’t resemble the result of some sort of magic “free will”. It looks deterministic.
I don’t know what to call it, but I can give you examples. As I mentioned upthread, a video tape isn’t deterministic, and it seems wrong to call it stochastic. There are a number of mathematical constructs that are deterministic when “played” in forward time, but not deterministic when played in backwards time. For example, Conway’s Game of Life.
I don’t think the caveat is as big as you think. Free will debates are about what is possible in principle, not in practice. Setting up the system and watching it evolve is all that Laplace’s demon was supposed to be capable of.
Please tell me that you are not advocating junking the Justice system in it’s entirety.
To expound on what Der Trihs said, here’s the conversation:
Rapist: Given the events that have happened in my life, rape was inevitable: I couldn’t possibly make another choice!
Society: No doubt. That’s why we’re adding some more events called Massive Prison Time to your life. Now your life will have a different set of events, and given this new set of events, not raping will be inevitable; the new stimulus will mean you can’t possibly choose to rape. Furthermore, putting those events in your life also puts the “Look at the rapist serving Massive Prison Time” event in the lives of other people; the introduction of that event into their own lives will turn some of them from can’t-help-but-rape to can’t-help-but-not-rape. I hereby sentence you to Massive Prison Time!
I do believe (as I stated) that their is randomness in the universe, and I do not believe in God, so I do not believe in determinism. However, even I did believe in it I’d still say it doesn’t really matter. You can apply a variation of the Turning test to it, just like questions such as “are we just living in a computer simulation?”. If you can’t tell the difference, then it doesn’t matter, other than as a way to make your brain hurt and sell aspirin.
It matters when you think about things like justice and the most effective means of punishment.
If determinism is true, then everything is determined, including what you think about things like justice and punishment.
Yes.
But *knowing * or *thinking *things are determined can effect the way you think about social issues…
There might be great reasons for believing in determinism (or anything). But if natural-law determinism is true, there is no way for a person to believe in it, whatever advantages believing it might have, if natural laws don’t lead to that result.
A person’s knowing or thinking something is just some particular physical state of his brain. If the universe’s domino chain since the beginning of time doesn’t lead to that person’s having that particular brain-state, then he won’t know or think or believe it, regardless of whatever good it might do him.
Say what? One point I’m making is that the Justice System implicitly presupposes determinism.
Well yes, but on the whole people do try to do what serves their self interest thanks to their evolutionarily selected, deterministic decision making process. As opposed to them just doing things that have no relation to their past or to external stimuli thanks to some poorly defined “free will”.
We may be using the two different forms of determinism. “Evolutionarily selected” and “deterministic decision making process” seems to suggest the second kind, the one which sees the facts about our biology, our culture, upbringing, and our other circumstances as imposing boundaries/exerting influence on what we are capable of intending.
The one I have in mind is the one that holds that everything in the universe is governed by natural laws, including our brains, which is the biological substrate of the mind, consciousness, personality, and volition. These things too, therefore, are determined by the operation of physical laws.
But you are right that we feel like we make decisions. So the determinist has to explain why it must be (on his account) that for every belief or intention the laws of physics ordain, they simultaneously also give rise to that person’s sensation of agency.
Because that’s how our brains are wired (why our brains are wired to produce that sensation is a more open question). There’s plenty of things that we “sense” that in fact are just artifacts of how our brains work. The “sensation of agency” is a problem for neuroscience to figure out, not an obstacle for determinism.