To elaborate, and reiterate what others have said:
Your mind/soul is a machine. It takes inputs, does some calculations, and spits out some outputs. That is free will. If you are compelled to do things by outside/environmental factors, eg physically forced to perform a certain action, then that is not free will, since your mind/soul machinery wasn’t involved in making a choice.
This does not reduce or change accountability. Just because the outputs can be predicted, in some cases, based on the inputs, doesn’t mean you weren’t involved in the calculations to make the outputs. Just because we know/understand why you did something doesn’t make you any less accountable. The robot next door blew a fuse, had a short circuit, and went on a serial-killing-spree. The robot isn’t off the hook once the engineers figure out what’s wrong. That robot ain’t going back into service anytime soon, if at all!
edit: If we found out *why *Ted Bundy did what he did, would that make him any less of a danger to society?
Why don’t all minds make exactly the same decisions? Whatever makes one mind different from another still has to be externally determined. The will can’t be self-causing.
Danger and accountability are two different things. an earthquake is dangerous but not accountable.
On the contrary, the concept of accountability implicitly denies free will. It assumes a predictable cause and reflect relationship between mental state and actions. There would be no point in holding something with “free will” accountable for its actions since nothing you do or say to it would have any cause and effect relationship with its behavior, nor would its past actions allow you to predict its future ones, nor would its own opinions and desires let you predict what it will do.
Society and human relationships in general are built on the fundamental, unspoken assumption that people are basically deterministic. All this talk about “free will” is empty; we don’t act like it is true and the concept doesn’t make any sense in the first place.
Seems to me you are being overly pedantic about what “determined” means.
You are correct that our decisions are not a random roll of the dice.
So you maintain our decisions are determined akin to the way a computer might make a “decision”. In the same way that a computer cannot truly produce a random number because, at the root of it all, it is being guided by a program. That program takes various inputs and produces a result. Now, those inputs can be seemingly random making the result seemingly random but if we know enough about the inputs we can determine precisely what the output would be.
For you that gets us to the infinite regression problem. Maybe you had a choice between steak or chicken for dinner (which I will assume for the sake of argument you enjoy equally). You maintain that what you choose is not free will, it is the result of inputs that preceded it and your “choice” was a foregone conclusion. But then the inputs that affected your decision were likewise preceded by other inputs that made them what they were. We can keep doing that to the moment of the Big Bang where, I guess, what you were to have for dinner tonight was set in stone.
If I put a $1 bill and a $100 bill in front of you and tell you that you can take one your choice is not random. Nor is my being able to reliably predict that you (or pretty much anyone) will choose the $100 bill a denial of free will. It is the choice that makes sense. Still, you could grab the $1 bill.
That is what society does. It helps steer people into predicable choices so we can get on with each other. That is not the same as saying there is no free will. Just that society imposes consequences on its members to encourage them to act within some set of norms.
No, it supposedly isn’t random either. It isn’t determined, it isn’t random…which doesn’t leave anything it could be, which is why the whole idea makes no logical sense.
But my point still is that concepts like holding people accountable for their actions presume some sort of predictable relationship between their mental state and their actions. Not some impossible to define “free will”.
As stated above: Everything has a cause, and all those causes also have causes of their own.
“Accountability” is a strangely human concept that has a specific function: To trace back the chain-of-causes to either:
the last know human input -> in order to find an outlet for emotions such as anger or revenge
or
the last known human-alterable input -> in order to make efficient changes so that whatever bad thing that happened won’t happen again
For practical purposes, in the case of #2, there is no reason to go any further back, since the futher back you go, the less ability you have to affect change.
(Unless of course, in the case of #1, you aren’t happy with the person you found responsible, and wish to blame someone else instead.)
Machinery that acts according to predictable, deterministic physical laws, with a bit of random quantum mechanics thrown in. No magic “free will” involved.
That is what societies do. Any society. Could be monkeys or wolves or dolphins.
Living together demands a level of predictability. Everytime we meet someone we do not want to wonder if the other person will punch us or shake our hand.
Look at kids…they are an evil bunch (read Lord of the Flies). We socialize our kids into patterns of behavior because society functions better when its members adhere to those patterns. Living in a society provides distinct benefits so, while we may chafe at some restrictions by-and-large most people abide by it.
We do that because it is in our self-interest to do it. Same as you choosing the $100 bill over the $1. Same as if we ever met I would be expecting a hand-shake and not a punch in the face. Expectations and “normal” behavior though do not preclude you from taking the $1 or punching me.
They are caused by statistically predictable mechanisms with statistically predictable results. I fail to see how this breaks the wonderful chain-of-causes. Can you perhaps elaborate?
An isolated particle is semi-random. We can assign probabilities to it which deem certain results more likely than others. Liken it to a casino game where you pick a number between 1-100. Truly random means any number is as likely as the next. In the quantum world we can say numbers 1-10 come up 90% of the time, 11-50 come up 5%, 51-90 come up 4% and 90-100 come up 1%. Anything is still possible but where would you bet your money?
On a macro level all that quantum randomness cancels each other out. As such when you play pool you can reliably predict where the balls will go when hit a certain way.
Only if you interpret it the right (e.g. Copenhagen) way, in which case, the randomness is built in axiomatically; so bringing up QM doesn’t serve any purpose in such a discussion, as you could just as well directly stipulate that uncaused events are possible.
Something following a probability distribution distinct from a uniform distribution is still fully random in the sense that there is no algorithm that allows you to predict with certainty what the next number is.