From here but only as the latest of a zillion threads about FREE WILL.
Here are the long-winded poll questions. A real poll with abbreviated versions of the same shall be appended to this momentarily:
FIRST, some general questions about the relationship of ideas as they keep reappearing in threads about FREE WILL (please check all that apply):
My perspective on free will has nothing whatsoever to do with either criminal justice (and hence punishment) or theology (and the notion of being judged by God). Completely unrelated subjects.
My perspective on free will has some applicability to subsequent considerations of either criminal justice or theology, but I first formed my attitudes towards free will; I did not form my attitudes towards free will based on how I feel about criminal justice or theology.
I consider free will and the subjects of criminal justice and/or judgment by God to be all intertwined and I can’t imagine how anyone would contemplate any of them without it carrying over into contemplation of the others.
I first came to hold an attitude towards punishment and culpability while considering criminal justice and the notion of being judged by God, and then extrapolated from that to a general dismissal of the idea of free will.
Of COURSE my perspective on free will is tied to my perspective on criminal justice and the notion of being subject to judgment by God and so on. That’s what EVERYONE means when they purport to be discussing “free will”, just like when people are discussing the “right to privacy” what they mean is abortion rights and the privacy clause that was used to derive Roe v Wade.
When I contemplate the question of free will, my focus is not just on judgment of other people’s socially undesirable behavior but also (or inst
I’m agnostic, and I hold little stock in free will. I don’t know if one belief begat the other.
But I don’t think a person can call themselves Christian without believing that we have free will. The story of Adam and Eve–>mankind’s fall from grace and need for redemption—>Jesus dying for our sins–>belief in Him saves you from Hell…this magical process doesn’t work in the absence of free will.
I guess I’m not clear on what this poll is driving at. I think that fundamentally everything is a reaction to everything else. Stimulus leads to response. Organisms avoid behaviors that hurt and engage in behaviors that please. That this happens on a meta level with my consciousness doesn’t really bother me. I think the universe is deterministic but since it carries the illusion of choice, pragmatically I don’t worry about it.
It is also possible that our actions are pre-determined, but we exist in a system of such sophisticated design that this fact is unknowable by us. The practical result is no different from actual Free Will.
I believe in free will because I wouldn’t be *me *without it; I’d just be a character in a story written by some other being. That may in fact be true, but I’m not buying it. Hence, it is a belief, rather than a certainty or a point of knowledge.
I don’t know that it has anything to do with anything else. It’s just a belief I need to make life palatable.
My take on free will is purely theological. (In a nutshell: from God’s viewpoint, everything is deterministic. If He ran parallel universes with the same parameters, the same things would happen. But from OUR viewpoint, we do make real choices. The fact that the choice is predictable doesn’t change our culpability for what we choose. If I’m pondering what to eat for dinner, I have free will to make any choice I want.)
My take on criminal justice is entirely separate. Criminal justice is about the smooth operation of society for maximized benefits of its members (pursuit of happiness and all that). It’s not about enforcing morality, so free will and theology are irrelevant. We want free, law-abiding people to be free of fear and able to live how they want to. Criminals should be rehabilitated if possible; if they can’t be made productive members of society again, they should be prevented from doing harm in a cost-effective manner.
…nothing to do with criminal justice. And all the rest of the disclaimers have to do with criminal justice. “Me thinks he doth protests too much.”
I believe we’re genetically predisposed toward and away from certain things.
I believe our cultures form the mold within we’re cast.
I believe our personal histories dictate how all that’s skewed.
Choices made outside of those perimeters come at a cost.
I do not think this poll gets to the heart of the matter at all, and none of the options (insofar as I can understand what they are getting at) match my position very well. One’s views about free will can certainly have implications for one’s view about criminal justice, moral culpability etc., but to choose your view about free will and determinism because it leads to what you think are preferable consequences with respect to justice and morality seems to me to be backwards, and tantamount to intellectual dishonesty. Proper reasons for believing or disbelieving in free will should derive from metaphysics and (probably, though its relevance really depends on you metaphysical view about science) science, and perhaps on phenomenology (i.e., your subjective experience of making choices - though again, the relevance of this really depends on your background metaphysics).
I agree with you completely about the intellectual dishonesty bit.
When discussing “free will” (or attempting to) I often find myself feeling that there’s an invisible subtext (with or without pink unicorns) and that the people in the debate are really arguing about something else that they consider to be implicated in free will: most commonly the questions of whether we should punish people for doing wrong or instead fix the social causes of their undesirable behavior, and whether or not there is a God. I made the poll to get a sense of whether indeed that is what was going on.
If I’m arguing that animals are sentient creatures with all the feelings and thought processes of humans, then wouldn’t it follow that I’m also going to argue some other things? An argument that doesn’t address the broader implications of its subject matter is a rather boring argument.
In the linked thread, it was frequently asked why we should care that free will is an illusion, since presumably people who believe in free will are indistinguishable from those who do not. Seems to me this calls for discussing the implications behind free will more than discussing free will itself.
Or maybe I’ve completely misunderstood your point.
I don’t believe in free will. But it seems rather odd to ask me what my “reason” is, since that implies that I’m CHOOSING not to belief in free will, which is a logical contradiction.
I don’t believe in free will simply because free will does not cohere with my understanding of neuroscience.
Let me go at it a different way. Let’s say we were having a debate about ending the Senatorial filibuster. We go on and on about the relative merits of ending or continuing the current filibuster rule and then at some point I get the distinct sense that what’s really motivating your argument is the fact that your party is not in the ascendancy and if the filibuster were not available it could not block majority action which would mean that the party in power could enact their laws.
That’s intellectual dishonesty: you weren’t arguing about the filibuster, really; you were doing a “whatever benefits our side” argument based on other things that would be affected by the outcome of the argument about the filibuster. It isn’t really relevant that yeah, indeed, your party’s ability to bottleneck unwanted legislation would be affected (at least hypothetically) by the outcome of our argument about the filibuster.
What do you think the subtext of “my side” is in the free will is an illusion discussion? I can guess what you think it is, but I would like for you to state it upfront, without hiding behind a hypothetical or a hard-to-grok poll. Because I can’t tell if I should take offense or not, and I’d like not to take offense.
iMHO, it does not require a hidden agenda to discuss matters of theology and morality in a conversation about free will. One can intentionally frame the discussion so that it avoids the issue. But that would be as strange as having a conversation about whether animals are sentient beings and purposefully skirting the issue of whether or not we should be eating them. And if someone refused to let go of the idea that animals are not sentient in the face of all the evidence showing otherwise, I’d probably ask them whether the chicken dinner they just ate could be biasing them. I don’t think this is dishonest. It’s kicking the debate to another notch, true. But it’s not dishonest.
I believe in free will because the illusion of such makes no sense. If I am just a program, I can’t be tricked into thinking I have free will. The basic concept presupposes that there is an I that exists. If I exist, I must have some sort of free agency, even if not everything I do is chosen by me.
In other words, consciousness presupposes some sort of free agency. And yes, this holds for non-sapient animals if they are conscious. No one has complete control, but ultimately they are making decisions.
Forgot to vote: I went with #2 and #7. I don’t think you can believe in free will and say it doesn’t affect everything. And there’s no way that other factor cannot contribute to what you decide to do. I find it hard to understand why any free will believer would pick 1 or 8 (or 9, but that’s a given.)
I did not vote because it seems to me that free will is an incoherent idea. I am what I am and follow the laws of physics. Free will implies that there is some “I” outside the laws of physics that is choosing. But if “I” is outside the laws of physics, how can it interact with “me”?
I’ll be honest, I don’t really understand the arguments against free will. They seem to be rooted in a belief that if we’re at all shaped by our experiences instead of acting at complete random our behavior is entirely pre-determined. That seems too ridiculous to be an accurate read on those arguments, so I must not get it.
Anyway, I believe we do have free will and chose 3 and 7.
“Me thinks he doth protests too much.”