So, we shouldn’t label it “free will” (we have a choice whether or not to?), because if people have free will, they have responsibility for their own choices, but if they don’t, we have responsibility… ? My brain hurts.
Sure it does.
To take it right to an extreme example: just because you couldn’t help yourself from murdering that person doesn’t mean that locking you up is somehow off-limits.
What it does mean, though, is that the intent and goals, and in fact very definition of ‘accountability’ might be different than they are under a free will model. It means that punishment may not be as moral a goal as some feel it is. Rehabilitation? Sure. Restitution? Sure, when possible. Safety for society? Sure. Deterrence? Sure. But punishment?
In fact, though, we do this all the time already, in small doses. Convictions and punishments vary wildly depending on circumstance. Why is one person accountable for their crime to a different degree than another person, if the crime is the same? We already allow for the idea that we are not fully in control of our decisions, but as I say in the post directly above this one, we currently draw that line in arbitrary places in order to accommodate both a concept of free will that we insist on clinging to, and, more often than not, our sense of superiority.
I didn’t say you shouldn’t. I said doing so leads to outcomes that are ultimately harmful and prevent us from fully understanding and exploring the human condition, and developing the greatest degree of happiness for the greatest number of people (which admittedly is an arbitrary set of goals, but one that I’m partial to).
That second bit I admit was poorly phrased. It should perhaps say:
“It encourages us to identify certain choices as personal moral failings, and thus prevents us from seeing the ways in which those personal choices are products of environment, and could be prevented (generally, not necessarily specifically) by social and environmental changes.”
Still waiting for someone to open up that can of worms…
Define “couldn’t help yourself”, and how can we be sure that he couldn’t help himself?
I don’t envision any possibility of a functional society in which we have banished the notion of free will.
This is a point that doesn’t get enough attention. Am I a smart guy? Oh, yeah baby. You should see my SAT scores from 30 years ago! I’m ever so smart. They tested me and put me in advanced classes when I was a child.
And so what? I should advocate a Spencerian survival of the fittest? Because I’m ever so superior?
But that’s not how it works. In reality I’m just one fallible human among many. I can’t rule over them as a living god unless for some reason I trick them into treating me like a living god. In human history such a thing has happened, but it didn’t happen because one guy got such good SAT scores that they decided to make him Pharaoh. Instead some jerk got to be Pharaoh just because his Dad was Pharaoh.
If I lived in an autocratic society I wouldn’t end up on top because of my superiority, such as it is. I’d end up as a peasant like everyone else. It turns out the only reason I have freedom is because everyone gets freedom. So I’m just a schmuck like everyone else, but at least I’m not a slave for some stupid Pharaoh.
We know he couldn’t help himself because he did it. Why did he do it? Because he wanted to? Why did he want to? In my mind, there are two possibilities, one of which I (obviously) find as non-functional an explanation as you find mine 
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Because a confluence of internal emotions, which are uncontrolled responses to stimuli, convinced his reasoning center that the best option in the moment was to kill, or:
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Because something in him, over which he has total control and that is not able to be influenced or manipulated (and thus is also unalterable by personal experience or learning, and is somehow emotion-free) weighed options and concluded that it was the proper course of action.
I can’t imagine what true free will would even look like. I can’t envision an alternate paradigm other than one in which a person’s choices are direct results of the combination of external forces and their personal biology.
I can’t think of a single chain of "but why did I choose that"s that doesn’t lead, ultimately, to the answer, “I don’t know, I just did.”
No, that is not true. The language of the Constitution recognizes, enumerates, and protects fundamental rights; that is, those that are so basic that no law can restrict them except in a narrow context for a compelling reason such as preventing someone from yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. Now, you can argue that that recognition is a social construct and that these rights don’t exist outside that context, but they are not provided in the way that an entitlement or a privilege, such as medical care or operating a motor vehicle on public roads are.
There is, of course, the hypocrisy that these rights were not originally recognized for well over half of the population (women, minorities, and in general, non-landowners) for a good chunk of the history of the nation, but that is a problem in law in protecting those peoples’ rights, not that rights have been “granted” to a new group of people.
Even if you adopt the notion that there is no “free will” whatsoever, it doesn’t prevent society from functioning. We correct and penalize people all the time for actions of which they don’t really have volition or foresight, and indeed, most of child rearing consists of applying corrections and demonstrating good behavior to people who are legally defined as not having cognizance over even their own actions. A purely reflexive system with no autonomy would still include corrective mechanisms in order to be capable of continual functioning.
In reality, any sufficiently complex system of responsive controls and decision-making will approximate some degree of “free will” in the colloquial sense of the term. In the philosophical sense of complete personal autonomy, free will can’t really be defined; we are all conditioned to process and respond to information via social conditioning and affective response, and even our basic perception is not based upon direct sensory information into the orbitofrontal cortex but rather impressions that are processed and integrated elsewhere in the brain and provided to the neocortex for cognitive “analysis”, e.g. reasoning and decision-making.
However, although we frequently think of people with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorders as hallucinating, in fact we are all hallucinating a model of the world around us that is only a rough approximation of reality, hence why we are fooled by optical illusions, sleight of hand tricks, and paradoxical or non-evidential beliefs. And more importantly, it is critical for our brains to do all of this biasing and manipulation of information because we do not have the cognitive processing power to interpret vision the way a computer does (by pixelating and recording individual elements of the visual field), nor could we possibly function if we had to make a conscious decision about every single action and impression. Having a cognitive bias about who we like and don’t like saves us from having to think through every interaction to decide whether a person fits into the category of “friend” or “foe”, even though a poor formulation of this natural bias can lead us to bigotry and anti-social behavior.
Stranger
Can someone explain what the OP is proposing? I honestly can’t figure it out. Reading all the responses so far has not helped.
OP is smart and most other people are sheeple.
The OP’s final sentence is “Dumb people need smart people to watch out for them, and we’re not doing that.” I presume he means we should enact a dictatorial society where people deemed by me (begbert2) to be insufficiently intelligent are enslaved and used for various purposes as a labor force and/or food source.
Society had better brace itself - things are about to get ugly.
Actually not. In that post you linked to an influential and widely-quoted paper by David Lisak, which has been used as a justification for aggressive policies towards those accused of sexual assault on college campuses. The paper is highly flawed, and really tells us nothing at all about male college students.
Lisak has recently encouraged the impression that he conducted the research himself.
He did not. The paper was based on pooled data from four studies conducted by others on his campus between 1991 and 1998. I spoke with Lisak in March of this year. When I asked about those studies, he first said he was unable to remember their topics, then that they “may have been about child abuse history or relationships with parents.” I asked whether they were about campus sexual assault; he conceded they were not.
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Lisak told me that he subsequently interviewed most of them. That was a surprising claim, given the conditions of the survey and the fact that he was looking at the data produced long after his students had completed those dissertations; nor were there plausible circumstances under which a faculty member supervising a dissertation would interact directly with subjects. When I asked how he was able to speak with men participating in an anonymous survey for research he was not conducting, he ended the phone call.
No, the hope would be that someone can offer a workable solution. As said, none of the current proposals seem safe to consider (e.g. dictatorial society, nanny states, eugenics, Communism, etc.) I am not proposing a solution, I am pointing out a problem that we’ve all moved on from because we don’t yet have a good solution, and saying, “Why don’t we give this another think and see if there isn’t an option G that we haven’t considered yet?”
Though saying that someone is dumb was not really correct. There’s fair evidence that conformity is not 1:1 correlated with intelligence. And of course, intelligence itself is not terribly well defined.
Oh, we’re talking about conformity?
Conformity is highly adaptive. If you look around and everyone is running away from something you can’t see, what do you do? Turn and run like everyone else, or stand there? If nobody else is eating the purple berries, what do you do?
The problem is that the world is full of a number of things, and it is absolutely impossible for one human being to investigate them all. And so we rely on other people. If your mom says not to stick beans in your ears, you listen to her and don’t stick beans in your ears. Not because you understand why, but because your mom said so. If all your friends are jumping off a cliff, you jump too even if you don’t know why, because they must have a pretty good reason even if you don’t know what that reason is. If you read in your math textbook that 0.99999… = 1, you believe it even if you don’t understand it because you know you know less about math than the guy who wrote that textbook.
So does this absolutely critical and essential human instinct get hijacked by silly stuff like religion and fashion and team sports and racism? Yeah, it does. But telling people to stop conforming won’t work, because how could it? Or do you tell them to not conform when people are being racist, but to conform when everyone is being egalitarian? When are they doing the good kind of conformity and when are they doing the bad kind?
When the robots take over and make us their domesticated pets, then human avarice and mob rule will be forestalled. Until then, democracy is a popularity contest and autocracies invite corruption and oppression, and there is little in-between for any population larger than what can fit in a Mazda Miata. Welcome to the monkey house.
Stranger
Solution to what? Can you clearly state the problem in one sentence?
A solution to protect people from the repercussions of living in a suggestive state and/or break that suggestive state.
Sorry, coming late to the thread, but it’s a fascinating one.
Others here have made a pretty good case that we all function in a suggestive state nearly all the time. Even if there are such things as free will and analytical action, not even the most intelligent among us can exercise them more than a fraction of the time. 99% of human life is hardwired and/or conditioned instincts.
My contribution (such as it is) to the conversation is to suggest that those instincts are ultimately incompatible with civilization. Not that I’m saying we’re all doomed to armageddon – just that the structures and conveniences of civilization often render our instincts moot, but they don’t erase the instincts, so a lot of widespread behavior makes absolutely no sense.
For instance: Why on earth do I get upset when the Chicago Bears play badly? What is the frickin’ point of getting emotionally invested in the performance of a team on which I know no one and whose outcomes have no tangible effect on my life? I can rationally understand that I’ve evolved with a tribal instinct that may have helped my Neanderthal ancestors survive, but that doesn’t help me turn off that instinct.
No one is immune to the 1001 bizarre manifestations of these instincts, from our most enlightened leaders to the lowliest dregs of society. We can’t “protect” people “living in a suggestive state” because that’s all of us.
Disagree with most of the posters in this thread.
Yes you can find plenty of bad behaviour by humans. But you can also find countless examples of altruism and general helpfulness and cooperation. Much of the modern world depends on the latter.
And, while US politics (and frankly, much of US society and culture right now), can make us all feel pretty despondent about the state of the world, the overall trend worldwide has been a rapid improvement in terms of peace, equality and prosperity.
Regarding the free will thing, that’s obviously a very big topic in itself. To summarize my opinion (given many times on the Dope), the term “free will” is an incoherent concept, usually defined in a self-inconsistent way. Saying “There’s no such thing as free will” is the same as saying “There’s no such thing as <undefined>”.
I’m fine as long as my conscious thoughts are part of the decision-making process. It takes fatalism out of the picture at least.
Yes, those thoughts are reducible to physics, like everything else. But what do we get from saying a chess game is *really *about the chemical properties of the pieces and the board? Reductive descriptions are not always (in fact not usually) the best description of a phenomenon.
This is vital: In a city of a million, if even one percent were seriously, truly uninterested in living by basic moral rules, that’s 10,000 murderers, rapists, and other violent offenders. No police force could keep up. The concept of a city would repeatedly collapse in massive, unchecked criminality.
We do not observe this.
This is also very important to keep in mind. I’d also argue that there’s been a moral improvement in humanity: Bear-baiting and dog-fighting are mostly gone, whereas they used to be major forms of entertainment in places like England. The corporal punishment of children is debated now, and widely reviled, and over things like spanking, as opposed to things like thrashing.
Reductionism, like all complicated concepts, is prone to being misunderstood, perhaps deliberately. Yes, the brain is ultimately subatomic particles obeying equations, but scientific theories are more about usefulness and comprehensibility than being 100% reductive 100% of the time. After all, we still have biology as a field of study, even knowing that every single subject of the biological sciences is a complex ensemble of chemicals.
Reductionism is more about knowing that you can pry the covers off, that everything can be understood by taking it apart, than about trying to “see through” all of the “covers” all of the time.
Yeah, that’s a pretty good way to refute most cynicism.
Cynicism is a pose, a mental fad, or phase, and not, in itself, a philsophical position. It is frequently mistaken for maturity, even by the mature, but it offers no new insights. It’s simply about interpreting the knowledge and insight you do have in the most shocking, least conformist way possible, at least according to the person’s idea of what conformity would consist of.