This possibility has just crossed my mind and the deeper I think about it the more I tend to believe there must be quite a few people who regard conscience as an illusion.
The argument can be summarized as follows: Functioning as a ethical foundation of human actions, the construct known as conscience gives transgressors the impression they could have chosen to act differently and makes everybody believe they are able to opt for right and abjure wrong. If the idea of free will is mere background noise in our brain, then the idea of conscience is nothing else but the source of all this annoying static.
Does your conscience really exist, or is it all in your mind?
Well, of course my conscience is all in my mind, just like my memory, my imagination, and my ability to do trigonometry.
I wouldn’t call it an illusion. There have been times in my life when I behaved very badly for my own pleasure. My conscience plagued me then, and eventually that discomfort grew to the point that I felt compelled to stop; the pain I was causing myself by my misbehavior–hell, I’ll go ahead and call it sin–grew to outweigh the pleasure I was getting. It served a valuable purpose.
I don’t think ex post facto is the term you mean; try “retrospective.”
Anyway – at the time I am talking about, I regularly engaged in actions which I knew, at that time, to be wrong (by which I mean causing unnecessary and unjustified harm to other persons), but which I nonetheless found pleasurable. I simultaneously did and did not want to engage in the behavior. So after I allowed myself to indulge in such activities I felt guilty because I knew I had harmed another person and I don’t like doing that. Eventually hte discomfort from the guilt came to outweigh the pleasure. I was aware of this process while I was doing it; my realization did not come after the fact.
Sure, in the same sense that memory, imagination, and mathematical facility are “real.” They are emergent processes of neurochemistry.
I personally don’t understand why evolution gave us so many tools for survival (desire for that which encourages our life, repulsion of that which damages our life) if pre-determination exists. There is probably some philosophical argument but I really don’t get it. Why evolve all those sticks and carrots if nothing is free to choose anyway.
Conscience does exist, but it is mostly devoted to feeling bad when you hurt something that is valuable to your life. I’ve never given a damn when I stepped on a bug or harmed a plant. I care more about harm coming to those who are genetically related to me than those in my social group. I care more about members of my social group than strangers. I (generally) care more about strangers than non-human life. Each step down in conscience is a step towards that life having less value to my own survival.
Then again, humans feel a lot of pain and guilt when they harm other humans who are not part of their social group or even an active threat to the social group we are personally dependent on for survival (shooting an enemy of the country, a cop shooting a dangerous criminal, etc). We also feel bad when we harm non-human mammals. I really don’t get it.
It’s partially learned, partially instinct. It exists because a society of sociopaths would fall apart, and we’re social animals; we need a society, and to have that society we need a conscience to keep that society from ripping itself apart.
On the contrary; if “free will” existed there’d be no point to all those carrots and sticks, because they’d be ignored. “Do good and be rewarded, do bad and suffer” is a very deterministic, cause-and-effect arrangement. If people had magical non-deterministic free will then punishments, rewards, past experience and persuasion would have no effect on their behavior and organized society would be impossible since no one would be able to tell what anyone else was going to do next.
If you know all the inputs that go into a computer you know exactly what the output of the computer is going to be. That doesn’t mean the computations that happen inside the computer are moot.
Similarly, if we work under the assumption that the laws of physics are deterministic (never mind quantum mechanics), then obviously if you know the entire state of the universe you can calculate the state at any later date, so you know what a given person is going to do. For this reason, some people argue there is no free will. Of course this is meaningless in practice because you can’t know the entire state of the universe, not in practice and not even in theory (uncertainty principle and all). But even if it weren’t, your internal decision making process is still part of the machinery, so you still have free will for all intents and purposes.
It’s not like you want to go to the left but “the universe” has predestined that you must go to the right so that happens against your will.
I’d even argue that it is impossible to actively do anything against your will.
I’m sorry, especially for the off topicness, but when was it decided that the concept of “free will” meant complete behavioral chaos? I suppose I should pay more attention to those threads…?
Volition isn’t absolute either way. It’s difficult to go on a diet or quit smoking; if free will were absolute, it would be a decision one would make, as easy as choosing whether to have rice or beans for dinner.
I agree with Wesley Clark here: we have an immense brain, with a great number of conflicting motivations, and lots and lots of very expensive biochemical tools for making decisions. If actions were predetermined, this huge expense in the metabolic energy budget is pointless: we’d have simply evolved tropisms, like insects, to act in the most advantageous manner.
Conscience – the sense of guilt over having done something wrong – is an evolved trait (Der Trihs is completely correct here) that helps cement us together as a social group.
One of the nice things about civilization is that it allows us to extend our social group to entire cities, states, nations, humanity itself, and even to include the higher animals in our circle of interests. We don’t torture cats, because our conscience includes them as entities to be empathized with.
This is like saying that since a computer program to find the bajillion^bajillion^bajillionth digit of pi is predetermined, there should be no need to wait any time at all for the program to finish.
All the computer has to do is find the answer immediately. No need for computation! No need to wait! No need for a powerful processor/big brain! There’s a predetermined answer that will be the same every time you run the program, so the computer can just magically find the digit the very first time you run it without any delay at all.
If everything is predetermined, what, exactly, is being “computed?” The answer is already carved in stone.
It seems absurd to evolve a expensive brain to compute answers that are already known and can’t be changed.
Meanwhile, if the brain’s “illusion” of making decisions is so profound that it cannot be discerned, by any scientific test, from “volition,” then the “predestination” is a load of nonsense, and only a religious claim, not a scientific one.
Why does a computer program to find the bajillion^bajillion^bajillionith digit of pi take six hours to run on a supercomputer? Why can’t it spit out an answer immediately?
The answer is already determined. What, exactly, is being “computed” by the computer? The answer is already carved in stone.
This is what you’re asking. And it has a clear answer.
The bajillion^bajillion^bajillionith digit of pi hasn’t changed. It is what it is. Set in stone. The computer program is a deterministic process. It will take six hours, with said computer, to find the digit, and it will take six hours to run every single time the program runs on this machine, including the first time. So why does the computer need so much time if the answer is already set in stone? Why isn’t there a “tropism” that the computer can use to skip the six hours and have the answer immediately?
And the answer is, obviously, that even though the answer is predetermined, the computer itself doesn’t know what the answer is. That’s why it has to crunch numbers with its big artificial brain to find the set-in-stone answer.
“Determined” is not equivalent to “perfect knowledge”.
Although the answer is set is stone, the computer does not have access to the answer until it finishes its computation. That is the entire point of computation.
“Determined” is not equivalent to “perfect knowledge”.
A deterministic system does not imply that any agents within the system have perfect knowledge of the entirety of the system.
You can program the simple “physics” of a world, like a video game with no human player. You can make the world fully deterministic – it will play out exactly the same scenario every time you run the program. You can place a computer agent inside the world you’ve created. But this agent will not have full knowledge of their situation. This agent must be programmed with limited knowledge, making decisions based on the best information they have available. (They might have some simple version of “eyesight” but they won’t see the dragon around the corner.)
The program is still fully deterministic. The agent will make the same decisions every time you run the program. And it might not survive. It might make a reasonable mistake and get burnt alive every time you run the program. It lives in a deterministic world, but its knowledge is limited so even if it acts fully reasonably, its decisions might still lead to bad results. This is Game 1.0.
You can create a new version. You can add many different kinds of agents, some of which can solve problems more quickly and some of which less quickly. You can have limited resources: the most successful agents create offspring, while the less successful agents die off.
This new version, Game 2.0, is still fully deterministic. The agents with imperfect knowledge will make the same decisions every time you run the program. The outcome of the program will be identical every time you hit the go button. But here’s the kicker: when the program is finished after its predetermined time limit, and the agents that were successful have reproduced, and the ones that were not successful have failed to reproduce, what will be the outcome of that fully deterministic program?
The ones with the big brains will be the victors.
The ones with the big brains will always be the victors, are determined to be the victors, and will be the victors every time the program is run. It’s not a “waste” for them to have big brains. By the fully deterministic physics of their world, big brains are part of the rigid causal chain that allows them to successfully reproduce. They survive because they solve problems more efficiently with their imperfect knowledge of their deterministic world. The ones who are best at solving problems with limited knowledge survive. Every time Game 2.0 is run, the same group survives. This isn’t an absurdity. It’s an inevitability.
And as it happens, every deterministic world with “decision-making” agents must necessarily have agents that are imperfectly knowledgeable. It’s impossible for it be otherwise. An agent embedded within a deterministic system cannot have full knowledge of the system they’re embedded in, because full knowledge would mean their brain encompasses the entirety of the universe which contains their brain. A contradiction. Their brain (or whatever passes for their brain) must be smaller than the world they inhabit, and that necessarily means that their brain lacks knowledge of at least some of the features of their fully determined world.
Determined is not equivalent to perfect knowledge. Determined is incompatible with perfect knowledge.
There are no tropisms that can skip directly to the most advantageous answer. For the big problems, computation is always required.
If consciousness is an illusion, who’s being fooled? We’re talking free will.
Free will seems like a concrete reality in a subjective sense because we are trapped inside the machine. Imagine a deterministic computer analyzing strategies and inputs and coming up with probabilistic outputs. It will come to a conclusion that can be predicted and modeled, but it has to weigh the different options internally. We do the same weighing and figuring in our heads. The options seem limitless from the inside.
I stick to the standard argument against free will, which basically says free will is a non-sensical concept. If the universe is determined, then free will doesn’t exist. It may be chaotic and impossible to realistically model or predict, but still set in stone. If the universe isn’t determined then our actions have randomness in them, also ruling out free will as most people know it. When I read compatibilist arguments they seem to do violence to what most people mean when they say free will (something like the ability, if given the same inputs, to choose differently of your own volition, not because of quantum fluctuations).
There’s such a thing as ego death, most easily obtained via psychedelic drugs, but that’s more of a rearrangement of your subjective orientation than the negation of the self. You’re still in there interpreting inputs.
Under scientific investigation the mind behaves much differently than most people think it does. Especially with regard for rationalizing our own behavior. In a lot of experiments it seems our conscious mind is along for the ride, observing what other systems spit out and exercising final veto power if needed. This is most apparent to me when coming up with creative ideas. They just pop into existence, as if someone else put them there. I can understand why the ancients believed in muses.
In my opinion, insomuch as one does not voluntarily (i.e. driven by free will) choose to perform an action that can harm other people, one has no reason to feel guilty. For instance, a baby’s birth often causes pain to the woman delivering it, but the baby bears no responsability for the inflicted agony. I mean, it is okay to embrace determinism, but we should do it consistently. One cannot possibly be responsible for a determinist course of events. One can feel sad about unavoidably harming others, of course, but not guilty. And the feeling that there is right and wrong or that the former can be opted for against the latter is a mere illusion disguised as conscience.
I don’t think the idea of consciousness is a controversial one. Humans are self-aware.
Determinism involves the absence of free will. What can’t anyone, then, accept the superfluousness of conscience or the fact that if free will is the mere background noise of consciensness, then conscience is nothing but the source of this nagging static. Why shy away from admitting that if free will is an illusion, so is conscience.
If your conscience isn’t in your mind, then where is it? Perhaps you are one of these lucky people who have a conscience located in some external object, like Pinocchio, whose conscience was located in an anthropomorphic house cricket.
Having an external conscience runs the risk that it could be lost or damaged. What would Pinocchio have done if Jiminy had been killed off? Would he have carved some wooden guns and gone on a killing spree, free from all normative restraints?
We evolved in relatively small groups. Our inclusive genetic fitness was highly reliant on other people, and to treat those people badly based on “fairness standards” that apply within a small group was a sure way to ostracize oneself. Conscience – which includes feeling bad about causing pain and breaking beneficial group standards – is one more essential cog in the machine. It decreased the chance of our ancestors destroying the social harmony of the group upon which they were totally dependent.
We feel guilty precisely because there is a strict deterministic reason to feel guilty.
That’s like saying “seeing green” is an illusion, or that “feelings” are an illusion.
Conscience affects our behaviors, just like the ability to see color (to spot delicious berries more easily) affects our behaviors. Stubbing a toe and feeling pain, and then later taking caution against that pain, means a change in our behavior. Hurting someone and feeling bad, and then not hurting them again in the future, means a change in our behavior. That’s the very opposite of an “illusion” as I think most people would understand the word.