Some people are just too “clever by half” or lack a basic level of human empathy, despite playing the moral outrage card. I saw this comment on my Facebook page. To spare the guy (who is in the US) embarrassment, and as his comments were not meant to be fully public, I will not name him, and I suspect he’s not alone in taking this sort of line:
“I’m sick and tired of everybody valorizing Donald Trump in the wake of the assassination attempt yesterday. Somebody tried to kill him and he got an injury to his face. How does that make him more virtuous? How does that make him somehow more qualified to be president? How does that make Biden LESS qualified to be president? Is it even possible to make either of them less qualified to be president? The fact that you endured an assassination attempt simply means you are the passive recipient of somebody else’s misconduct. It does not make you more virtuous or more heroic.”
The penultimate sentence contains the seeds of this writer’s error (such as his words “passive recipient”), and a key point is that, in the writer’s way of thinking, Trump/other shooter victim should only be viewed as a victim. But the writer missed the point, and here is what I wrote in response:
“It’s how a person reacts to an attack that counts. In fact, it’s about when people refuse to play the `victim card’ and behave in a particular way that’s important. It comes down to how composed and calm a person can be in times of stress. In all walks of life, we admire people who display those traits…And I think Mr Trump handled himself well after being shot and realizing that a shooter was trying to kill him. If you can’t give a person credit for that, then that’s odd.”
I would go beyond what I said to this person on FB by making a broader point. Today, we live in an age when it is often widely held among supposed intellectuals, scientists and the like that we don’t have free will, and that we are, in varying ways, the consequences of internal and external forces we cannot understand or control. As a result, it is – as the writer I responded to claims – no cause for praise in how anyone reacts to said forces.
To have free will is, according to this point of view, an illusion, albeit perhaps a necessary one for mental health and maybe also an aspect of biological evolution. (The latter has the risk of being a “just-so” story explanation.) But if free will is nothing more than a handy, surface appearance, then it is hard to see how it has much value, much cash value, from evolutionary terms. After all, knowing you are not the author of your actions might, for some people, be comforting, rather than a nightmare. And think of how certain well-known writers, such as Sam Harris, argue that free will is an illusion and that, for example, criminals are ill, primarily, rather than wicked. The flipside of this is that a person who shows courage, either physical or mental, gets no praise because, on the determinist view, he had no choice in the matter. Everything, including the words I type right now, I had no choice over. None. We are all in the Matrix.
But this is self-contradictory. If determinism is true and judgement is pre-determined, how can we know the truth of determinism if we had no choice but to do so anyway? I think we know from introspection that the sense that we are making a choice to focus our minds or not, to set the course of how we want to think about something (or not), is real as anything is in the universe from an empirical sense. To think is to choose; thinking and volition are intertwined so much as to be one and the same. If introspection is an illusion, then so is sight, smell, taste, hearing, etc. But oddly, determinists rarely in my experience challenge these senses’ validity in conveying reality.
Back to Mr Trump’s way of reacting to the would-be assassin and others like him: I think that Mr Trump, whatever else one can say about him, had the kind of character, a character that for better or worse he has developed, to want to assert himself in the face of danger. That’s not always smart or fashionable in these weird times, but it is there. There is a sort of Andrew Jackson-style baddass mind-set that came to the fore on Saturday.
(Here are some excellent places to look if you want to understand, as I do, why I think free will is real. See this book, by Christian List, for example, or this or this one by Alfred Mele. And finally this, by Lee Pierson and Monroe Trout, for those who want to burrow deep into the evolutionary argument.)
Addendum: The writer is also denouncing the idea that Mr Trump being shot is somehow proof of his virtue. However, I doubt anyone thinks that. Of course, Mr Trump does threaten the agendas of a lot of people, foreign and domestic, but that is not the nub of my point here, although I am sure commenters will want to mention these issues.
Related to this is the point: so what if somebody shot at Trump? Why would that convince voters, especially fence sitters, to vote for him?
Well, simply because somebody thought they had a right to take away THEIR rights, so there’s a visceral reaction, a way of saying, ‘hey, f*ck you, I’m voting for him out of spite for YOU’.
Trump has always been what he has been. It’s always been suspected, but not proven. After all, he was not a military veteran, did not even serve. But his reaction after being shot was certainly an eye-opener.
Also, some detractors have said before that he’s a bully. Well, maybe. But would you want a bully advocating for your country, or a weaselly walkover? And corollary to that is the perception that bullies actually fold easily when resisted, that they’re cowards at heart.
Trump has withstood insane amounts of pressure and resistance since he decided to enter politics. And having faced a bullet, he still had the guts to stand tall and rally his people. Certainly no coward, that’s for sure.
Does all these mean he’ll win?
Nah, all the problems from 2020 remain. Why won’t the demon-crats double down on their election fraud if they’re reasonably sure they can still get away with it? What are the majority of americans going to do?
Declare civil war?
They only have to make it somewhat plausible that their candidate can win. Certainly, it’s not Joe, that would really not fool anybody anymore. A Kamala Harris-Michelle Obama ticket would do it, no matter how terrible Harris polled in 2020.
I hope I’m wrong. Not least because a weak economy, rising inflation, and hence higher interest rates in the US hurts me too – higher mortgage rates once I need to refinance my housing loan in 2026. I’m not ashamed to say that.
Please please please, Trump had better win this.
There are many people who defend the idea of free will – but their motives, beyond a sense of conviction, are unclear.
Me? I’m a determinist… but what I do say is people choose to do, or not do, actions based on their biology and life experiences which are probably mostly unavailable to introspection. So people use the useful fiction of ‘free will’ to explain to themselves and others the ‘reasons’ why they made a particular choice at that particular point in time.
A key point unexplored by those waving away criminality (or heroism) ‘because they had no free will’ is that an individual’s actions do not stand in isolation… the community they live in also makes judgements using their own free will useful fictions. So people who cheat or break the law are ‘not playing the game’ we generally subscribe to. And playing the game has implied winners or losers. Change the community and you change the game, a little or a lot.
My belief is that God and free will are the same thing. Pascal’s wager applies.
“If you can’t give a person credit for that, then that’s odd.”
WTF, that’s about the squishiest comeback to a man without a chest belittling true heroism that I’ve ever come across.
How about: “then crawl back under your rock, why don’t you.”
“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” Epictetus
He’s a friend. I’m old fashioned in not insulting people that I know personally.
Sometimes civility works.
Discovered Joys, but to “change the community”, to push for better, nobler ways of conduct is a choice. We aren’t just chess pieces on a board.
I’m old fashioned too and my friends and I often insult each other, especially when someone is being a stupid prick.
Perhaps the most insightful comment — on Samizdata — about “free will” (or agency, which i think a much more appropriate term) was written by Clovis Sangrail yesterday:
This was not meant as a philosophical remark about agency, of course; but it contains 2 philosophical nuggets:
1. the distinction between reflex reaction, which is not agency, and thoughtful (re)action, which is the same as agency;
2. the sentence “I’d better get down!”, which, if you think about it — and i mean think about it seriously — destroys all incompatibilist positions: the “determinism” of Sam Harris as much as the “libertarianism” of Thomas Reid and Paul Marks. It also destroys the “compatibilism” of Hobbes, and arguably of Hume (although Hume allows himself more elbow room than Hobbes does).
I don’t think Sam Harris’s argument about determinism and punishment is sound. Yes, it’s true that heredity, and prenatal conditions, and early childhood experiences are all part of a criminal’s past. But if there are penalties for theft or rape, and if those penalties are known to exist, the knowledge of them is ALSO part of the criminal’s past, and may prevent them from committing the crime in question, even on a purely deterministic account.
I would also say that a focus on the past and past causes is a misunderstanding of determinism. The past doesn’t cause anything; it’s no longer there to be a cause. The cause must be something that exists now. It’s not the criminal’s childhood that reaches forward in time and makes them want to harm someone, but the present character that was shaped by that childhood; it’s not the past learning of penalties that reaches forward in time and provides a disincentive to harming someone, but their present knowledge that was generated by that knowledge.
This is an excellent way of explaining the concept.
Moritz Schlick expressed pretty much the same view in his essay: When is a Man Responsible?
But not as clearly; and i say that without meaning to flatter W.H.S.
@Jonathan Pearce
Quite so, but we cannot change our community single handedly. There is (perhaps) ‘Enlightenment thinking’ trying to reduce the emotionally driven reactions to something more considered but we should all do our bit to see this happen. But you could argue that ‘changing the community’ can go either way – and that in the relatively comfortable developed world the regression to ‘Romantic’ emotions, warts and all, carries no great censure.
The simple answer to this is to look at Singapore, where they hang drug traffickers and say ‘Well, as the courts and prison people don’t have free will either, there is nothing to complain about, they can’t help hanging them.’
Yet for some reason they protest. Somewhere on YT I saw an interview with Lee Kwan Yew in retirement where he mused on the effect of hanging drug traffickers. He said something like ‘We had to hang three or four before they realised we were serious.‘ (and then drug trafficking effectively stopped).
Irrespective of whether Trump has “free will” or not if his actions are predetermined and that predetermination indicates that he will be brave and tough in face of adversity, that he will stand strong against the forces against him, these are all good traits to have in a leader, irrespective of whether they are predetermined or determined by his free will.
And in regards to determinism, first of all science doesn’t support this idea at all. If you look at the quantum level the reality is that almost everything happens at random, though the laws of nature demand a certain stochastic probability shaping the outcome. That randomness certainly does manifest in the macroscopic.
But taking that more macroscopic view, if people are to claim that free will does exist given all the scientific evidence that the brain is a chemical machine, then they really need to put forward an alternative theory. If there is a source of information beyond the normal macroscopic cause and effect of the material world, let them say what it is. Or at very least offer some sort of evidence for its existence beyond just philosophical personal preference. I’m definitely open to hear alternative ideas on this, but they surely have to be based on data rather than just appeals to emotion, or concerns with undesirable consequences.
Ultimately the real challenge in these matters is one of definition. I have often said that we can agree on the question “do I have free will” as soon as we agree on the meaning of the words “I”, “have”, “free” and “will”. Like many philosophical questions it comes down to what words mean and it is all to easy to hijack or confound a discussion with a tiny semantic tweak to the words.
Trump shows his character and strength in unscripted moments, moments that he could never prepare for.
We saw his strength in reaction to the assassination attenmpt.
It reveals more than any speech, interview or press comference.
This youtube clip I have found , if you can open it shows another side of him. I searched for ‘Trump waits for Carson’.
What it shows is that Trump is, at his core, instinctively generous and supportive. He had no time to rehearse that and to me it is very impressive. Of course Trump is brash, undiplomatic, egotistical and more. But he is a good man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYOSaKGtLmk
I’m struggling to understand Discovered Joy’s concept of determinism. He/she/it doesn’t seem to be offering a “hard” determinism whereby everything, every movement of an electron and every human thought was pre-ordained when the Lord (or whoever) set the wheels spinning.
“We cannot change our community single handedly” makes no sense to a hard determinist. We can’t change our community AT ALL. Because we can’t change anything at all. It’s determined.
So we seem to be left with a sort of squidgy determinism whereby things can be changed – ie not everything is determined – but human individuals can’t change anything on their own. But this seems unlikely. I don’t see how society impelled me to write this comment. Indeed I nearly didn’t bother. And if I can choose to write or not to write an obscure comment on an obscure website all on my own, why should it be beyond me to invent a new treatment for varicose veins ?
One guy on a roof came close on Saturday.
@Lee Moore, yeah this is my concern with the “of course we have free will” view. It is based on things like “if we don’t have free will we don’t have criminal liability” or, “if we don’t have free will what is the point of life” and so on. But these are not arguments in favor of free will. It is like making a claim “Trump is going to win the election”. I ask why, and the response is “if he doesn’t then the country will go to hell.” Irrespective of the truth of this second thing it offers no evidence whatsoever that the original claim is true.
So if you advocate for “we have free will” I’d simple ask — why do you think that? What evidence is there to support your belief? Where does this free will come from? When things happen what degree is it because you decide by “free will” and what degree are your decisions the result of circumstances? It is clearly a combination of both: I definitely make different decisions when I am grumpy and haven’t had my nap.
I’m open to such arguments, I just don’t hear them being made. What I hear are these “we don’t want these consequences, so therefore we will wish them away by believing something on faith.” And that doesn’t work for me.
And to reiterate, there is no such thing as determinism, only high levels of probability. At the very lowest level can’t even say reliably how many quarks there are in a proton at any particular time, just that it is very likely to be 3.
@bobby b
One guy on a roof came close on Saturday.
Excellent riposte. I’d say the unlikelihood that Trump was not killed and merely grazed on his ear is perhaps the strongest evidence I have ever heard of for the existence of divine providence.
Though the family of the guy who died or the two people seriously injured might strongly disagree.
When we understand how everything in the universe functions, then we would know whether or not we have free will. Until that time, it is just a matter of faith, either way.
Many Collectivists (although not all of them) do indeed reject moral personhood (free will) because they want to claim (perhaps even to themselves) that they had no-choice over committing the terrible crimes (tyranny) they commit – “I could do no other – my actions were predetermined”.
Also if humans are not really persons (beings) then it does not matter what is done to them – if the Determinists are correct that humans have no moral agency (that the “I” does not really exist – is an “illusion” – in which case who is experiencing the illusion if the human person, the “I”, does not exist?) then it does not matter if humans are burned alive, or whatever. Certainly political liberty is of no importance what-so-ever, is without meaning, if moral agency (free will – human personhood) does not exist.
Donald J. Trump made a choice to behave well (just as he has sometimes made a choice to behave badly) “wait-wait” he said calmly – before he raised his fist and declared his defiance to the audience, “fight-fight” he said, thus drawing the citizens to their representatives, reminding them that he can win NOTHING alone, that everything depends on the efforts of ordinary people.
To win enough ordinary people must make a choice, a free choice, to defy the establishment and take their nation back from the establishment.
However, moral agency – personhood (free will) is not enough on-its-own – there must also be knowledge.
That is why I wish someone would give (as a gift) a copy of W.H. Hutt’s “The Strike Threat System” to both President Trump and to his running mate Senator J.D. Vance.
Both men are on record as supporting Collective Bargaining (a gift of the government to the unions) especially Senator Vance – the motives of President Trump and Senator Vance are good, but they lack the knowledge that Collective Bargaining leads to the structural UNEMPLOYMENT.
J.M. Keyes famously said that “wages are sticky downwards” – but he did not say WHY this is so, the reason is the government-granted Collective Bargaining power, if it were not for government granted Collective Bargaining power then wages would quickly adjust to Credit Money busts and there would NOT be mass UNEMPLOYMENT for years after such a Credit Money bust.
Given that a massive Credit Money bust is coming – it is vital that wages NOT be “sticky downwards” if mass UNEMPLOYMENT is to be avoided.
The “demand fallacy” that wages must not be allowed to fall as this “undermines demand” is fatal – it leads to mass UNEMPLOYMENT.
If people don’t have free will then you can make an argument that Trump’s actions are stronger proof of his courage. If he had free will then if we was faced with adversity again he could walk away. But if he is wired in such a way that he is forced to make these decisions then his courage is determined.
@Paul you are making all the very arguments that I pointed out above are not useful, and also doing a bit of guilt by association in saying that “Collectivists” think that way, suggesting that if a person doesn’t accept your free will viewpoint they are necessarily a collectivist.
Even if I accept all your arguments about the consequences of not having free will, how does that in any way make a convincing case that you are right? To demonstrate something is true you must do so because of some cause, not, as you have done, demonstrate that it being true causes something else. Causality is, generally speaking, directional.
I understood it to be widely accepted that when faced with sudden threat, humans like pretty much every animal ever respond using what Jordan Petersen described as lobster brain reaction – “flight or fight”. At those extremely stressful points the reaction is below conscious thought, incapable of being scripted (conspiracy theories notwithstanding) but are highly predictive of how that individual would respond in another confronting situation. Mr Trump’s reaction was the best example you will ever see of someone automatically switching to fight mode. I don’t believe that its in any way a comment on his personality, courage or his ability to exercise free will, he just defaulted at an instinctive level to fight mode.
Not good or bad, just is.
If people don’t have free will then you can make an argument that Trump’s actions are stronger proof of his courage. If he had free will then if we was faced with adversity again he could walk away. But if he is wired in such a way that he is forced to make these decisions then his courage is determined.
Ben, that is an interesting way to think about it, but I am not sure you are quite right here.
There is the courage that comes in weighing up options, knowing that they are all difficult, even unpleasant, but going for one of them out of conviction, judgement, etc. But that surely is a very clear case of showing will, and willpower. Then there is the capacity and will to keep calm during mayhem. (I panic quite easily, so trust me, I know what it takes to not panic.) Where free will enters the picture, I think, is that a person who learns to keep his cool, does so after a lot of practice of handling tough situations, so that the coolness becomes hardwired. But to get to that point, to cultivate that sort of muscle memory, takes years of practice. The Secret Service guys who surrounded Mr Trump on Saturday and took him to safety were doing this. It is something that the best cops, firefighters, security guards, pilots, navigators, etc, do. And I think that with politicians, particularly those who have come up in a roughhouse political culture, dealing with threats, including physical ones, is one that they almost have in their skillset.
Another point is about planning. A scuba diver plans for when he might have an oxygen problem; a pilot does so if an engine fails, etc. Plan, and then plan some more. There is a reason why the military plans and practices to an inch of its life.
And obtaining skills, learning how to keep cool, to manage stress, are things one can learn. To take a far less stressful example, people can master public speaking anxiety, or being nervous about social interactions (and asking that stunning lady if she would like a drink), by practice. And that is a choice.
Trump has always been a profligate rally-er. He gets out there amongst the people daily – in front of huge crowds, mostly unsearched crowds. And the people really seem to appreciate this.
Biden? Not much, ever.
I take that as a partial measure pf Trump’s character. He is a brave sucker.
(Yes, there will be people who respond that bravery is stupidity. Save it.)
Has anybody made the Teddy Roosevelt comparison yet?
I wish I could remember where I came across this, but an interesting perspective on the free will debate is to flip it to “free won’t”. Personally, I strongly believe that we have the capacity to exercise our will, consciously and voluntarily; situations can arise that suggest that digging in our heels and saying “no, I won’t” rather than the easier option of going with the flow are an illustration of free will.
There’s no requirement in the definition that we exercise free will constantly, and arguably for the majority of the time, we don’t. But there are occasions when we do – whether or not to succumb to temptation being an example.
I don’t think that it will do, if you want free will, to appeal to quantum randomness or indeterminism as such. If I’m playing a game, and the rules say that I must do X, then I am not free to choose my move; but if they say that I must roll a six-sided die, and make one of moves A through F depending on what comes up, I still am not free to choose my move, even though my move is not determined or determinable in advance. If quantum mechanical processes are random, and if my actions are the outcome of such processes, my actions may be indeterministic but they are still the product of physics.
Of course, quantum mechanics, at least in the Copenhagen interpretation, makes a point of the collapse of the wave function being brought about by observation, and that seems to build consciousness into the fundamental physics. But I’m not sure that’s right. I have the impression that the term “observation” in the QM axioms is an undefined primitive term, which can be assigned any interpretation that is convenient. It may mean a human physicist looking at something, but it may perhaps mean simply that the microsystem has interacted with a macrosystem that need not be conscious at all. We should not be importing our metaphysics into the formal axioms.
And so I don’t think that it’s legitimate to suppose that quantum mechanical events as such embody intentionality, or that their indeterminism means intentionality rather than randomness.
You can perhaps salvage “free will” in the physical sense if you adhere to some form of dualism. But dualism is no longer a widely held philosophy, nor is there anything in science that gives it aid and comfort. I think we are increasingly moving toward Patricia Churchland’s call for “no spooky stuff,” and thus we need notions of things like agency and narrative and volition not as things independent of physics, but as configurations of physical systems.
@William H. Stoddard
If quantum mechanical processes are random, and if my actions are the outcome of such processes, my actions may be indeterministic but they are still the product of physics.
100% of what you say is right William (except for the “observer” part not so much because you are wrong, but I think what “observer” means is in many ways at the root of the various disagreements on different models of QM. But that is both a huge tangent and also way outside my comfort zone of expertise.) However, I think perhaps I didn’t explain myself real well.
I was not trying to suggest that consciousness resides in quantum fluctuations — this is an idea I think mainly advocated by Roger Penrose. No I was really just objecting to the word “determinism” since nothing really is deterministic due to the points you so ably described. So in a sense I am being pedantic, though perhaps justifiably so, since this field of free will is very sensitive to what you mean by words.
My personal view is that I cannot see any evidence for some additional source of information beyond the basic chemistry of our brains, whether a soul or “moral agency” or some other thing. But I am very open to hearing a convincing argument in a different direction. After all, brains are extremely complicated and there is a lot that isn’t understood about them.
What I won’t accept though is an argument saying “we must have consciousness because if we didn’t the consequences would be terrible, or I wouldn’t like them, or I feel uncomfortable being “just” a machine.” None of these are arguments supporting the idea that the brain is anything other than mechanistic. So I’d rather stick with terms like “materialist” rather than “deterministic”, or even better “no-spooky-stuff-ism” for the reasons you so ably pointed out.
And of course we can interpret, as you say, “free will” and other such terms to fit within that model as long as you redefine them in a way quite different than what people mean. Which is to say, they are a useful macroscopic abstraction, even if not a particularly accurate model at the smallest scale. And that is ok.
After all when we say a table is solid we are really using a macroscopic abstraction in the same way. Because truthfully a table is composed of tiny particles composed of condensed energy surrounded by space overwhelmingly bigger than them, most of that solid is in fact completely empty, and when we “touch” it we are really interacting through electromagnetic forces. But “solid” is a super useful macroscopic abstraction that proves very useful in practice.
Fraser: I mostly agree with what you say. I prefer to say “determinist” because it makes the specific point that I am rejecting the idea of free will. I’ll stipulate that there appears to be true randomness going on at the quantum mechanical level of individual particles; I’m not sure how much difference it makes to macroscopic behavior, but I’m confident that God playing dice with the world (as Einstein put it) isn’t sufficient for us to have “free will.”
I think that language gives us the capacity to narrate our own actions, which gives us the capacity to narrate and thus model our own future actions. But since that narrative exists in the present it can be a cause of those future actions. And from that we get the kind of paradoxes that Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel proved theorems about, so that even if we have the infinite precision to model ourselves at the level of subatomic particles, those paradoxes would limit out ability to predict our future actions. Or in the words of my favorite joke:
Erwin Schrödinger, Kurt Gödel, and Noam Chomsky are in a joke together.
Schrödinger says, “I can’t tell if this joke is funny or not.”
Gödel says, “Of course you can’t tell; you’re in the joke.”
Chomsky says, “Of course it’s funny; you’re just not telling it right!”
We are in our own narratives about ourselves, so we can’t always predict our own actions, and of course we can often defeat predictions about ourselves, if we know those predictions.
Ben – courage is a choice, the choice to overcome fear. See the book set in the Civil War – the Red Badge of Courage, or see the memoirs of President Grant.
If courage is predetermined, then it is not courage.
To talk of freedom as simply the removal of external restraint robs freedom of all moral content – it is like saying that water is free when a damn is blown up, there is no moral importance in such “freedom”.
The water does not CHOOSE to gush out – it just does.
The Determinist denies human personhood – including their own.
And the “Compatibilist” takes two incompatible things, moral responsibility and lack of choice about one’s actions, and declares (absurdly declares) that they are compatible.
They are not compatible – if someone could not have done other than they did, then there is no moral blame. Indeed there is no morality – none.
Morality rests on the ability to be able to do other than we do – if there is no such ability then we are no more morally responsible than water is when it kills people gushing out of a damn that has been blown up.
Indeed if someone can not choose to do other than they do they are NOT “someone” they are someTHING (someTHING – only), they have no personhood.
William H Stoddard makes some good points.
Free will and quantum mechanics…
OK… Are they linked? Maybe but the argument is exceptionally shakey. Now assorted (including Sir Roger Penrose) folks have dressed it up in fancy clothes over the years but let’s strip it to it’s M&S pants. QM is mysterious. Consciousness is mysterious. They are both mysterious so they must be linked. How? Well, that’s mysterious as well… It really is that simple and meaningless an argument.
There is of course a counter argument. The orthodox, Copenhagen, interpretation is that QM is irreducibly stochastic. That means something like “perfectly random”. This is debateable but if we assume it is true and consciousness is in some obscure way a consequence of QMech then our “conscious” actions are neither determistic nor chosen but essentially more random than a fair die role. Let that sink in.
The role of the “observer” in QMech is somewhat obscure as well. William H Stoddart is correct on that. It is why people still drag out Schrödinger’s cat. Essentially the Copenhagen interpretation doesn’t deal with it. As far as I’m aware there is no real answer as to what counts as an observer. I have a trail cam. I use it to spot badgers at night. Sometimes a badger walks past and the camera goes off. Has the badger been observed? Or is it only really observed when I review the footage the next day. But what if the badger is spotted by a fox? QMech really doesn’t want anyone to ask such questions. Not that “want” is the right word, obviously. It’s just that QMech doesn’t provide an answer.
I appreciate we have gone a long way off topic.
As if we are automatons. The societal consequences of regarding people as automatons are pretty dire, while in contrast societies which regard people as having free will function far better.
@pst314
As if we are automatons.
I’m afraid your exasperation and incredulity are no more valid arguments than the others put above. It sounds like the people who say “These foolish idiots are seriously telling me we are all descended from monkeys? How silly they are. Next they’ll be telling me I’m distantly related to a cabbage!” Even if it is a fun and effective rhetorical argument it isn’t a very good rational or scientific argument.
he societal consequences of regarding people as automatons are pretty dire, while in contrast societies which regard people as having free will function far better.
So there are two important things to say about this:
1. Again, saying you don’t like the consequences of something being true doesn’t make it any less true. For example, I really dislike the fact that humans are mortal. Look at the consequences, every day millions of people die, all their life experience, wisdom, education and memories disappear in an instant and it brings devastation to their loved ones. Mortality has horrible consequences, but the fact that these consequences follow naturally from mortality does not make us any less mortal.
2. You say that the consequences result from “regarding us as automatons”. Well surely then the best approach is to not regard us as automatons. We use these kind of abstractions all the time where we encapsulate a complex, nuanced set of things into a simplified model (you are responsible for your actions) all the time. So, if you are responsible for your actions you should suffer the consequences of them. This is surely even more true in a mechanized world than one with soft notions of the soul and so forth.
Again, I reject the word of “automaton”, but I also reject the idea of some sort of non corporeal stuff that makes us more than the marvelous machines we actually are. I am super open to a different perspective, but nobody seems to be making any substantial argument to bring any serious evidence to bear in favor of this soul, or whatever way you want to characterize it.
@Fraser Orr
your exasperation and incredulity
Don’t read more into my comment that is clearly justified. Especially more emotion.
You say that the consequences result from “regarding us as automatons”
Note that I did not say that all consequences are a result of that, merely that it does have consequences.
nobody seems to be making any substantial argument to bring any serious evidence to bear in favor of this soul
I’m not interested in getting into such a discussion/debate. I merely pointed out some consequences worth bearing in mind.
Ben:
There is confusion and befuddlement about the concept of “””free will””” here; which is why i avoid the term.
Let me rephrase it in a way that is intelligible:
If people’s choices are not random, but determined by their character, then you can make an argument that Trump’s actions are stronger proof of his courage. If Trumps’s choice had been random then if he was faced with adversity again he could walk away. But if he is wired in such a way that he is determined to make these decisions then his courage is determined.
Thus rephrased, Ben’s comment is pretty much the essence of Hume’s argument AGAINST INDETERMINISM. (As distinct from Hume’s argument for causality, which i reject: see my previous remarks.)
I note from Paul Marks’ reply to Ben that he (Paul) is unable to distinguish Hume’s (strong, original) argument against indeterminism from Hume’s (weak, unoriginal, Hobbesian, not thought through) argument for causality.
pst314:
This is an argument which i completely fail to understand.
My own political philosophy is now* based on the notion of a free choice as a choice completely determined by moral character.
* as a consequence of arguing against Paul Marks.
But pray tell me, what widely-accepted political doctrine is based on a notion of agency? Any notion.
No hand-waving in your answer, pretty-please!
Snorri – David Hume was either playing games (more on that possibility later), or he was a lying fraud.
Saying that two incompatible things (such as moral responsibility and actions being predetermined) are compatible does not make them so – it is false, as even Kant understood (and said so).
As for the possibility that David Hume was playing games (gently mocking overly serious people), rather than presenting a serious position with the intention to deceive – that is, perhaps, indicated by a couple of famous quotes from the man himself.
Every day ordinary people go this moral process – “this is wrong, so I ought not to do it” – so what does Mr Hume say, he says “you can not get an ought from an is” – thus mocking what people do in their ordinary moral reasoning.
But it does not stop there.
All the great moral teachers of history had taught that one should use moral reason to control the passions – the terrible desires that human beings have, that have led to so many terrible atrocities, as well as to so much “petty” evil by ordinary people (by us all at times – for all of us have done evil things, every person has to struggle with their own evil within themselves, their own passions, every day of their lives – and we sometimes fail).
So what does Mr Hume say – Mr Hume says “reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions”.
In short that there is, or should not be, no moral reason (that all the great moral teachers of history were wasting their breath) and the passions should be indulged – both on a petty and a grand scale, with reason just reduced to an instrumental role (a “slave”) – “how can I get away with doing these things?”.
So let us hope that Mr Hume was just playing games – mocking stuffy people overly concerned with the risks of robbery, rape and murder.
For if (if) Mr Hume was serious, then his doctrines are monstrous – and they place they lead to is Hell (in this world – even if no future state exists).
As for the attacks on the very existence of the human person (the “I” – with the false claim that a thought does not mean a thinker) and the attacks on the objective physical universe.
Again either this is gentle mockery – mockery of overly serious people, or the attacks were meant.
If (if) the attacks were meant – then the attacks were despicable.
Sorry, Paul, but you don’t know what you are talking about.