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[hops]

Personally, I'd be in the "there is no free will" camp too if it didn't pose serious threat to meaningful jurisprudence. How can we meaningfully deter criminals if free will didn't exist?

Not to mention, the assumption that free will doesn't exist also enable oppression and restriction of freedom.

[KittyTac]

Personally, I'd be in the "there is no free will" camp too if it didn't pose serious threat to meaningful jurisprudence. How can we meaningfully deter criminals if free will didn't exist?

Not to mention, the assumption that free will doesn't exist also enable oppression and restriction of freedom.

Well, there's nothing stopping anybody from actually deterring criminals without free will. If humans interact with each other in deterministic ways, then punishment (or lack thereof) is also a deterministic interaction. There's no actual threat.

[Maximum Spin]

Free will pretty much implies a soul of some sort, so a true materialist does not believe in free will. I consider myself to be a true materialist.

That is in fact not true at all. There is a very tiny, outside possibility of free will being recovered from quantum mechanics if and only if it turns out that quantum "random" processes are actually admissive of conscious control. (The more commonly cited "quantum randomness means no determinism, therefore free will!" case, though, doesn't hold up because randomness is also not free will; if your decisions are purely random, you have no more freedom to choose than you do if your decisions are predetermined.) This would basically fall under the umbrella of discovering new laws of physics compatible with free will, which (as a physicist) I must remind you is always possible.

Personally, I'd be in the "there is no free will" camp too if it didn't pose serious threat to meaningful jurisprudence. How can we meaningfully deter criminals if free will didn't exist?

Not to mention, the assumption that free will doesn't exist also enable oppression and restriction of freedom.

Can I file this statement under "things that made me absolutely terrified today"? I can't comprehend the idea that a factual statement about the world should be determined true or false by its moral consequences. Gravity also enables oppression and restriction of freedom...

[hops]

Well, I don't know about you, but physics is about picking the useful model, not the true model necessarily, because our perceptions are flawed and therefore we can't really get the absolute truth anyways. Everything we know about the world are analogies used to describe reality.

[Reelya]

By assuming that "choice" is a multi-level thing.

You could decide to never get out of bed because "determinism" means the decision of whether you get out of bed or not has already been made by "the universe". So you might as well stay in bed for the rest of your life, because you didn't get to "choose" to get up every day. But that's clearly bullshit. At some level, the person who never gets out of bed made a choice to do that.

That assumes that determinism is more like a fractal set of layers of decisions, rather than an all or nothing thing with us just being buffeted by the whims of the universe. Sure, the machinery of your brain made the choice whether to ever get out of bed, but that machinery is you, and nothing "external" forced you to act one way or the other.

[KittyTac]

Free will pretty much implies a soul of some sort, so a true materialist does not believe in free will. I consider myself to be a true materialist.

That is in fact not true at all. There is a very tiny, outside possibility of free will being recovered from quantum mechanics if and only if it turns out that quantum "random" processes are actually admissive of conscious control. (The more commonly cited "quantum randomness means no determinism, therefore free will!" case, though, doesn't hold up because randomness is also not free will; if your decisions are purely random, you have no more freedom to choose than you do if your decisions are predetermined.) This would basically fall under the umbrella of discovering new laws of physics compatible with free will, which (as a physicist) I must remind you is always possible.

But the existence of these laws is not proven or even implied. Therefore, I will only ever change my mind if such a law is discovered.

Personally, I'd be in the "there is no free will" camp too if it didn't pose serious threat to meaningful jurisprudence. How can we meaningfully deter criminals if free will didn't exist?

Not to mention, the assumption that free will doesn't exist also enable oppression and restriction of freedom.

Can I file this statement under "things that made me absolutely terrified today"? I can't comprehend the idea that a factual statement about the world should be determined true or false by its moral consequences. Gravity also enables oppression and restriction of freedom...

We need to veto gravity. Gravity is an inherently oppressive system.

[scriver]

Personally, I'd be in the "there is no free will" camp too if it didn't pose serious threat to meaningful jurisprudence. How can we meaningfully deter criminals if free will didn't exist?

Not to mention, the assumption that free will doesn't exist also enable oppression and restriction of freedom.

As he screamed "You are an evil man"
And I paused a while to wonder
If I have no free will then how can I be morally culpable, I wonder

I shot Richard Holmes in the stomach
Gingerly he sat down
And he whispered verily "no offense"
Then lay upon the ground

"None taken" I replied to him
To which he gave a little cough
And with blazing wings I neatly aimed blew his head completely off

[Maximum Spin]

Well, I don't know about you, but physics is about picking the useful model, not the true model necessarily, because our perceptions are flawed and therefore we can't really get the absolute truth anyways. Everything we know about the world are analogies used to describe reality.

The concept of whether there even is such a thing as "absolute truth" is not amenable to scientific investigation. That said, it's a total misnomer to say that physics (or science in general) is about "picking the useful model"; science is about determining what is empirically correct, that is, effectively, what model yields accurate predictions about future observations. You can't simply replace "useful" with "produces the moral outcomes I want" because that's not the measure that our epistemology uses.

[KittyTac]

By assuming that "choice" is a multi-level thing.

You could decide to never get out of bed because "determinism" means the decision of whether you get out of bed or not has already been made by "the universe". So you might as well stay in bed for the rest of your life, because you didn't get to "choose" to get up every day. But that's clearly bullshit. At some level, the person who never gets out of bed made a choice to do that.

That assumes that determinism is more like a fractal set of layers of decisions, rather than an all or nothing thing with us just being buffeted by the whims of the universe. Sure, the machinery of your brain made the choice whether to ever get out of bed, but that machinery is you, and nothing "external" forced you to act one way or the other.

Your biochemical processes and (probably damaged) psyche is what would make you never get out of bed. It's not a choice. "You" is an illusion.

I think we've derailed this thread hard.

[hops]

This discussion has officially gone into confusing territory and I'll shut up because I don't feel like I'm actually learning anything.

Also, don't fall into the trap of personally attacking people for their philosophical opinions. That shit killed Socrates.

[Maximum Spin]

By assuming that "choice" is a multi-level thing.

You could decide to never get out of bed because "determinism" means the decision of whether you get out of bed or not has already been made by "the universe". So you might as well stay in bed for the rest of your life, because you didn't get to "choose" to get up every day. But that's clearly bullshit. At some level, the person who never gets out of bed made a choice to do that.

That assumes that determinism is more like a fractal set of layers of decisions, rather than an all or nothing thing with us just being buffeted by the whims of the universe. Sure, the machinery of your brain made the choice whether to ever get out of bed, but that machinery is you, and nothing "external" forced you to act one way or the other.

Your biochemical processes and (probably damaged) psyche is what would make you never get out of bed. It's not a choice. "You" is an illusion.

Yeah, KittyTac has the right of this here, that's fundamentally a misunderstanding of determinism. Determinism doesn't mean "I don't have to choose anything because it is inevitably decided by the universe" or something, it means "I can't choose anything; I either will get out of bed or will not, and I don't know until I find out by doing so, but the alternative was never possible according to the known laws of physics".

This discussion has officially gone into confusing territory and I'll shut up because I don't feel like I'm actually learning anything.

That sounds like a good way to keep not learning anything, though

[hops]

Or, I could read more books. I don't know, I never learn when I'm sharing my opinions. Guess it's just the way I'm wired.

[Reelya]

No, but I was talking about Free Will, not determinism, so that's a different argument.

I was talking about a definition of free will that's compatible with determinism, so saying "that's not how determinism works" is missing the point. There's a name for this entire school of thought, called "compatibilism".

[KittyTac]

Look up literature on determinism or something. Now, can we stop this discussion and put the thread back on its rails? It's blatantly obvious that none of us have been moved a millimeter by this discussion.

[Reelya]

Why don't you, there's a whole school of thought on Free Will's compatibility with Determinsm, called Compatiblism. I wasn't challenging the definition of determinism in the first place. So that's like a complete red herring right there. I'm defining Free Will differently to you, not Determinism.