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[Reelya]

I don't think that's really any different to what I specified as my position.

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.

"Machinery of the brain" and "set of biochemical reactions" refer to the same thing, it's just using a different metaphor. I also referred to it as fractal and multi-level. By that I meant the brain is a part of the universe, the brain makes decisions, but it's influenced by effects at different levels, too.

[helmacon]

So, I would say that it looks like we all more or less agree, and ate just defining terms differently.

[ChairmanPoo]

I dont think free will and determinism are mutually exclusive

Ultimately, that position is equivalent to "not using the same definition of free will as everyone else".
To the majority of people, free will means that your decisions are not predetermined by the state of your brain, which is incompatible with determinism.

eta noticed this:

However, where you're wrong Maximum, is that the act of seeking a prediction gives you a different future to the one where you didn't seek a prediction. You say that predictions don't change the future, but that misses the point that the act of getting a prediction leads to a different future than one one where you didn't get the prediction.

Not sure where that amounts to me being wrong; that all comes before the prediction and thus does not change the prediction you get, so it's simply irrelevant to what I was saying; moreover, the proffered scenario implied, to my mind, that the genie just shows up with this information unsolicited rather than being asked.

Maybe it's your definition of free will that is flawed. By virtue of making a choice  you're expressing a preference. In that situation you had that preference and that's written in stone. Making a different choice in that situation is a discussion about time travel, not free will.

Btw I did a quick search and I'm not alone in seeing things like this :p

For that matter, if we break determinism that doesn't mean at all that you have free will. If your decisions are not your own because they followed a predetermined pattern, they won't be your own either just because they follow a RNG

[Reelya]

However, where you're wrong Maximum, is that the act of seeking a prediction gives you a different future to the one where you didn't seek a prediction. You say that predictions don't change the future, but that misses the point that the act of getting a prediction leads to a different future than one one where you didn't get the prediction.

Not sure where that amounts to me being wrong; that all comes before the prediction and thus does not change the prediction you get, so it's simply irrelevant to what I was saying; moreover, the proffered scenario implied, to my mind, that the genie just shows up with this information unsolicited rather than being asked.

Well let me counter this with another example. You say that the act of getting a prediction doesn't influence future events, because the choice to get a prediction or not was already made. I think that sounds like saying whether you get blisters on your feet isn't dependent on whether you wore shoes when you walked down the street, because the choice to wear shoes or not was preordained. To hold onto the "predictions don't matter" argument you have to reject causality, not determinism.

However, I don't see any problem with saying that getting a prediction - or wearing shoes - altered the future path, and that this view doesn't conflict with determinism. The key term is that the prediction influenced future events, which is what people are actually talking about when they talk about how the act of prediction changes the future. Nobody was ever claiming that it was non-deterministic as a result.

[Criptfeind]

What an interesting conversation I certainly didn't skip and this was probably covered by someone else already: But I noticed there was mentioned of how the lack of free will gives some people issues with the justice system i.e. Is it okay to punish people who aren't ultimately responsible for their actions?

I'd like to purpose it's not okay to punish people even when they ARE ultimately responsible for their actions, at least not just for punishing them. So the question is moot. Instead the justice system should punish people to A: Act as a deterrent to others committing crime in the future "Ohhh... I really wanta snatch that purse, but then I'd go to jail, better not" B: Physically prevent that person from committing more crimes "Too bad I'm in jail for purse snatching, I really want to snatch more purses." C: Rehabilitation and reintroduction to society as a person who won't commit more crimes "Thank goodness for that purse construction class in jail, now I can satisfy my need for more purses by making my own, and I can even sell them on etsy afterwards!"

And none of these things have an issue with if free will exists or not, since even without free will their mechanisms interact with the deterministic processes that determine if someone will commit a crime.

[helmacon]

Ideally, yes I would agree with you, but a lot of people see the justice system as a vengeance system, (ie. "Rot in jail" " they deserve a death sentence" ect...) and suggesting otherwise to then gets you ridiculed as "soft" or "liberal bleeding heart" even though a vengeance system literally makes more crime by making people more likely to re offend.

[Reelya]

Punishment comes from our monkey-brain's evolved fairness detector system. If you give a monkey one banana, he's happy. But if the other monkey gets two bananas, first monkey is going to flip his shit. The desire for punishment derives from a related ancient cognitive system: it's about fairness perception.

The monkey who only got one banana isn't going to feel so bad if you give the two-banana monkey a poke as he would if both monkeys got one banana. The same thing if the second monkey did something bad, then the first monkey won't care whether a similarly bad thing happens to the other monkey. And if the second monkey was bad enough, then the first monkey won't be happy until something bad happens to the other monkey. Or even if a monkey was just really lucky, we feel schadenfreude if he has a run of bad luck. It's all about perceived fairness. This is all evolved stuff that originated before language and laws, to deal with getting along in groups. It's primate justice.

[helmacon]

A lot of people have an innate desire to eat tide pods because of the way our monkey brain classifies food. Dosen't mean the idea has any merit. That's an appeal to nature.

[JoshuaFH]

Punishment comes from our monkey-brain's evolved fairness detector system. If you give a monkey one banana, he's happy. But if the other monkey gets two bananas, first monkey is going to flip his shit. The desire for punishment derives from a related ancient cognitive system: it's about fairness perception.

And then the monkeys evolved self-serving biases to try to rationalize-away the neighboring monkeys' anger. "No, I worked hard for this extra banana." "My monkey family sacrificed for this banana." "You're a lazy and bad monkey you don't deserve two bananas like I do." "I'm one of god's chosen monkeys! It's divine will that I get two bananas and you only get one!"

[Reelya]

Yep, it all comes down to one word, Deserve. This is actually one of the most ancient cognitions, related to the primate fairness thing I was talking about. A lot of human/primate behavior is built around the "deserve" concept. He deserves to be punished, I deserve a raise etc. Poor monkey doesn't "deserve" to get another banana, rich 2-banana monkey "deserves" to fall on his face in poop.

[Maximum Spin]

Well let me counter this with another example. You say that the act of getting a prediction doesn't influence future events, because the choice to get a prediction or not was already made.

I didn't say that.

I don't know why you think I said that. I didn't say that. All I said was an accurate prediction cannot render itself false by being made, because then it wouldn't be accurate.

Chairmanpoo, too: I don't know what you think I'm saying, exactly, but I'm not saying it. All the things you said, including that nondeterminism doesn't rescue free will without some kind of conscious control, are things I already said I agree with.

[KittyTac]

Here's my opinion. I *do* believe in both determinism and free will, but not like how Reelya does. Yes, "you" are simply a set of biochemical reactions that interact with the universe, nothing more. But what tells people that that set of biochemical reactions can't make decisions and have free will? Because it's not romantic enough? Yes, the universe decides everything, but you are a part of the universe. All the other atoms in the universe can't simply ignore your atoms' effect on them.

A set of biochemical reactions acts in predetermined ways. You can't have free will. The effect that your atoms have on other atoms is too predetermined.

Re: Justice
If a set of biochemical reactions we call a human misbehaves, it's okay to correct it. It just means that its biochemical reactions went wrong somewhere.

Now, can we plug this discussion already? It's been a massive thread derailment so far.

[Maximum Spin]

The concept of free will terrifies people, I don't see the problem.

[Reelya]

sometimes you seem to deliberately misconstrue what I'm talking about and when I clarify what I meant all along you say I have a "flawed definition". That's not really a consistent point to follow on with, when someone points out you weren't arguing against what their actual point was. If someone is using a term differently, the polite thing is to ascertain what they actually mean and argue against that, not to argue against a strawman and then when they point out that that's not what they meant, you say their "definition" was flawed. Just seems argumentative for little gain in discourse.

And you make points like this which I can't really fathom how they're relevant except to be confirmation-bias that you're "winning" some sort of game:

moreover, the proffered scenario implied, to my mind, that the genie just shows up with this information unsolicited rather than being asked.

How is that different to the formulation where you "seek" vs "don't seek" the prediction. In the case of a genie that appears, it's identical to postulating scenarios in which the genie can "appear" or "not appear". The scenario is identical in either case, in terms of how it affects causality, so I don't see how this made any sort of point against what I wrote.

[KittyTac]

The concept of free will terrifies people, I don't see the problem.

Sure, but the discussion could get flamey. You don't want for the Toadmobile to arrive, do you?