Determinism vs Free Will
What are your thoughts?
If you subscribe to the deterministic perspective what are your thoughts on human interaction such as punishment for crime?
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What are your thoughts?
If you subscribe to the deterministic perspective what are your thoughts on human interaction such as punishment for crime?
Comments
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." - Karl Marx
One of philosophy's more pointless questions - if you don't believe in free will, what are you going to do about it? Nothing, because it's pre-determined. Conversely, it doesn't matter if I believe in free will. If I don't have it, then my belief in free will is pre-determined. Much better question on what to do with free will.
As suggested by the Marx quote above, it isn't really an either/or question. There is free will, but there is also psychology - inculcation, compulsion, etc. and social circumstances. It gets particularly important when you're talking about public policy, when you're dealing on a social level rather than an individual one. Sure, you can tell an individual growing up in poverty in a neighborhood with rampant drugs and crime with few economic opportunities to buckle down and study and work their way out, but if you think that, in aggregate, those conditions aren't going to lead to continued crime and poverty you're kidding yourself.
Everyone has free will. Determinism is a philosophy that's true to a certain degree. For example, you mention punishment of crime, which is only applicable to those who fear and follow the law. A person with free will may be a sociopath and just ignore laws.
So a person willingly chooses to be a sociopath and ignore the laws?
Less fruitful maybe, but one of the more interesting, if you go in looking only for results then yes, it would be a pointless question. I'm not sure how it isn't an either or question, even after reading the quote. Either there is an immaterial part of our conciousness allowing for free will, or it is a process governed completely by physical laws. You could have the immaterial portion affected by physical laws, but you would still have free will, in which case determinism would be off the table. It's one of few times that a dichotomy isn't false.
As for the last paragraph, I was just curious about the question from the point of view of someone who does subscribe to determinism. If you believe in free will then yes, you would have no reason not to punish and etc.
Only if they really want to. But I think most people follow what they're comfortable with, which is obeying laws. It's a matter of conformity, independent thinking, and how the person was raised.
I know I have free will. I could choose to do anything I want to right now. With that said, looking back on my life I don't think It was possible to have done things any different. I know technically I could have, but if I had then I would be a different person. This me would not exist. I don't know if that even makes sense to anyone else, full disclosure this is something I would think about when I was still getting high. I think this might be part of M theory I don't know I'm tired.
You feel like you have free will. You can think, and then choose to act in accordance with your reasoning, and you can reflect on the choice you made and it may influence future choices as part of your reasoning "path", but determinism doesn't say you can't have the illusion of choice.
I believe they are both true things. I think that our existence has set possibilities of what could happen and many...many paths are predetermined. However, I believe we have the ability to choose which path we eventually follow. Of course many people are at positions of which they can't take many paths based around many disabilities and issues they might have, they still have the ability to choose their own path as example with many people who have problems but overcame them. It is possible for both to exist at the same time.
I'm basically a determinist. I think free will and choice can be useful constructs for conceptualizing our actions, but I don't think they exist in actuality. The brain can best be thought of as a very complex input-output mechanism. When an environmental cue is inputted, it interacts with the current mental state we have, and then outputs a behavioral directive. Given the same environmental cue interacting with the same mental state, I don't think it's possible for a different behavioral directive to be outputted (barring some weird quantum fluctuations I can't even begin to understand).
In terms of crime and punishment, my determinism makes me lean away from "justice" as a basis for punishment, but I think a prison system is perfectly compatible with determinism. The general goal of a society should be to minimize the number of harmful behavioral outputs in that society. So when we identify a brain whose mental states result in a lot of harmful behavioral outputs, we should isolate it to prevent it from carrying out harmful behaviors. Then, if possible, we should correct the brain such that its mental states produce more positive behavioral outcomes. Once the risk of the brain carrying out more harmful behavior has been sufficiently reduced, we can remove it from isolation. However, if the kinds of harmful behavior that the brain produces are too extreme, it may never be worth the risk to remove that brain from isolation. In that case, we could either keep the brain isolated until it dies or terminate it.