iNow

Because my conclusion comes from the facts of how our minds work. I’ve been posting here on this topic for about a decade across scores of threads. I can’t fault you for not remembering my many contributions across so many of those threads, but please don’t accuse me of just making shit up and failing to support my stance. You know me better… at least I hope you do and you’re not learning to hate your neighbors like so many others across the planet these last years. The locations of the brain activities for these choices and decisions are activated well before the locations of our brain responsible for awareness, consciousness, and sense of self. Full stop. You can certainly form your own conclusions around what this means for the concepts of choice and decision making and free will, but my conclusion is that calling it a “choice” is a bit silly since we’re not even aware of it yet when it happens. My wife bitches at me about my tone sometimes, too. It doesn’t make me wrong. ✌🏼

I could, but it’s not worth the time. I’m glad you’re here, but not when you act like this.

Those better predictions also make it painfully simple to see where the ROI is on the expenditure of our tax revenues. As you well know, we can either spend hundreds of billions reparing towns and restoring infrastructure (over and over and over again) after the storms, or we can instead invest those same revenues on risk mitigation at much lower orders of magnitude and much higher returns. We're digging a hole and we can all agree that we need to stop digging, even if we disagree slightly on how much larger the hole will ultimately become if we continue unabated on our current path.

So you don't think our instinctive programming includes a desire to avoid ostracization from the group? I'd argue otherwise. Selection pressures tend to reinforce adherence to tribal and cultural norms, not abandon them. More to the point, I suggest the same chemistry driving our choices and behaviors also apply here. Through conditioning, the firing patterns and activation thresholds of those neurochemical events have been shaped to avoid triggering the other neurochemistries within us which express as shame and embarrassment and desire to escape the situation. Acknowledging that the impetus of our actions comes well before we previously realized in no way changes our day to day experience. The only difference is the explanation, not the outcome. IMO, it's a bit like learning that it wasn't gods in the sky arguing which caused lightning storms, but is instead explained by basic physics and electromagnetism. The lightning is still the same, as is our experience of it. It didn't alter just because we became more accurate in how our descriptions of how it functions.

Will you please provide an example or two of what "departing from our instinctive programming" means? Aren't we still subject to the same underlying neurochemistry and sequencing regardless of what actions we're engaging in?

And also to drive up recidivism wherever possible.

No, uncoerced works just fine, and has the added benefit of eliminating the confusing subjective baggage which these 92+ other threads we have active on the topic confirm accompany any attempts to focus instead on free will. If it is "not just subjective," this means it's also (at least in part) objective. To that end: What objective measures of utility do you propose are available to help us agree upon a better/best framing of the free will concept?

Which animals? Me, a week ago today:

A desire for revenge and retaliation is understandable, and arguments in favor of it as a method of prevention run contrary to the available evidence. Kids who are punished learn how not to get caught. They don’t learn how to be a better integrated more productive member of society. Adults are mostly just kids with larger clothes, bills, and related responsibilities. We’ll always have criminality, but we don’t have to stick to the discredited notion that fear of imprisonment is what stops people from engaging in it.

I didn’t agree with all of the conclusions in the OP, but how we treat crime can and probably should change. That’s true regardless of any conclusions we draw on the peripheral and independent topic of free will (though I suppose it depends on which definition). The goal is to minimize harm to society, to ensure the freedoms of one don’t infringe upon nor hinder the freedoms of another, and that’s better effectuated by rehabilitation than punishment IMO. A patient to be healed is a better framing than an evil devil to be locked away. Even if our actions are driven by chemicals before we ever become conscious of them, we still have a motivation of improving security and safety of each other in aggregate, and rehab simply provides a new input to adjust that chemistry. Much like the air we breathe and the food we eat and the sounds we hear can all change the operations of our minds, so too can our response to unwanted behaviors It’s okay not to punish people if, in fact, we find better methods of more effectively addressing behaviors we wish to extinguish, especially since the rapist is indeed acting on their own chemistry too. Several Scandinavian countries have already made great strides in this regard.

Which animals?

Which animals? And yes, your mind and my mind differ and we’re both human. Hell, even my own mind today differs from my mind yesterday. So what? Relevance?

Not the one which suggests choices are made at least a few hundred milliseconds before we even become aware of them in the areas of our minds generally considered self, or the one which (based on evidence) shows thay we use the story creation parts of our minds to map a post-dictive narrative (aka: fiction) on to those “choices,” and that this story telling part of our minds tends to falsely imply agency and volition in those narratives. It might be easier to define love and good taste.

Humans are a type of animal, though. Part of the great ape family to be specific. Humans are not an exception to your argument. Basically, I reject your silly unfounded assertions about animals being unable to do these things… also, which animals? Some can, some can’t, but you continue speaking in absolutes.

Implicitly though you have, by suggesting a “choice to fail the test” is an example of free will.

Uncoerced You’re mixing frames and making another category error. You as an individual entity acted a certain way and society as an entity concluded that action was a mistake / against accepted social norms. You as an individual, however, still were subject to a set of basically unconscious chemical signals and electricity, propelled like an automaton who then later tells himself a story which pretends you had any control, and those signals drove you to execute that action. Both can be and are in fact true at the same time in parallel. You can continue being snarky and bitchy about this FACT in every post you make, but I can promise that doesn’t in any way bolster your stance nor result in me/others reconsidering mine. But this is at least IMO par for the course in most philosophy threads… mock others who disagree with you bc you’ve got nothing better to stand on. Useful as a metric similarly suffers from subjectivity. I’m grateful to have you as an ally in my desire to improve the way we as a society address criminality. Welcome aboard!

No

I’m not, but there’s a 100% chance that I don’t feel like arguing with you about this right now.

Coercion is the relevant metric in criminal charges, IMO, not free will. I also believe we make many mistakes in the way we punish instead of rehabilitate people, but that’s OT I agree with you that the conclusions we align with on this topic depend on how we frame the concept of free will. My framing is different from yours and leads me to reject the contention that freedom is the best descriptor. I’m unwilling to make the same leap that you do suggesting your framing is wrong and mine is right. We both have valid perspectives.

I reject your suggestion that the student made a choice here. That’s been my stance all along. They acted as if propelled by a command that came from their neural chemistry. It’s possible all of us that responded are wrong and you’re right. 100% acknowledged, but there’s also a chance we’re correct here and your question / sample use case misses the point and is peripheral to the topic we’re exploring.

Probably because it has more to do with over confidence and self delusion than it does with free will. Even if the student had mastered the material beforehand, they’re unable to “choose” to be able to answer every question posed. They’re unable to choose whether they do or don’t know the answer. They’re unable to choose to know what’s on the test. The student like all of us is a wet meat robot executing chemo electrical commands in specific sequences and orders. I concluded your question was unrelated to (or at best only marginally and poorly representative of) the discussion taking place and my chemistry led me to ignore it. Just because our actions are determined doesn’t mean we have access to sufficient information beforehand to accurately PREdetermine them.

And my mind and your mind receive different information of a color and use it for different purposes, too. So what? You’re barely even the same person having the same thoughts now as you were when you write the post above 6 hours ago.

You probably subscribed to the thread or have too many email notifications enabled on your user profile. Either way, issue is of your own creation and can only be solved by changing your preference selections

He’s turning himself into the modern day equivalent of Howard Hughes, and IMO he’s on the precipice now of Spruce Goosing himself out of relevance. Eventually, the spoiled child having yet another tantrum gets ignored and the adults in the room move on to more important things. In large part, this is our own damned fault since we as a culture tend so often in large massive numbers to idolatrize wealth.

Our future is pretty certain, actually. We too will eventually go extinct and fall into the dustbin of geologic history, or at least evolve into something completely different and unrecognizable.