Neuroscience, Psychology Eroding Idea of Free Will 867
pragueexpat writes "Do we have free will? Possibly not, according to an article in the new issue of the Economist. Entitled 'Free to choose?', the piece examines new discoveries in the fields of neuroscience and psychology that may be forcing us to re-examine the concept of free will. The specifically cite a man with paedophilic tendencies who was cured when his brain tumor was removed. 'Who then was the child abuser?', they ask. The predictable conclusion of this train of thought, of course, leads us to efforts by Britain: 'At the moment, the criminal law--in the West, at least--is based on the idea that the criminal exercised a choice: no choice, no criminal. The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.'"
leave to the british (Score:5, Insightful)
You still have the capacity to make *choices*... (Score:4, Insightful)
-b.
Bleah (Score:5, Insightful)
I won't claim to be smart enough to solve the whole 'free will' debate, but personally I hope free will exists - it (in theory) allows us to help people improve themselves. Otherwise, as soon as someone is shown to have criminal tendencies you might as well just put a bullet in their head and dump them in a hole somewhere.
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:1, Insightful)
I have a pretty bad fever right now, so I have to cut this a bit short. But, for all that your post was well written, the entire thing fell into the cracks with that line. Someone would have to pretty much toss neuroscience textbooks in front of you to answer that one. In short, a summery of the answer to that would be, "One hell of a lot!"
Getting what you "deserve" (Score:2, Insightful)
Early scientific advances such as Newtonian mechanics were closely correlated with astronomy. Astronomy established that the earth was a very small part of a much larger universe. As a results, creation mythologies that had once been a central part of most religions were de-emphasized and no longer taken literally by most people.
Now, the central feature of most religions is a notion of rewards and punishments - that people get what they "deserve" after they die. It is likely that advances in computer science (particularly AI) and biology (particularly neurobiology) will result in a major shift in attitudes toward the notion of free will. As a result, religions will come to de-emphasize the notion that people get what they "deserve" after they die.
The basic problem with free will is illustrated by the following. Imagine that a computer program is eventually written that can simulate the human brain with sufficient accuracy that its behavior is indistinguishable from the behavior of a human brain. By hypothesis, this computer program will have the same amount of "free will" that a human brain has. The problem is that the behavior of any computer program (that is, how the program responds to inputs) is totally determined by the underlying structure of the program. This view, that human behavior is is determined entirely by the physical structure of the human brain, is at odds with the notion that people "deserve" to be rewarded and punished for their behavior.
Note that discarding the notion that people "deserve" to be rewarded and punished does not mean that a system of rewards and punishments will not affect individual behavior. In particular, it does not mean that society does not benefit by implementing a system of rewards and punishments to modify individual behavior.
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:5, Insightful)
And, anyway, the legal system already accounts for physical disorders causing people to commit crimes. There's such a thing as a "not guilty by reason of insanity" - you get confined until you're declared "cured" - this guy obviously *was* cured. The level of compulsion required for a successful insanity defense varies by country and even by US state.
-b.
Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think I speak for EVERYONE on the planet, except the idiots that lead us, when I say: What The Fuck???
If we have no free will, then you also can't blame people for their actions. Though a new application of it, this concept has surfaced as one of the key problems philosophers have had with the Abrahamic religions - If god has even the teensiest capacity for mercy, it can't very well send you to some form of hell for doing what it already knew you would do, and indeed made you to do.
The same applies to a society's criminals. If a person has no free will, then they exist purely as a product of genetics and their social conditioning. Unless the UK wants to start a eugenics program, that leaves us with laying the blame on how society raised someone in the first place.
Thus, without locking up everyone for creating the conditions that lead to criminal behavior, you need to stay well clear of that particular slippery slope.
And all of that presumes the government would act in the best interest of the people, rather than its own perpetuation and the self interest of our leaders. Which, if you believe that, I have a bridge for sale on the cheap...
Re:quantum physics has a large hole for "free will (Score:3, Insightful)
Why does the planet revolve around the sun? Physical determinism. Why does Britteny Spears roam around in public with no panties? You're definitely moving into non-euclidian geometry there.
I do find the quantum physics angle pretty interesting...There has to be something we don't yet understand to explain how we can exist in the first place...Not talking religion here, but, in terms of physics and chemistry, living things are pretty weird.
They have the question backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
I see the following possiblities:
1) All Human desires and activities are controlled by things like this tumor. No one had free will, everyone does what the secret biochemical commands tell us to.
2) Someone with that particular tumor loses their free will and is forced to abuse children. If you get it, you will abuse them, no matter what. This would not mean that normal humans don't have free will, just those with that tumor
3) Someone with that particular tumor is subject to strong, but resistable biochemical commands to abuse children. If you get it and are not strong willed, you will abuse them. You have Free Will still, but are going to find out how strong a person you really are.
4) Someone with that particular tumor enjoys abusing children, but has no 'biochemical command' to abuse them. If you get it, you only abuse the children only if you are weak willed. This is no different than what happens when you find a briefcase of money. Some will keep it, others with more ethics will turn it it. Why? Because both people have free will.
Without a lot more evidence, this incident says little about free will. Assuming that the worst case #1 is true is ridiculous. There is zero evidence to indicate it is true. My experience in the real world indicates that #3 is most likely to be the case.
FUD (Score:2, Insightful)
We're able to predict (with a 5% chance of error, as everyone who's studied statistics knows), a whole range of things, from your reaction times, to the opinions you're likely to give, and all sorts of things. And now we're making a do about a single person with a brain tumour? Yes, a lot of things you don't choose, you do them because you're human, or because you're ill, or whatever. But that doesn't change free will. It's like saying you've no free will because you can't quack...
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:4, Insightful)
I tend to side with Wittgenstein on this one: these questions are a problem of language, not of reality. It's like, "Can god create a stone so heavy god can't lift it?" Who cares?
Does having free will mean anything? No. Does having no free will mean anything different? No. We live our lives like our actions are the result of our desires, and there is no other way we could exist and still have a functioning society.
So why worry about it? It's mental masturbation.
Re:leave to the british (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bleah (Score:3, Insightful)
Free will is irrelevant to that, though. If we have no free will, then what we're looking at is a brain which has a higher than average statistical probability of committing criminal acts. This can be modified by education, or by deterrence, or even by the knowledge on the part of the brain that it is on a list of Likely Criminals at the police station and that it will therefore be high on the list of suspects when a crime is committed, and that it had therefore better keep its nose clean...
Just because we don't have free will doesn't suddenly mean we're perfectly predictable. It changes nothing unless you're a philosopher or a theologian.
It's optimal to behave as if free will exists. (Score:5, Insightful)
If it doesn't, then we never had a choice anyway.
Funny clash of ideologies (Score:1, Insightful)
Secondly, the 'no free will' side is by what I have seen almost universally adopted by people holding opinions on the left field of politics. Why is this? I think it's because judgemental bourgeoise notions like "He works hard, therefore he is a moral person" - "He steals from others, therefore he is a bad person" disappear completely. Morals becomes a meaningless concept - I could run out on the street and shoot every one of the primary determinists through the back, and "punishing" me would be meaningless, because my actions are determined and caused by the events I have experienced in life and my own brain structure. At the very least I should be rewarded to stop me for feeling bad for something out of my control. For people who see free-will ethics as cementing conservative structure and punishing food thieves who only redistribute in the just direction, this is extremely appealing.
Thirdly, adopting this strand of thought demands a complete reformation of society. Showing porn to underage children is no logner bad. The shower, after all, could not help him- or herself. But if the parent beat this person up, then that would not be bad either, as the punching with the fist is out of the puncher's control. Racism would not be good at all, and even if someone suggested that racists should be exposed to nice people with the disliked characteristic, the suggestion would be without moral value, it would simply be a causal result of the _suggester's_ personal experiences. The revolution of thought to take this to its logical conclusion is vast beyond imagination. That does not prevent it from being worked for by aforementioned parties due to its more immediate and easily-imaginable concepts, such as getting criminals better treatment. I can therefore see it appearing regularly as a supportive aside for these goals only, though not as a general movement.
Fourthly, the last time I devoted any particular philosophic thought to the question, I concluded that the question is irrelevant and meaningless - because if humans have free will then so be it, and if not, then we are still forced to pretend they have, because the consequences of not doing it (ironically, the causal consequences of affirming deterministic causality) would be too bad.
Fifthly, I hadn't really thought of the implication (as said, the implications are vast) that you would refrain from removing from society a lot of criminals, but rather remove a lot of people who haven't committed any crimes but who have undesirable thought patterns. I see this leading to interesting and funny stumbling blocks and dilemmas, because the people who typically argue with determinism in favour of criminals also (by my private observations) also happen to often be very opposed to imprisoning people for thought-crimes as well.
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:5, Insightful)
Where do our desires come from? If they come from the our bodies and ultimately the universe, then that's determinism. If they come from nothingness, then you have free will. It is not a false dichotomy. There is either causality or there is not.
You don't understand (Score:3, Insightful)
Slashdot is made up to a large extent of fairly conservative types--engineers and corporate IT folks especially--who, beyond their geekiness, are really rather unsophisticated believers in the status quo and anybody who suggests that the latest technological "advance" may not be the best thing for civilization is often modded down as "troll," whether they are actually trolling for any specific kind of reaction or not. There's no moderation category for "doesn't agree with my worldview." Just watch what happens to this posting.
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:3, Insightful)
Hear hear. The case in question concerns (at best) the philosophy of justice, not that of free will. Re-examining free will is like digging up a dead horse, cloning it, and then beating it some more. We already have the concept floating around, and new advances in brain science have no bearing on it. As for the philosophy of justice, many of us already agree that we want to
1. punish people who abuse children and then pretend to be sick;
2. cure people who abuse children and are sick;
3. do nothing to people who "abuse" children as a result of a freak accident (e.g., lock them up in the basement for whatever reason and then find out that the lock is broken).
Distinguishing between (1) and (2) can be done by creating a casual link between tumors and behaviors, which is done by the medical science, not by philosophers.
Re:What's with British govt's fascination with 198 (Score:3, Insightful)
The post-modern Left reads Orwell as if he wrote instruction manuals.
Re:eep (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:2, Insightful)
The legal system gives a damn, or at least is should. It should care about the victims, not excuses.
The pedophile mentioned in the article still had a choice. A brain tumor may have made him want to molest little kids, but it did not force him to do so. I want to do illegal things all the time. Testosterone in my system makes me want to knock the shit out of people every day. Is that a defense? Of course not. I choose not to because I know and fear the consequences of such actions. When this guy got the urge to hurt children, he knew it was wrong and if he didn't, he should have asked someone. If I were to get an irresistible urge to do something that everyone else in the world thinks in heinous, I'd ask for help.
Unless you watch Everyone Loves HypnoToad or you have green slime sucker attached to your head, you have a choice.
Since you brought up religion, A girl that used to live next door to me told about how Catholics feel about homosexuality. She said that you may be born homosexual, but that's just something you have to live with. It is your cross to bare. Just as if you were born with one arm, or short, or ugly or whatever, that's no excuse to steal, lie or cheat. It's no excuse to give up. You make do with what you were given and do what is right.
Cartesian dualism (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously. Where is the point? It's just another crazy brain puzzle bequeathed down to us by the pretzel-minded religious scholars of antiquity. I have heard so many arguments for and against free will...I used to think it was an important question. I remember reading Freedom Evolves, which is a well written piece by Daniel Dennett defending free will from the point of view of a physicalist who doesn't believe in mind/body separation. I remember working his arguments over in my head, trying them out against some of the dualist perspectives, who claim we'll lose things like objective morality when we "lose" free will.
And finally, it just occurred to me that "losing" free will is like losing the fricking tooth fairy. Who cares? There are a lot of really smart people who have devoted their whole lives to solving a question that has no fricking answer, and even if it did have an answer, it wouldn't matter!
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:5, Insightful)
> What possible explanatory purpose is served by adding or removing free will?
Dignity as a human being. Without free will, we are all helpless automatons.
I don't know about you, but I take responsibility for my bad decisions AND my good ones. I wouldn't want to live any other way. (And I am not religious in any sense.)
Bad road to take (Score:3, Insightful)
If an individual does not own their ideas, our capitalistic society will basically fall apart since there would be no way to leverage ones unique ideas and processes against someone else, since those ideas belong to society and everyone should be able to benefit from them.
If you're curious how this would play out feel free to read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. It starts from the premise that there is this idealogical shift from thinking that we have free will and reason to thinking that we don't and everything else logically follows from that.
Re:quantum physics has a large hole for "free will (Score:3, Insightful)
Doesn't that seem a bit presumptuous? Sure, we can treat subatomic particles as probabilistic - and in many cases, with out current means, we have to - but it seems a bit hasty to jump to the conclusion that many quantum physicists have, and argue that there's a schism between quantum-level physics - which are strictly probabilistic - and non-quantum physics, which aren't.
Let's be honest: quantum theory just isn't exactly understood as well as simple mechanics. I'm not arguing that quantum behavior isn't probabilistic, just that it seems a bit hasty to claim that it must be so patently different when it's just not understood all that well.
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the problem. He proved he exists, but then got stuck there. In his actual argument, he followed that up with, "If I exist, then god must exist, and if god exists then the world must exist, because god wouldn't fuck with me like that" which is pretty weak.
The only way to deal with the cogito is to throw it out the window at the start, because you can never prove the existence of anything but yourself a priori.
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:5, Insightful)
The practical answer is, either way, you still have to get up and go to work in the morning. The same world will exist. The same physical laws will apply. The only difference is we'll be missing something that we can't even perceive in the first place, and which very well may not exist at all.
From a religious standpoint you can make the same argument with God and/or the immortal soul in the place of free will and it reads exactly the same.
Re:leave to the british (Score:3, Insightful)
While I agree that your post was not a troll, and that you probably meant what you said, your argumentation lacks... common sense.
1. Cameras are not invasive. They record what happens in public spaces. If you don't want to get recorded, you probably don't want to be seen either, so you should avoid public spaces. And by the way, simple logic should be enough to convince you that britain doesn't have somebody watching every camera (that would be 4.2 million employees). The cameras are used to investigate after a crime is commited. You should be feeling safer. If you are victim to a crime in a public place, chancer are higher that the perpetrator will be caught. 2. Sounds highly unlikely. While I haven't read the relevant law, I very much doubt that it means Joe Random Policeman can demand all your encryption keys. It would probably require a bit more formality higher up in the system, such as a court order, or something like that. And if you really don't want the government to read your data, then either be prepared for some jail-time, or don't depend on encryption to keep it secret. 3. Well, I get what you mean to say, although I could make fun of you and say that we already jail people who have committed crimes all over the world. But yes, I agree that this is invasive.
Re:You don't understand (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that most 'true' hard-core geeks tend to be very liberal, perhaps having something to do with reading/watching Science Fiction stories, as the best of them often emphasize compassion, understanding and attempt to acknowledge society's ills. As a progressive (read by some as 'raving liberal') myself, I do believe that Slashdot does have a 'liberal bias', otherwise I'd have lots and lots of more 'troll' and 'overrated' hits for many of my comments. Hell my old sig was a flat out insult to neo-cons, if your assertion was correct, I would never have been able to maintain my excellent karma. Also, I work in a corporation, and I'd say that most of the people I know well tend to hold 'liberal' beliefs, even if they would never label themselves as such, as the neo-cons have successfully changed the word to seem an insult rather than a category of political leaning.
That being said I do see a difference between 'true' conservatives who hold to steadfast 'old fashioned' conservative values, and those who play 'lip-service' to those values in an attempt to gain power and control (like Rush 'water boy' Limbaugh, and Anne 'happy widow' Coulter). If you caught idiots such as them on an honest day, you will find that they intentionally push their 'views' farther 'right' than they themselves believe, as many foolish people cling to the idea that 'the truth is in the middle', and by pushing their slander they hope to shove the public to their view points. I don't believe that kind of posturing is possible on the 'left' as liberals don't seem to stand for it.
Re:You forgot something (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:3, Insightful)
I think in time we will find that sub-quantum physics plays a much bigger part in the universe than we're currently aware of, and that it will help explain some things that we really don't understand about ourselves.
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that you equate free will with non-causality. Basically your argument makes free will into a non-deterministic random number generator. But of course that would not make you free in any meaningful sense, it would just mean that your actions are controlled by random dice rolls as opposed to by laws of physics.
Besides, unpredictable people are not "free", they are insane.
The basic problem is that free will is an abstract philosophical concept (and ill-defined one at that), based on observing one's own mental processes from the inside, and as such cannot be directly mapped into any physical conditions. As a result, any attempt to use laws of physics to prove the matter either way will end up producing absurd results. Garbage in, garbage out.
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, law doesn't matter if you don't have free will, but doesn't mean we can throw you in jail for the safety of society.
We can say we had no choice but to throw the criminal in jail
Re:I've seen this (Score:3, Insightful)
You have the question backwards (Score:3, Insightful)
The point of the tumor is that it appears "spontaneously" and it can be removed. The exact spot on his brain where it acted could have been influenced by an injury, which wouldn't come unnoticed and wouldn't be cured so readily.
It's not a question of strength of will, it's a question of the nature of one's will. The tumor (apparently) gave him the will to have sex with kids, removing the tumor removed that will. It isn't about your will being separated from your urges, it's about your urges and your will being one and the same.
Re:Yes, it's tragic the way you're criticised (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Wow. (Score:3, Insightful)
That only makes sense if you don't really believe that people lack free will. If you accept that they do not, then no, you cannot blame them. You can't blame anything without first ascribing to it the power to choose.
Would you blame the bullet for killing JFK? Would you blame the asphault for killing Diana Spencer? Would you blame the ocean for killing countless sailors throughout history?
Actually, having written it, that last point seems the most telling - Various cultures have blamed the ocean for those it takes, but they always attribute free will to it (in the form of some deity o' the seas) for that purpose. When not "Neptune's vengeance", the ocean simply acts as an impersonal and blameless force of nature.
As a sort of middle ground, would you blame a dog for eating a steak (formerly your future supper) left unattended and within reach? if you say "yes", then has the dog acted purely on preprogrammed instinct, or made a choice to do something it knew would bring it pleasure but displease you?
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you heard about the parasites that change the behavior of certain insects so that they get eaten by birds, completing the parasites life cycle? Have you ever wondered if there are parasites that can do that to a human?
The similarity between hypnotoad and the green slime suckers, and the thing that makes them different from a tumor, is that they are conscious entities doing it to you and the tumor is not. Does this play a role in your theory? Exhanging one conscious choice by one entity for another, you still have someone to blame. Why is blame important?
True moderation (Score:3, Insightful)
This is just a pet peeve of mine, to see people make claims like yours above, about people who seek the middle to find the truth. Quite often the truth is "in the middle", which is to say, both sides of such a divide often have very good points that all need consideration.
The fallacy people fall for is thinking that the spectrum of which the middle is correct is the spectrum of commonly espoused positions. It's not. It's the spectrum of POSSIBLE positions. You're absolutely right that the middle of what are presently called Liberal and Conservative positions is nowhere close to 'the truth', because what we call Liberals are actually fairly moderate. There's a much, MUCH further left position that could be taken (anarcho-socialism, the complete abolishment of all notions of government and property, where everyone is free to do and take what they please, regardless of it's effects on others) and between THAT position and it's farthest-right equivalent (fascism or corporatism, what I like to term "tyrano-capitalism" in contrast to anarch-socialism) that the moderate truth lies.
Right now, the most liberal position along the interpersonal axis (referring to the Nolan Chart [wikipedia.org] here) that anybody is arguing is a fairly moderate position - that there should be governance of some sort, to keep people from doing certain kinds of bad things to each other, but that government should be very limited and generally allow people to do most things they want to do, so long as nobody gets hurt. So the "middle" between that and the hardcore social conservatives in this country is actually a very conservative position itself, because nobody is crazy enough to argue the far-liberal side, but plenty are crazy enough to argue the far-conservative side, so the public get a false impression of where the ends of the spectrum are and thus where the middle lies.
So overall I agree with what you're saying the conservatives are doing, but it's not foolish to believe that "the truth is in the middle". The middle just isn't what people think it is, because they don't tend to consider possible positions that people aren't screaming about all the time.
Re:You don't understand (Score:3, Insightful)
Shoot -- then I must be one-of-a-kind. I'm a software engineer but also a Conservative / Libertarian (because I find the logic of free will and free markets compelling. I also find the lucid arguments of Rousseau's The Social Contract and Bastiat's The Law appealing.) Nevertheless, I do not automatically mod down liberal views if they are presented with some level of logic, respect, and tact. I believe all views should be heard -- but I also believe that all discourse should be as civil as possible. I only react negatively to people who either attack those with whom they disagree or who insist on using superlatives and generalizations such as "every Republican" or "every Democrat" or "always" or "never", etc.
I just wanted you to know that some members of the Slashdot audience are right-wing conservatives who don't have a knee-jerk need to mod down liberals and Democrats. I actually look forward to reading articulate arguments from the "other" side as they help me to clarify my own opinions.
Peace, brother. Peace.
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:4, Insightful)
Alas, it doesn't work to say, "Free will must exist, because I think it would suck if it didn't."
free will and determinism (Score:3, Insightful)
If, beyond the very convincing, however necessarily subjective evidence given by introspection, we were to look for scientific evidence of free will, we should rather turn to physics: As a physical phenomenon, free will would show up as an effect without a cause WITHIN THE SYSTEM, i.e. the intersubjectiv, physically observable universe. Or, with other words, as a random event. The existence of genuine randomness (e.g. in radioactive decay, but basically in any form of quantum measurement) in the observable universe is pretty much a settled fact in the physical community since the thirties of the previous century. Alas, philosophy (and psychology, for the matter) is, as usual, about a century behind, and still trapped in Newtons mechanistic and deterministic worldview.
Don't get me wrong - of course, the existence of randomness does not PROVE the existence of free will - it's only a necessary requirement (in a less strict sense - for all practical purposes, so to say - deterministic chaos or simply intractability would also suffice). But here, Occam's razor kicks in: Perception (such as the fundamental perception of my own existence as a single individual) is an immaterial phenomenon (albeit with a physical substrate). Introspection shows me to have free will, likewise an immaterial phenomenon. The known rules of the intersubjective universe, as established by physics, allow for observable phenomena without a deterministic cause (quantum measurement), so they are compatible with the idea of free will. The actual existence of free will is the simplest explaination which accounts for all of the above. The concept of free will is no more absurd than the idea of individual perception, just the direction of the influence is not from the physical "outside" to the mental "inside", but the other way around (with the additional benefit that it could therefore be disproved if we found our observable universe to be deterministic, after all).
Of course, there are people who deny both, but firstly I doubt that their mechanistic explaination of how the bunch of atoms that they think they are manages to develop the "illusions" of consciousness, individuality, perception and willful behaviour is much simpler. And secondly, with mental phenomena, the illusion IS just the same as the real thing.
TFA is a troll. (Score:3, Insightful)
"Liberalisim and Neurolgy".
The link between the two is:
"Nor is it only the criminal law where free will matters. Markets also depend on the idea that personal choice is free choice. Mostly, that is not a problem. Even if choice is guided by unconscious instinct, that instinct will usually have been honed by natural selection to do the right thing. But not always. Fatty, sugary foods subvert evolved instincts, as do addictive drugs such as nicotine, alcohol and cocaine. Pornography does as well. Liberals say that individuals should be free to consume these, or not. Erode free will, and you erode that argument."
In other words his conclusion is that Liberalisim is an evolutionary dead end. Yet the article goes on about "personal responsibility" and "the rule of law" but fails to find any implications for conservatives.
Now for my own troll:
Rational, intelligent people do not go into a brain spasm when confronted with two contradictory ideals. I belive in good food, good drugs, good sex, personal responsibility and the rule of law, everyone I know thinks likewise but they all differ about the definitions. OTOH: I subscribe to Eienstien's view that "a man cannot will what he will's.
Memo to the UK gov't: (Score:3, Insightful)
1984 was a cautionary tale about the perils of a totalitarian goverment, not a fucking manual on how to establish one!
~Philly
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:3, Insightful)
I personally think that breaking it down into a dichotomy in the first place leads to an epistemilogical hellhole from which there is no escape. It's like asking fish to describe water...What are they goign to say, "Wet?" It's not wet to them.
It's just as difficult for us to try and put a finger on exactly what free will would entail. I think in some things we are definitely constrained to act in a certain way, but I don't think that we are constrained in all things.
Re:Truth is Multidimensional (Score:3, Insightful)
I must take issue with your characterisation of Anarchism here.
All but the most fringe Anarchists would agree that all individuals are responsible for guarding the equal freedoms of others. In fact, the voluntary choice of individuals to organise to guaratee each other's freedoms is the very core of Anarchism, see the works of Proudhon, Kropotnik and Bakunin. There is no objection in mainstream Anarchism against the collective of individuals taking action against one who misuses his freedom to trample on the freedoms of others.
Most Anarchist thought rests on two pillars
Note very well that the second point brings up the possibility of there being rightful authority. Even Bakunin said he'd defer to the authority of his bootmaker when it comes to mending his boots. There is a definite bent of meritocracy in Anarchist thought, but it only stretches as far as to recognise authority flowing from expertise. Me knowing something about computers gives me authority to say you are doing things suboptimally with your IT resources, but it does not give me authority to force you to do things my way.
Furthermore, extending from the first point, no human has the right to ride roughshod over the rights of others, as all others' rights have equal weight to theirs. Disregarding what crimes may exist in an ideal Anarchist society (I refer you to Enrico Malatesta for details), crime will exist nonetheless as no human is perfect, and it is right and proper for individuals to take action, both individually and collectively, against those that would abrogate their rights. What distinguishes such action from the common practice of using police forces in conventional societies is that those taking action are not seen to have inherent authority to do so. Their authority only flows from the actions of the abuser, and it ends once the abuse is stopped.
Muddling this analysis is of course that Anarchism appears to appeal to a lot of dissatisfied teenagers, who are already at a stage of life where rebellion against authority is a common mode of thought, and who are attracted to the apparent 'no responsibility' of Anarchism. They are usually the stone throwers who shout 'down with The Man' as they disrupt otherwise peaceful demonstrations. They either grow out of it (subsequently often turning to authoritarian modes of thought in reaction), or they learn more of the deeper philosophy behind Anarchism and start taking responsibility.
Mart