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.'"
Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:4, Interesting)
Without the religious angle, there isn't much to free will. This is just another example of physical determinism, which is even more pathetically weak than it's religious counterpart, because it replaces a omnipotent puppet master with the laws of nature. Is nature taking away your ability to choose? Do the laws of physics require that you consume this twinkie instead of that ho-ho? It reduces quickly to absurdity.
Free will is like the Cartesian solipsism brought on by cogito ergo sum, where you prove your own existence, but lose all the rest of existence at the same time. What type of person does it take to sit down and wonder whether or not they exist, and if they do exist, does the rest of the world exist?
Do you have free will? Does it matter? Would you ever know the difference? The pedophile cited in the article couldn't use it as a defense in his trial, because the legal system doesn't give a damn.
I normally am not a proponent of Occam, but this is one of those cases where it's just so apt. What possible explanatory purpose is served by adding or removing free will?
quantum physics has a large hole for "free will" (Score:5, Interesting)
at the very base of quantum physics is the measurement problem: when a measurement is made, the many quantum possiblities of particles collapse into one actuality. so far, no one has any explanation of what determines which possibility becomes the actuality, and some physicists believe the choice is made by the conscious observer.
eep (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it fair that I get locked up because one a month I spent a day telling people to go fuck themselvs and verbally abusing those close to me who try to help? I don't think it is.. but how I read this, I would be in very deep trouble for something I have no control over and effects me less than the average time a guy spends horny a month which effects them in a different way but with about the same direct effect on their beahaviour (wanting sex isn't the same as hating the world, but neither can be controlled).
People need to learn that mood disorders are very difficult to deal with and if you act differently to people like us then you make it worse not better. If you just ignore it and side step/try not to take offence then after an hour or two it tends to fade and everythings back to normal.
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:1, Interesting)
It's not a contradiction to say we have free will, and we do not at the same time. It's a matter of *Degrees* of freedom and power to act or change. For instance the pedophile they were talking about may have had something wrong with his brain, but other pedophiles do not, they most likely were simply shunned by females/society and hence in the psychological pain inflicted on them by natural selection as punishment for not performing breeding behaviour they seek easy targets because whenever they tried to get it the good old fashioned way they were constantly rejected instead.
It's not an artifact of religious thought, sure modern religious people (and people here) think it might be so because they are not well read historically or otherwise. It's an artifact of rational thinking. We hold people responsible for their actions because they have the intellectual power to know the consequences of their actions. This is why if a retarded person accidentally killed someone (or even on purpose) how we judged the act and in which light would be different then say a serial killer.
Just because we have evolutionary tendencies and desires doesn't mean we *must* act on them. There are have been many times all people have experienced at one point or another after being severely wronged, wanting nothing more then to kill that person, but that's in the heat of the heat of the moment, we're rational enough to cool off or find something else to do and stay away from whatever triggered that response.
What's with British govt's fascination with 1984? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, because "likely" and "certain" are obviously the same thing in the British government's eyes.
Even if you dispense entirely with the notion of free will, locking up someone before they've committed a crime just because they might is the antithesis of justice.
And it's exactly what I would expect out of a government that seems to be using 1984 as a "how-to" manual.
I swear, the British and the Americans must be in a race to see who reaches totalitarian bliss first...
Re:quantum physics has a large hole for "free will (Score:3, Interesting)
Must something determine which possibility becomes the actuality? Can't God play dice with the universe?
and some physicists believe the choice is made by the conscious observer.
I've often wondered about this view. Conscious observer? OK. Then what constitutes an observer? A scientist with a PhD? That's an observer. A grad student? That's an observer. Undergraduate? Yeah, that's an observer too. Some guy off the street? Also an observer. A retarded person? Yes? Then a chimpanzee? Or how about a cat with a gun aimed at its head with the trigger wired to a radioisotope? Does the cat count as an observer of the isotope? If so, then it damn well is either alive or dead and definitely not both. Is a housebrick an observer? Because it'll sure as hell collapse a superposition. Researchers in quantum computation have the devil of a time preventing decoherence; if the secret was just not to look, surely it would be easy.
If we're proposing that the observer needs to be conscious - as opposed to just being a system far larger than the quantum scale with which the quantum-mechanical system interacts - then just how smart does it need to be?
Let's all stop beating Basil's car (Score:2, Interesting)
Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution. There may be passing mention of deterrence or rehabilitation, but the surrounding rhetoric gives the game away. People want to kill a criminal as payback for the horrible things he did. Or they want to give "satisfaction' to the victims of the crime or their relatives. An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as "atonement' for "sin'.
Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.
Basil Fawlty, British television's hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn't start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. "Right! I warned you. You've had this coming to you!" He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?
Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn't surprise me).
But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?
Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.
This originally appeared here. [edge.org]
Question and Answer: (Score:4, Interesting)
If so, let's stop talking about it because we can choose to.
If not, then it has already been determined that we're going to stop talking about it right now, so we can't do anything about it, except stop talking about it.
Determinism (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do I think this matters? Because we understand precious little about _any_ feedback system; anything self-referential. Our logical analysis breaks on "this sentence is false". The math of our classical physics fails to give precise results with 3 mutually interacting bodies. And we're ready to claim that we understand the human mind well enough to rule out free will?
Maybe we don't have free will... how should I know? But I think it's a little premature to discount the most pervasive observation across the entire human species without even knowing how these things work.
This premise of this article isn't even talking about all that, though -- they're not considering physical determinism, they're wondering if people can rise above their personality profile. Sure, there are extreme anecdotal examples (like the tumor causing misbehavior) that might say otherwise, but even a small study that looks at people's behavior indicators and their resulting behavior will show that people don't always do what you expect. My guess is it never will. But in any case it is way premature.
To summarize my view -- we don't have nearly enough understanding of anything to discount free will. But if in fact it doesn't exist, the completely pervasive perception that it does is more than enough for me to live and let live as though it does.
Of course, my making that very decision brings up the question of free will, I suppose
Cheers.
I call a dupe (by about 300 years) (Score:2, Interesting)
Using Compatibilism (Free will and determinism), people would still be responsible for their own actions. What is a person beyond a collection of knowledge and algorithms (emotional and rational) in a physical shell? If one's value sets are "warped" and the incentives of obeying the law/doing the right thing are not personally great enough, then it should be said that transgressions are made of ones "free will".
I suggest reading some David Hume. People have already thought of this problem and ways to counteract it.
Also, while tumors aren't subtle, most criminal behaviour is a much more complex mesh of incentives and values that are, as any economist will tell you, hard to determine for certain. Jurisprudence still works!
Re:quantum physics has a large hole for "free will (Score:5, Interesting)
The measurement problem is beautifully resolved by the many-worlds interpretation: all you have is a humongous wave function that describes everything and evolves under Schrödinger's equation. "Measurements" have no special status. A measurement is an interaction which tends to "clump together" the wave function in a bunch of different areas; these areas we call "different worlds"; they all exist in parallel. Every large thing exists either in one clump or in another or in both, but never spread out in between like electrons often do. So slightly different copies of you exist in various different clumps, inaccessible to you because of the valleys between the clumps. Most cosmologists prefer this interpretation, because obviously if you want to apply quantum mechanics to the whole universe, you don't have room for an outside observer performing measurements.
And quickly back to the topic at hand: free will. You are a probabilistic information processor, just like a chess computer. During the time the computer ponders its decision, it is "free". You are free in exactly the same sense. And probabilistic information processors can be held responsible for their actions; the fact that they will be held responsible is just one more piece of information for them to consider.
Re:quantum physics has a large hole for "free will (Score:3, Interesting)
I recall for a mechanics homework once, having to work out how long it would take for a pencil balanced precisely on its point to fall over, assuming that it is perfectly upright to begin with and that the only deviation is due to quantum uncertainty in its position.
IIRC, the answer was about ten seconds. Even with the most accurate sensing equipment theoretically possible in this universe, you would not have been able to predict in which direction the pencil would be pointing ten seconds later.
Chaos magnifies uncertainty, and quantum mechanics makes sure there's always some uncertainty around. How long does it take for chaos coming from the quantum-mechanical uncertainties to swamp our meteorological predictions - to make the difference between, say, sunshine and rain? I've no idea, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn it was less than three months.
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:5, Interesting)
Tumors are nasty. One of my close friends' mom had a tumor, and until it was removed she went completely nuts. She would talk to invisible people, ignore visible people, forget who she was for a while, abuse her own children in various ways, do things like stopping drinking all water because the government was trying to poison her, etc., etc. After the surgery her condition improved dramatically. She ceased to be dangerous, for one, and went back to being a really nice, laid back person she was before the illness. She still sees and hears invisible people, but now she realizes that she is "different" from others and is doing her best to fit it, so to speak. She never had any therapy.
Re:Wow. (Score:2, Interesting)
Onicience would mean that this god would have no limit to his knowledge, which means that time cannot limit his knowledge. So though we have a choice, and have choices laid before us constantly. He knows which choices we are going to make and why we would make this choice.
Before I am done, I have to make this point. I am a Christian. Can I explain or prove the existance of god? No. Can I make you believe? No. Because Faith and the basic prinicpals of science cannot mix. There is no experiment to prove god exists. Only faith that when you feel that sure feeling that is telling you that what you are hearing is true, is not just you believing something you want to, but an unknown force/being that is telling you through means of communication we have yet to understand, that what you hear is true.
I guess I kinda got off topic, but bottom line, I made this choice to type, and read
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:5, Interesting)
Good question. May I be so bold as to forward an answer?
Perhaps if there is trully free will this means that there must exist something supernatural (the identity of which remains unknown).
If free will exists, then there must be something which is NOT governed by the physical universe (hence, not deterministic), but which itself CAN influence or govern the physical universe (ie. the brain). This seems to fit the definition of supernatural -- or outside nature.
Thus, it seems (at least to me) that the question of free will is at least somewhat important as it adresses the existance of something outside the physical universe. Granted, I have not devoted much time to thinking about this, but that is my initial impression.
Of course, the ability to determine whether free will exists is somewhat problematic, i agree. It seems, however, that if you think logic exists, then you are admitting to free will. For without free will nothing could be proven true or false. Ever.
At least that is the way i see it.
Eugenics... (Score:3, Interesting)
The sum total of all useful knowledge (Score:3, Interesting)
And there you have it: proof that Wikipedia is the Internet!
(On a more serious note, I've found that I tend to surf Wikipedia today in much the same way as I surfed the fledgling web back in 1994-1995: Read a page, keep following links as they look interesting, spend hours just going from one topic to another. Today's web feels more like a star topology than an actual web: start at a search engine or bookmarks, move to a site, do stuff there, go back to the search engine, look for something else. Hypertext has given way to navigation links. Wikipedia actually makes use of hypertext, so I find myself jumping to interesting related topics instead of going back to the hub.)
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, according to Buddhism, the only way to truly gain free will (Nirvana) is to acknowledge you don't have any.
Now this doesn't make sense to our western way of thinking, but these Neurologists are coming across things that perhaps Buddhist monks have known for thousands of years.
In order to actually have true "free will" you must overcome your mind or at least its physicality.
This isn't mumbo jumbo kind of "oh my body is floating about me in some glowing light" but actually become aware of what you mind/body is doing at any particular time.
As an example from a Buddhist monk that I recall... You are walking down the street and see an ice cream store and without thinking or because your mind impulsed you to, you go in and buy.
This can apply to most everything we do.
However, a Buddhist (or anyone who actively pays attention to their thought process) will go... "Oh. My mind thinks this ice cream would be tasty!" and acknowledges this fact. They may or may not choose to go and buy ice cream, but even if they do buy the ice cream they have free will over the impulse.
The other thing that human mind does is judge things and be objective about them. Where as a objective person hears a bell ringing and may think "That bell sound's nice" (or bad/irritating/loud) whereas someone not judgmental will think "I hear a bell".
When you don't judge you can often focus on things that are important rather than your personal opinions of the matter.
I'm not really an expert and I've only dabbled in reading Diamond Sutras and tried meditating on occasion, but I try to often acknowledge that I don't have free will over a good deal of my actions, but I can improve upon this problem if I put my mind to it.
If there are any real Buddhists on here feel free to chime in and correct me or add. (Again I'm no expert on the matter)
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:5, Interesting)
Furthermore, people find that the "I" in "I have free will" is not constituted of the same things we thought it around St. Thomas Aquinas' time. The "I" might not even exist as a singular entity at all. So of course saying "I have free will" is misleading - "I" now means, the sum of the mental states which supervene on physical brain states, and the phenomenal experience accompanying those states.
The problem is of course that we cannot place the burden of personal responsibility on the individual. This is a huge problem, since our notion of social order and justice comes because we can't locate any agent on which to place the burden of responsibility.
Funny you mention Cogito. Descartes is the one who actually came up with the argument you just reiterated - namely, people do bad things because their will is infinite while their intellect is only finite in comparison with God's. It's a shaky argument, but this, along with his ontological arguments for the existence of God, is a popular way of framing the concept of free will.
These are deep philosophical questions which cut to the core of our ability to preserve order in society. It cuts into our present fantasies of retribution. Since we no longer have a place to assign personal responsibility, how can we do anything else but what Christians supposedly advocate - forgive? Unfortunately, that kind of society could devolve into a dystopian nightmare.
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:3, Interesting)
If it's the former, I'm in agreement with you for the following reason: we're much better off believing we have free will and being wrong, than believing we don't have free will and being wrong. If there is no free will, there can be no morality, and it doesn't really matter (in a moral sense) what we do. Jailing someone for something a brain tumor made them do would be a bummer for them, but of no moral consequence. On the other hand, if we have free will but we act amorally because we believe otherwise, we may do all sorts of immoral things.
If you were claiming the latter--that even an answer to the question of free will would be irrelevant--I can provide a counter-example. Recently, John Conway and Simon Kochen (of the Kochen-Specker Theorem [wikipedia.org]) published a paper [arxiv.org] claiming that, for a minimal definition of free will (amounting to little more than non-determinism), humans must have free will or else the Aspect experiment and other test's of Bell's Theorem have little meaning.
In other words, if humans have "free will" (even just in the limited sense described by Conway and Kochen), the Aspect experiment and others like it show that reality is described by quantum mechanics or some other non-local physics. If we don't have free will, the experiments have no meaning, and physics could still be local.
On another track, if you were somehow presented with proof of the non-existence of free will, would you continue living your life the same way (and please avoid the glib "I'd live it however was pre-determined" type remarks)? It seems to me that any rational person would have to respond by ditching morality and living a hedonistic life. Sociopaths would be the new role models, as they would be free of all the now-irrational constraints of morality. This is why it's better we assume (wrongly, perhaps) that we do have free will...
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:3, Interesting)
It depends on what you mean by measurable brain irregularities. Do you mean just physical irregularities? It is widely recognized that chemical imbalances are responsible for most if not all depressions, schizophrenias, etc. In this case I think the words irregularity and imbalance are synonymous (and no laxative jokes :-).
If you mean only physical irregularity there is the famous case of Phineas Gage [wikipedia.org], the 19th century railway worker who had a tamping iron shot through his head during a construction accident. He went from being a conscientious hard worker to a an unstable sometimes violent person. This shows that physical forces on the brain itself can cause behavioural changes. In another case I read about during the late 1980s or early 1990s, there was a fellow who over time became increasingly violent and eventually committed a violent murder (he was for most of his life, peaceful in nature). His behavioural problems were cured when a brain tumour was removed (I wish it was easier to find old news articles like this on the internet... but I am certain of this story... unless I have a brain tumour). The bottom line is that I don't see how you can dismiss then the possibility that brain tumours, which put unnatural physical pressure and stress on parts of the brain, could not also cause behavioural changes or abnormalities.
In any case the fact that brain tumours can affect behaviour (I do believe it) can also help to prove your point on free will. Since our brains are what give us our perception and understanding of the world, and its make up affects how we think or act, we may have free will but don't recognize it because we can't, or we recognize it but can't do anything with it because some limitation of our brain prevents us. Kind of like a Schroedinger's uncertainty principle of life.
Anyway, if the guy had free will he should be jailed to punish him. If he did not because of a brain tumour, he should be jailed/hospitalized/removed-from-society because he cannot control himself and the public needs to be protected (until such time they can show conclusively that the tumour removal changed his behaviour). If they can conclusively show they cured him, then release him.
Re:You don't understand (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:3, Interesting)
Not only tumours (Score:3, Interesting)
Lyme Disease, neurosyphilis, and other low-grade long-term brain infections can also be extremely evil. Mainly because they're subclinical and don't present with scary symptoms like high fever or unconsciousness, but they can cause a whole range of symptoms. Seizures, paralysis, behaviour changes, etc and so forth. I had chronic Lyme for a few years and it felt like my will to exist was stripped away. Hard to describe, but sort of like a continual case of the flu but moving through yellow shimmering molasses. Really fuckin wierd and unpleasant. Not to mention electrical shock-type sensations in my head, inability to focus my eye on text (but my vision itself was fine), wierd twitches, a propensity to get easily angry, and even prostate cramps with unknown (neurological?) cause. Thank g*d I got cured (more or less cured myself) of that shit - I don't think I'd be here now had I not researched it and recognized the symptoms!
-b.
Re:Neuroscience is eroding quantum consciousness (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually if you look on PubMed you'll find a number of experiments that do demonstrate quantum aspects to microtubules and the brain; no, it doesn't prove consciousness is causal from them, but there's something to this; I think at the very least it partly explains memory in the brain. And regarding Libet, well, I'm not sure the arising of the urge to mash a button is really indicative of anything on a grander scale.
Introspection is consciousness. And someone who is conscious of thoughts, urges, as they arise will note they arise for a reason, and that something caused them. So what then is will? Will is acting upon a choice. But who chooses the choices we are presented with, the "good/bad" judgments made about them, the evaluation of the course of action? Who chooses the physical limitations upon actually carrying them out? Who chooses the train of thought and experience even leading up to that choice? Can such a thing really be called a choice at all? Who chooses to have a choice? Certainly things beyond our "will", our control.
And what then is freedom? Freedom from what, for who? There was never any "freedom" in this path to begin with, rather, only bondage to things arising from causes. Freedom can't even truly be used to describe a "go/no go" decision, the meeting of the frontal lobe and limbic system. So what then is freedom? Freedom is in being uncaused, beyond causality, which neither thought nor emotion is. Yet, consciousness remains above both, above causes, conscious not only of the body, but of the mind, and of itself. So truly, who are "you" to have free will at all? Wandering thoughts arising from external events and the structure of the brain? Or consciousness of that happening?
If so, then as Ram Dass said, we don't have free will-- we are free will. Why then, do people consider things they have never controlled, and say "this is me, I am this"?
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:3, Interesting)
Already done in Sweden (Score:3, Interesting)
While it was never implemented fully, what was introduced and what we still have today is that the sentencing part includes what to do with insane people. First the case is deliberated in court and a verdict is reached. If the accused person is found guilty a psych exam is performed and a decision is made as to if the person should go to jail or be sent to a mental institution.
Perhaps you are starting to see the problem.
In order to be sentenced to mental care, you have to be guilty. Sweden holds the dubious distinction of being the only country in the world that doesn't think you need to be sane to be legally responsible for your actions.
As you can imagine this brings a few problems. If you have to be guilty to receive care then a motivation for why you are guilty needs to be found - motive is essential in judicial rulings. In order to resolve this problem they invented something - I shit you not - called the "possible hypothetical motive". In essence it means that since motive is meaningless for a crazy person, the court invents a motive based on the worst case scenario. If you accidentally run over somebody with your car you will be found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. If you are insane and run somebody over with your car because the little green men told you so, you will be convicted of premeditated murder.
The severity of sentence is proportional to the severity of crime. In order to get sentenced to a long time of mental care, the crime has to be really hideous. So absurdly, when the court sees that the person standing trial really needs medical help, they have to show that the crime was premeditated. So even petty crimes committed by insane people get labeled as premeditated grave atrocities. This is so that when the sentencing part of the trial comes the court can sentence them to prolonged care.
Perhaps the greatest absurdity is that the sanity of the person is first evaluated after the verdict - and hence not at the time of the crime. Temporary insanity doesn't exist. Sane criminals when convinced play insane and get sentenced to care instead of jail. Great examples of the effects of the absurdity are cases where a person commits a crime, is found insane and sentenced to care. On leave from the mental institution (yes, in Sweden both mental patients and criminals get short vacations from their sentences on a regular basis) they commit another crime. This type the psych evaluation finds them to be sane and they are sentenced to jail. So they leave from the mental institution in order to go to jail - and are returned to the mental institution once their jail sentence is up. If you speak Swedish, read Maciej Zaremba's excellent article series [www.dn.se] on the subject, called "Rättvisan och dårarna" - it won this year's Swedish journalist prize.
Re:Wow. (Score:2, Interesting)
As I've Said Before (Score:3, Interesting)
Behavior, coercion, violence, whatever, is one thing. Crime is another.
Crime - like war - is the health of the state.
Again, the essence of the state is: "You do everything we tell you to, and give us everything you have, and we'll protect you from the bad people inside and outside our borders - and if there aren't any bad people, we'll make some."
The state - ALL versions - is a protection/extortion racket depending on human fear, nothing more or less.
Chimpanzees apparently aren't capable of understanding this, unfortunately.
Dogmatist never need to understand ... they know! (Score:2, Interesting)
Those who play 'lip-service' to those values in an attempt to gain power and control (like Rush 'water boy' Limbaugh, Anne 'happy widow' Coulter, George Bush, Dick Chaney
Watch out for them nuts, they fall out of the trees all the gaul-dang-fycking time killing people and destroying many things like values of honor, honesty, family, community, caring, sharing, integrity
Re:Truth is Multidimensional (Score:3, Interesting)
A classic political example of this is that some people who identify themselves as "conservative" because of economics issues, and argue against "liberals" because of those same economics issues, may actually agree with those liberals on social or interpersonal issues; and likewise, some "liberals" who argue against "conservatives" on social issues may agree with some of those same conservatives on economic issues. This breakdown of the left-right axis is what lead to the Nolan chart's two-dimensional spectrum.
Myself, I see each of the axis of the Nolan chart itself as a false dichotomy; there are in fact at least four dimensions that need plotting there. It's not just personal freedom and economic freedom; each of those axes can be broken down into two axes of individual freedom and collective responsibility. People who hold positions "against freedom" on some axis of the Nolan chart are often actually arguing for collective responsibility (that is, responsibility to society as a member thereof), which doesn't have to come at the expense of personal freedom and may in fact be required to ensure it. Consider how much personal freedom (as in "freedom from", negative liberty) anyone would have if there were no police forces to keep the strong from simply plowing over the weak; and then consider that those police forces can only exist if everyone is collectively responsible enough to support them. Anyone who supports the moderate social position that there should be police forces, but only to the extent of limiting some individuals from trampling over the freedoms of other individuals, is actually in favor of both individual social freedom and collective social responsibility.
You could be (and people often are) just one or the other, though the tenability of your position would be questionable; you could argue that everyone should be free to do anything and not have to be responsible for guarding the equal freedoms of others (like an anarchist), or that everyone should be mutually responsible for everyone else's social wellbeing but there should be very little personal freedom (like most collectivist religious types). I guess theoretically you could support neither - believing that no one should be socially free, that people must adhere to some particular strict code of behavior handed down from above, but that no one is responsible for ensuring that anybody else must do so. I guess some Christian Anarchists could hold that position, but it seems pretty rare and rather indefensible IMO.
So yes, the truth is multidimensional. I never said otherwise.