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)
Re:leave to the british (Score:5, Insightful)
You forgot something (Score:5, Funny)
You don't understand (Score:3, Insightful)
Sla
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.
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
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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, Kro
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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 l
Re:leave to the british (Score:5, Funny)
By Jove! No-one's ever thought of that before! Usually we just give criminals a jolly good talking to, but this "Jail" idea of yours might just do the trick!
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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
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Re:leave to the british (Score:5, Funny)
No, I never questioned your facts. I questioned your opinions.
I never said that not wanting to have your movements recorded when you are in public spaces is indicative of criminal behaviour. What I said is that people who worry about CCTV cameras are worrying too much. Let me give you an example. I work in the security industry.
You like CCTV cameras because you're one of the watchers, they are part of your means to bread and butter.
The watchees, hoewever, feel differently.
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?
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.
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There are exceptions, of course, but anti-social behavior is rarely so clear cut.
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.
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He lived. While in care, they discovered that he had a tumor. Most of it was blown away when he shot himself in the face. They finished the job, attempted to reconstruct his face and he's mentally A-OK today.
So yes, tumors will make you do things that are not really 'you'.
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 strippe
Chemical-mental predispositions (Score:3, Informative)
In reference to the parent, though, m
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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 acc
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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: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.
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, 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.
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.
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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
As the Buddhists say: (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
If you research this topic you will see that the poster was right. It is not a matter of where our desires
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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 co
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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 peop
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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
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And since having/not having free will is about as tangible as having/not having a soul, there is zero reason to ever even suspect you don't have free will unless you're just hanging around speculating on existence. It's pointless.
Eugenics... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Shades of Daniel Dennett (Score:5, Informative)
Let's consider a feral cat. One day, it sees a bird. It's hungry, so it chases it and kills it. The cat is responsible for (that is, acted as an agent to cause) the death of the bird. The matter whether the cat has free will or not (and many people will say the cat doesn't) does not enter into that consideration.
You might interject that there is a disanalogy here. After all, laws seem to stop most people from breaking (the heinous) crimes, which might indicate that people have free will. But on closer inspection, it doesn't indicate anything of the sort. Whether or not free will exists, it is clear that laws are a force guiding people's actions. But this is compatible with both claims. People might choose to obey the law, coming to this decision in a rational manner. Or they might just be motivated by vague fears stemming from environmental factors, just as the cat was motivated by hunger.
There's a reason why modern philosophical ethics are hard. It's specifically because the free will and determinism issue cannot be settled, so discussions about ethics and to be phrased in terms of responsibility and other analogous terms.
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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.
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Sexual attraction is not a good basis for this. (Score:2)
There are better ways to demonstrate free will. Usually by noting behaviour that changes when the person believes someone else is watching them.
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.)
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."
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: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.
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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 ma
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I was much more interesed (Score:3, Funny)
i hate it when i misread the headline
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-Rick
Nothing to see here... (Score:2)
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.
Re:quantum physics has a large hole for "free will (Score:3, Funny)
"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."
Yeah, well in Britain the conscious observer is the Government, and they've decided you're fucking guilty.
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 we
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The Internet is built on a foundation of pornography, and cannot exist without porn, especially hot celebrity porn. The Internet is also everywhere, and contains the sum total of all useful knowledge, and can therefore be said to be omniscient. An omniscient entity cannot cease to exist.
Therefore, in order to avoid the paradox of something that cannot cease to exist ceasing to exist, Brittany Spears, being a hot celebrity, could not avoid appea
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: st
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 t
Re:quantum physics has a large hole for "free will (Score:2)
So chaos in general provides another "out" for free will. Perhaps emotions and free will are something like
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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,
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, Insightful)
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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
You still have the capacity to make *choices*... (Score:4, Insightful)
-b.
Re:You still have the capacity to make *choices*.. (Score:2)
who needs it? (Score:2)
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.
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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
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 scienc
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: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
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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 t
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.
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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.
You have the question backwards (Score:3, Insightful)
Not all child abusers have tumors. More importantly, not all people with tumors become child abusers.
*sigh*
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
Why not free will? (Score:2)
I don't see anything wrong with believing in free will.
If there is no free will, then it obviously doesn't matter whether you believe there is or not (or what you believe on any matter). It seems psychologically healthier to believe in free will (because you then feel you have some control over your destiny). If there is free will and you don't believe in it, you might make suboptimal choices based on your illusion of not having a choice.
I think that covers all the cases.
So what? (Score:2)
Where some interesting law might be established is in the cited case, when the tumor is removed, does continued incarceration serve any useful purpose to society?
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There are better chances of an answer to this if the crime was a murder, or some other crime.
Even if the offender was provably cured, anyone calling for his release can easily be slandered as "hates the children" at best and "must be a pedophile himself" at worst.
Reasonable people (Score:2)
Is Belief in Determinism Irresponsible? (Score:2)
If it's not us behind the proverbial wheel, then we shouldn't be the ones to blame when somebody gets hurt, right? We can't help it, it's all physics, or chemicals in our brains, or God, or my upbringing, or whatever.
I try to believe in a mixture of bot
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
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:What's with British govt's fascination with 198 (Score:3, Insightful)
The post-modern Left reads Orwell as if he wrote instruction manuals.
It's optimal to behave as if free will exists. (Score:5, Insightful)
If it doesn't, then we never had a choice anyway.
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.
Possible UK Law (Score:3, Funny)
Cartesian dualism (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Free Wii! (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
...lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes
(Emphasis added). No tin foil hat required. The British have decided to throw innocent until proven guilty away. Anything based on probability instead of hard evidence is circumstantial at best, and in this case doesn't stand up to "beyond a reasonable doubt." Until our entire society is clairvoyant, we simply can't (and shouldn't be able to!) convince a jury of 12 people that the personality disorder makes the person guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
mandelbr0t
Re:Science pushing materialism is foolishness (Score:5, Informative)
\Nobody with the slightest knowledge of science has ever done this. You can't logically disprove the *existence* of God anyway, although you can make a very convincing logical argument that it doesn't matter if he exists or not. The existence of God, as something which by definition cannot be tested, measured, or understood is outside the limits of science. It's the domain of philosophy and mythology.
Information theory says information can not be created, only lost. Entropy is forever increasing. So where did the original order and information come from?
It says no such thing. It'd be trivially wrong if it did, as order emerges from chaotic systems constantly.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 d