RE: Is Moral Responsibility Compatible With Determinism?
June 1, 2019 at 4:58 pm
(This post was last modified: June 1, 2019 at 6:16 pm by vulcanlogician.)
(June 1, 2019 at 6:26 am)Alan V Wrote: No, it is not "all stimulus response." You are completely overlooking motivated selective focus, the human ability to suppress reactions, and conflicting desires, not all of which can be followed at one time.
(my bold)
Alan, you don't need to read Hume. Hume doubted that the laws of cause and effect exist. That's just radical skepticism. You just need to address a (possible) misconception you have that just because the brain is complex and is self-mediating (in addition to its perceptive, interpretive, and responsive powers)... that it is somehow endowed with free will. Let's look at what you've said with laser beam focus and see if it contains a misconception or not.
The one quoted statement above is what I take issue with here. When I can show what's wrong with this statement, I can show you why we don't agree that brains do not make free will possible. Let's break it down. Let's just focus on what you've said in this one sentence because this is why it is erroneous to think brains have anything to do with free will. And just to remind you: free will may be true. Determinism may be false. That's not the issue here. The issue is brains have nothing to do with it.
1) No, it is not "all stimulus response."
* Yes it is. (see below)
2) You are completely overlooking motivated selective focus...
* I am not overlooking motivated selective focus. Motivated selective focus is stimulus driven. It all happens on an unconscious level (how can free will be pertinent to decisions you don't even know you are making?). As is remarked in a scholarly article "[Effects of motivated selective focus] depend on internal states but arise without conscious will," So, free will or no... it doesn't matter. Motivated selective focus doesn't involve the will at all. It is a piece of brain software, an adaptive algorithm that helps direct consciousness to this or that external stimulus in order to obtain rewards as per the dictates of evolutionary conditioning.
If anything, motivated selective focus is an argument for determinism because it controls what we focus on before we are even conscious of anything at all. (But I'm not apt to pick up this line of reasoning, even though it speaks to my point. Because, as far as I'm concerned, brains and their inner workings are irrelevant to the discussion.)
3) You are completely overlooking... the human ability to suppress reactions, and conflicting desires, not all of which can be followed at one time.
*Nope. I had things like these in mind all along. You need to ask yourself: "What IS the human ability to suppress reactions?" Is it the brain suddenly gaining the ability to change how the laws of nature operate? No. It's actually the brain in conflict with itself... or more aptly... one part of the the brain sending one impulse and another part of the brain sending another. I'm no neuroscientist, but I think such things are resolved via a mediating feature in the prefrontal cortex. But even if I have my neuroscience wrong there this does not prove free will because it can be explained (again) in terms of computer algorithms. Sometimes one algorithm conflicts with another within a program. One way to deal with this in computer science (and it appears it's also nature's way of dealing with it) is to tack on a third algorithm that makes certain "calls" about which of the other algorithms will "win out" in a given scenario.
Unless a 1980s apple computer has free will in your conception, neither does the human brain... at least insofar as it can suppress certain responses that arise within it or handle conflicting desires.
