(July 26, 2016 at 12:39 pm)Alasdair Ham Wrote: I think anger is a natural human emotion that needn't be as long lasting once belief in free will is dropped but it's not something we could ever stop ourselves feeling in the first place. It's a natural reaction to feeling that yourself or those you care about are violated.
Arguments against free will, and the subsequent pointlessness of punishment, are dropped by the wayside when someone's daughter is raped, or parents are murdered. Fuck that guy, and the outrageous thing he did!
The thing is that we are equivocating on agency and environment. We treat the brain as a mechanism external to the personal agent-- he doesn't have free will, because his brain function dictates how he will behave. But all that stuff, all that brain function, IS the self. Asserting that the self is brain function, and then defining free will in such a way that for it to be real there'd have to be MORE than brain function, begs the question in a pretty obvious way.