(January 13, 2018 at 6:21 am)DLJ Wrote: Free will does exist. It's just not what you think it is.
Have some Dennett...
Pretty much my take as well. Whatever people thought free will was before the fly got in the bottle is pretty much what it still means. The trouble is it has had a variety of meanings.
An appreciation of how brains work and what people are should lead us to recognize the ongoing need for imposing consequences to shape human behavior but also recognize that in fact the same illegal act undertaken by different people might involve more or less compulsion and so more or less capacity to avoid. Fortunately our justice system reflects this understanding to some degree. Unfortunately the political system permits the creation of laws which are blind to these understandings -such as the notorious 3 strikes law. For a chimp species we seem to be making strides even with the less clever of our kind regularly fucking up progress.
