RE: No soul? No free will and no responsibility then, yet the latter's essential...
August 21, 2020 at 9:45 am
(This post was last modified: August 21, 2020 at 9:59 am by Smaug.)
Free Will is one interesting topic. I've had a discussion on this matter with a friend who is non-religious and is interested in science yet he is much bothered by explanations implying that the brain functions are fully determined by the laws of Physics. He argued that there has to be a special decision-making feature that is not constrained by the brain's current configuration or the input signals. Further discussion made it clear the he did not mean any sort of randomizers since random generation of control signals is not Free Will. This is very interesting since this person is one of the most reasonable people I know. There has to be a very strong psychological attachment to this kind of ideas.
My conslusions are the following:
- the 'classic' or 'strong' concept of Free Will directly contradicts Casuality. It has to be fundametally outside of this world.
- 'classic' Free Will is a placeholder concept that people made up due to their lack of understanding of the world. It's one of the most undefined concepts out there.
- for some people it's an integral part of their personality which helps draw a definite line between them and the rest of the world. Thus questioning it may be subconsciously treated as some kind of a personal attack or a threat.
- to add to the previous point, it's so engrained in culture by now that for some it's hard to wrap their mind around the way things really work.
Speaking of the practical side, the absence of the 'classical' Free Will does not remove responsibility and does not undermine the judicial institutions of the society. Here's an example. Let's say a thief has been caught red-handed. The new scientific knowledge may allow us to learn more how and why they became a thief and what was going in their brain when they made a decision to steal. But this does not remove the need to correct their anti-social behaviour. We know by now that behaviour is formed by learning, 'positive' and 'negative' stimuli. Thus the judge's going to give them some negative stimuli in form of jailtime or a fine, or something else.
My conslusions are the following:
- the 'classic' or 'strong' concept of Free Will directly contradicts Casuality. It has to be fundametally outside of this world.
- 'classic' Free Will is a placeholder concept that people made up due to their lack of understanding of the world. It's one of the most undefined concepts out there.
- for some people it's an integral part of their personality which helps draw a definite line between them and the rest of the world. Thus questioning it may be subconsciously treated as some kind of a personal attack or a threat.
- to add to the previous point, it's so engrained in culture by now that for some it's hard to wrap their mind around the way things really work.
Speaking of the practical side, the absence of the 'classical' Free Will does not remove responsibility and does not undermine the judicial institutions of the society. Here's an example. Let's say a thief has been caught red-handed. The new scientific knowledge may allow us to learn more how and why they became a thief and what was going in their brain when they made a decision to steal. But this does not remove the need to correct their anti-social behaviour. We know by now that behaviour is formed by learning, 'positive' and 'negative' stimuli. Thus the judge's going to give them some negative stimuli in form of jailtime or a fine, or something else.
