Morality in Nature

[max-greece]

But in a deterministic view he has no choice but to commit the crime and society has no choice but to punish him for it.

The net effect of determinism/free will is nil.

Or maybe the deterministic society will deterministically arrive at the obvious conclusion that people can't be punished for crimes they could not have avoided committing.

Apparently only if they are bankers

[genkaus]

At the time of access, it ceases to be passive. The neurons which encode the data fire up, send signals to other parts of the brain, and affect behavior. That's a process.

Yes, a process of accessing data. The data itself doesn't magically turn into a process.

I'm not talking about the mores of the judges. I'm talking about the immoral behavior of the person being judged. We don't care what evil ideas he holds-- so long as he shits once a day, eats three times a day, sleeps normal hours, and goes to church on Sunday, he's a swell guy. We don't care HOW he arrives at his good behavior-- so long as he doesn't start raping kids, killing moms, or voting Democrat.

You are talking about our mores. In this context, we are the judges who judge when to start caring. That person is being judged by our abstract principles.

Why would you give that that set of principles is not inevitable for the person? At what point in the person's life, in a deterministic view, did he have a chance to learn other than he learned, feel other than he felt, and form other than the ideas he has formed?

When he went to school, to college, interacted with friends, read a newspaper, read a book or even read a fortune cookie. Everyday in your life you are exposed to new and different ideas. That the choice of whether you integrate those ideas is determined by who you are does not mean that a choice wasn't made.

This is special pleading: "Everything follows from a deterministic interaction between particles in the universe. Except that serial killing bastard-- HE has to fry, because he should have (magically) caused himself to turn out other than he did."

On the contrary, this applies to any and all agents. That is the nature of agency.

You are desperately hanging onto the concept of free will, while you insist on a model of the universe with which it is incompatible.

Which brings us back to the original point. Since I don't mean the same thing by free-will as you do, I don't regard it as incompatible with my model of universe.

[Lumpymunk]

There was a really great documentary by NatGeo in 2008 about Stress called "Portrait of a Killer." Although the documentary wasn't directly about this it did show something that I think relates.

It describes how the life expectancy and general health problems increase as your place in the social order is lower, and the professor in the documentary studied a pack of apes over the course of 20 years to draw the correlation. One of the sections in the documentary described a situation where all of the dominant males in a pack were killed, leaving all of he mild-mannered socially calm males alive. This completely changes the dynamic in the pack from being hierarchic and dominance-driven to a much more peaceful coexistence.

What I think this teaches is that when you look to nature for morality a lot of it is not as "locked in stone" as you would think. The behavior isn't necessarily an expression of how the animal truly is (or would rather behave), but its adaptation to its environment... and can be easily changed. Within the span of a single generation the social dynamic was completely different in the pack... and was maintained.

It's a very good documentary (on netflix if you have it).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYG0ZuTv5rs

[bennyboy]

@genkaus

re: mores
The person is being judged by our abstract principles, which are ALSO a process. The devolpment and acceptance of those principles, the social act of collecting and organizing them, the feelings that lead us to want to apply them to others, etc. This is all process. There's no such thing as data that is "just" data when it's being used.

re: choices
The question is whether choices are MADE or whether they HAPPEN. In your view of agency, choices happen. It happens that one person's brain leads to murderous behavior, and the other not. But why would we punish material events? We don't punish a rock for rolling down a hill, or the sun for rising. It is because we still mythologize humans as somehow above pure material processes that we justify punishing them.

And in the end, that's the problem. The whole concept of human existence is taken as material reality, when it's in fact symbolism. Don't believe me? What's "Mom"? People don't see Mom as an organism with input, processing and output. They see her as a kind of emodiment of abstract qualities: kindness, love, temperance, etc., and a collection of anecdotal vignettes. This is the problem. You can't say, "My Mom's free-will is really just a label for a deterministic process," because the word Mom is incompatible with that idea. So is most people's sense of self.

You can't use a deterministic view of free-will, when the concepts we have of human agents use a different view of free-will. The criminal has free will in the sense that it is HIS brain making a choice, and HIS body acting on it; but the mythology of human agency which is always implied in so much as a name uses free-will in the sense that the person could potentially have done otherwise than he did. In using the morality of actual free agency vs. morality as a label for certain kinds of ideas, we are introducing a harmful equivocation.

[genkaus]

The person is being judged by our abstract principles, which are ALSO a process. The devolpment and acceptance of those principles, the social act of collecting and organizing them, the feelings that lead us to want to apply them to others, etc. This is all process. There's no such thing as data that is "just" data when it's being used.

First of all, you seem to be consistently mixing up two lines of argument.

Secondly, what you are describing is data processing. As the phrase implies, there is something called data, which is processed. Which means, data itself is not a process.

The question is whether choices are MADE or whether they HAPPEN. In your view of agency, choices happen. It happens that one person's brain leads to murderous behavior, and the other not. But why would we punish material events? We don't punish a rock for rolling down a hill, or the sun for rising. It is because we still mythologize humans as somehow above pure material processes that we justify punishing them.

Actually, in my view of agency, choices are made. Try to remember that your worldview is not mine. I regard agency as a specific form of material process and rocks or sun do not qualify for that.

And in the end, that's the problem. The whole concept of human existence is taken as material reality, when it's in fact symbolism. Don't believe me? What's "Mom"? People don't see Mom as an organism with input, processing and output. They see her as a kind of emodiment of abstract qualities: kindness, love, temperance, etc., and a collection of anecdotal vignettes. This is the problem. You can't say, "My Mom's free-will is really just a label for a deterministic process," because the word Mom is incompatible with that idea. So is most people's sense of self.

Again, try to remember that what people usually mean by it and what I do are two different things.

You can't use a deterministic view of free-will, when the concepts we have of human agents use a different view of free-will. The criminal has free will in the sense that it is HIS brain making a choice, and HIS body acting on it; but the mythology of human agency which is always implied in so much as a name uses free-will in the sense that the person could potentially have done otherwise than he did. In using the morality of actual free agency vs. morality as a label for certain kinds of ideas, we are introducing a harmful equivocation.

But I'm not using the words in the same context that others usually do. That's something I've said from the beginning. The common understanding of free-will and agency are based on the incorrect premises of dualism - which I reject.

[bennyboy]

The person is being judged by our abstract principles, which are ALSO a process. The devolpment and acceptance of those principles, the social act of collecting and organizing them, the feelings that lead us to want to apply them to others, etc. This is all process. There's no such thing as data that is "just" data when it's being used.

First of all, you seem to be consistently mixing up two lines of argument.

Secondly, what you are describing is data processing. As the phrase implies, there is something called data, which is processed. Which means, data itself is not a process.

. . . unless it's being recalled and used in the brain.

The question is whether choices are MADE or whether they HAPPEN. In your view of agency, choices happen. It happens that one person's brain leads to murderous behavior, and the other not. But why would we punish material events? We don't punish a rock for rolling down a hill, or the sun for rising. It is because we still mythologize humans as somehow above pure material processes that we justify punishing them.

Actually, in my view of agency, choices are made. Try to remember that your worldview is not mine. I regard agency as a specific form of material process and rocks or sun do not qualify for that.

In your model, the sun chooses to burn, and the rock chooses to roll down the hill under the force of gravity, in the exact same way that a person chooses to act in a particular way. The only difference is that rock-rolling is more difficult to predict. But you could say something like, "I think that cloud is going to choose to rain when it hits Seattle" as well as you could say, "I think that girl is going to choose the pink umbrella."

But I'm not using the words in the same context that others usually do. That's something I've said from the beginning. The common understanding of free-will and agency are based on the incorrect premises of dualism - which I reject.

This is my point. ALL the words in which humans are considered singular entities are as fictional as the idea of actually-free-will is in your view. If you say, "Mom's brain processed her environment, accessed her memories, and caused her to hit me," you are only getting it half right. You have to say, "The collection of interconnected but independent processes called Mom has exchibited a hitting behavior." If you accept a moral agent, you have to accept all its implications, including actual-free-will.

So back to our murderer-- there IS actually no singular agent responsible for the behavior. Maybe a particular brain region led to the killing, and all the rest of the brain is a nice, functional guy. Maybe he had a stroke, or has a blood clot. Maybe he was abused and his world view is broken. Lumping all those possibilities under a single agency, just because they are collectively called by a single name, is cruel. If there's no single agent (i.e. the brain somehow unified by a spirit, or a will or whatever), then inflicting punishment on the entire system is immoral.

[genkaus]

. . . unless it's being recalled and used in the brain.

Nope. Even in that case data is not a process.

In your model, the sun chooses to burn, and the rock chooses to roll down the hill under the force of gravity, in the exact same way that a person chooses to act in a particular way. The only difference is that rock-rolling is more difficult to predict. But you could say something like, "I think that cloud is going to choose to rain when it hits Seattle" as well as you could say, "I think that girl is going to choose the pink umbrella."

Wrong. As I said, choice requires an agency, which the sun and the rock do not have. The girl, however, chooses pink.

This is my point. ALL the words in which humans are considered singular entities are as fictional as the idea of actually-free-will is in your view. If you say, "Mom's brain processed her environment, accessed her memories, and caused her to hit me," you are only getting it half right. You have to say, "The collection of interconnected but independent processes called Mom has exchibited a hitting behavior." If you accept a moral agent, you have to accept all its implications, including actual-free-will.

I do accept a moral agent with all its implication - including actual free-will. Its just that what I understand by actual free-will is different from what you do.

So back to our murderer-- there IS actually no singular agent responsible for the behavior. Maybe a particular brain region led to the killing, and all the rest of the brain is a nice, functional guy. Maybe he had a stroke, or has a blood clot. Maybe he was abused and his world view is broken. Lumping all those possibilities under a single agency, just because they are collectively called by a single name, is cruel. If there's no single agent (i.e. the brain somehow unified by a spirit, or a will or whatever), then inflicting punishment on the entire system is immoral.

Wrong. There is a set of interconnected processes that constitute a singular agency. A stroke, blood cot or past event are not a part of that agency.

[bennyboy]

Wrong. As I said, choice requires an agency, which the sun and the rock do not have. The girl, however, chooses pink.

Yes, but your definition of agency is arbitrary. There's no singular agent at all-- there's the IDEA of a singular agent. These are very different things.

I do accept a moral agent with all its implication - including actual free-will. Its just that what I understand by actual free-will is different from what you do.

I didn't say "free-will," by whatever totally not-free definition you are trying to make it mean. I said "actual-free-will."

So back to our murderer-- there IS actually no singular agent responsible for the behavior. Maybe a particular brain region led to the killing, and all the rest of the brain is a nice, functional guy. Maybe he had a stroke, or has a blood clot. Maybe he was abused and his world view is broken. Lumping all those possibilities under a single agency, just because they are collectively called by a single name, is cruel. If there's no single agent (i.e. the brain somehow unified by a spirit, or a will or whatever), then inflicting punishment on the entire system is immoral.

Wrong. There is a set of interconnected processes that constitute a singular agency. A stroke, blood cot or past event are not a part of that agency.

You forgot abuse, brain development issues, exposure to crime and violence at a young age, etc. etc. That is, you exactly forgot all the influences, totally beyond a person's control, which inevitably led to his murderous moment.

Anyway, this singular "agent" you talk about is a complete myth. Just because you attach a name to multiple processes, most of them completely unconscious and inaccessible to the murderer, does not mean there is anything singular about them.

EXCEPT as an idea. And that's what I'm talking about. As much as you want to objectify SOME of the human experience (e.g. free will), you continue to mythologize this singular agent, which I challenge you either to define or produce. Sure, you can wave airily at a person and say, "There's Bob. He's the agent. He killed someone." But that's not really a good representation of the processes that led to the killing.

[genkaus]

Yes, but your definition of agency is arbitrary. There's no singular agent at all-- there's the IDEA of a singular agent. These are very different things.

You mean you don't regard yourself as a single person?

I didn't say "free-will," by whatever totally not-free definition you are trying to make it mean. I said "actual-free-will."

I regard my definition of free will as "actual-free-will".

You forgot abuse, brain development issues, exposure to crime and violence at a young age, etc. etc. That is, you exactly forgot all the influences, totally beyond a person's control, which inevitably led to his murderous moment.

On the contrary, I don't regard these influences as inevitably leading to the murderous moment - given that they are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for the murder.

Anyway, this singular "agent" you talk about is a complete myth. Just because you attach a name to multiple processes, most of them completely unconscious and inaccessible to the murderer, does not mean there is anything singular about them.

Wrong. All those processes work towards generating a singular identity and in doing so, become part of that singular identity. Compare it to multiple threads of code generating a single program. That is what's singular about them.

EXCEPT as an idea. And that's what I'm talking about. As much as you want to objectify SOME of the human experience (e.g. free will), you continue to mythologize this singular agent, which I challenge you either to define or produce. Sure, you can wave airily at a person and say, "There's Bob. He's the agent. He killed someone." But that's not really a good representation of the processes that led to the killing.

I think I've answered this question before. I can't say exactly at which level of complexity do the involved processes generate an identity. But that they do is evident from the fact that it exists.

[bennyboy]

Yes, but your definition of agency is arbitrary. There's no singular agent at all-- there's the IDEA of a singular agent. These are very different things.

You mean you don't regard yourself as a single person?

I've course I do. I'm not a determinist, or a physical monist. I believe in actual mind and actual free will.

I didn't say "free-will," by whatever totally not-free definition you are trying to make it mean. I said "actual-free-will."

I regard my definition of free will as "actual-free-will".

Except that it's neither free nor will.

You forgot abuse, brain development issues, exposure to crime and violence at a young age, etc. etc. That is, you exactly forgot all the influences, totally beyond a person's control, which inevitably led to his murderous moment.

On the contrary, I don't regard these influences as inevitably leading to the murderous moment - given that they are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for the murder.

Yes, because determinism has wiggle-room, so that the murder itself isn't proof enough that it had to happen. So where does this wiggle-room come from? Space pixies?

Anyway, this singular "agent" you talk about is a complete myth. Just because you attach a name to multiple processes, most of them completely unconscious and inaccessible to the murderer, does not mean there is anything singular about them.

Wrong. All those processes work towards generating a singular identity and in doing so, become part of that singular identity. Compare it to multiple threads of code generating a single program. That is what's singular about them.

Okay, so if you blow a CPU, and the computer doesn't function, you'd say, "Goddamned computer doesn't work" and throw out the whole thing, right? Because that's what punishing an individual is-- the entirety of the individual didn't cause a murder.

EXCEPT as an idea. And that's what I'm talking about. As much as you want to objectify SOME of the human experience (e.g. free will), you continue to mythologize this singular agent, which I challenge you either to define or produce. Sure, you can wave airily at a person and say, "There's Bob. He's the agent. He killed someone." But that's not really a good representation of the processes that led to the killing.

I think I've answered this question before. I can't say exactly at which level of complexity do the involved processes generate an identity. But that they do is evident from the fact that it exists.

What matters isn't whether the self exists. What matters is whether it is a byproduct of deterministic processes. If it is, then the apparent agency of the self is irrelevant-- it is a single experience of multiple functions, none of which the self has control over.