strubenuff

I've only had a chance to glance over the posts, but it seems that there is an agreement that newtonian physics are deterministic. Has quantum mechanics been considered?

Bill

Yes, but scientific investigation has been unable to define what effects occur at a "macro level" (meaning within our observable world at the scale at which humans normally live our lives) which are in any way non-deterministic.

In other words, there may well be randomness down at the quantum level, but by the time the effects build up to something that average humans might take notice of, there is nothing but deterministic reality on all sides.

== Bill

Bill

Personally, I cannot recall a case ever being made that any "higher primates" other than homo sapiens had any sorts of "thoughts and feelings" that were in some way QUALITATIVELY distinct from those of other mammals. Is a chimpanzee really that much more of a "thinker" than is a lowly mouse? I personally doubt it (particularly after the recent findings of how common human genetics is with mouse genetics).

If you have any information on any accepted SCIENTIFIC scale for measuring such qualities, then I would appreciate your posting that information somewhere around here. Otherwise, I will stick to my basic impression that only humans, among all of the mammals, have truly distinctive forms of thought processes.

== Bill

Gurdur

Strawman - care to address the actual point ?
I dunno, you seem to think medicalizing crime is perfectly OK - absolving people of moral responsibility.
Care to clean up your glaring contradictions ?

Weird.
I suppose it's too much to ask you to actually address points rather than theses meaningless flights of rhetorical circular arguments.
Ah, the obligatory tarring with the theist pitch.
What on Earth makes you think that is at all relevent here ?
It's positively amusing in a way to see this, but couldn't you at least give the semblance of a counter-argument ?

D'oh.

Wrong on just so many counts !
It's an odd sort of "compatibilism" that holds choices of free will are perfectly determined - have you noticed any randomicity in your enviroment ? -
moreover, society does not put the criminally insane in psych hospitals because of the failurre of deterrence, as you believe, but rather to treat them, and hopefully bring about a recovery, as well as protecting them from themselves, and protecting the public from them

Make up your mind. Either you want to medicalize all crime because of determinism, or you don't.
Which ?

D'oh.
I talked about the difference between
a) the risk of apprehension
and
b) the severity of punishment

Now tell me how on Earth your confused question relates to my statement.
Not as many as you'ld think; even in countries where there is larger-scale condoned murder of female spouses (under the Sharia system for example), the rates are not all that high.

And once again you evade the point.

Kent Stevens

Quote:

quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Originally posted by Kent Stevens: The most technically correct way of looking at things is that there is no "choice". -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reeeeeaally ? *raise eyebrows* According to just whom ? quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The weather has no choice as does other natural systems. If we have perfect foresight we see that a murderer "must" kill the person they do. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ah, human behaviour and that ol' self-consciousness/free-will conundrum resolved by a simple recourse to an analogy drawn from the weather. Why do I remain unconvinced ? quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We still attribute death to a murderer as opposed to other causes. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Perhaps the weather ? quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Murderers are still morally responsible as they are people and we hold people morally responsible for their actions. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is wrong on several counts. Under most present legal systems, extreme youth and insanity are grounds not to hold someone morally responsible for their actions --- and there's also "diminished responsibility", a mitigating ground to take into consideration when sentencing. Furthermore, if you want to adhere so faithfully to the extreme determinist position, there's no point or need to hold people morally accountable for crimes; for example, you can simply "medicalize" crime instead. Bring on the "Twinkie Defence" ! quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The possibility of punishment deters crime because people are influenced by this threat. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wrong. Several studies seem to show that it is the (self-estimated) possibility of detection and apprehension that deters crimes, not more severe punishments per se. Furthermore, crime incidence is often related to the socio-economic history. quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If a someone kills somebody else we would predict that they could harm someone else as well. By prediction it makes sense to imprision such a person to prevent further predicted crime. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wrong. Many, if not the majority, of murders in say present-day Great Britain are committed by the nearest-and-theoretically-dearest of the victim; IOW, people often murder the one-and-only person they simply cannot bear to live with one day longer. They do not usually go on to commit other murders. Regards,

By saying that something is the most technically correct I am expressing my opinion of what the case is. I then give some reasons for my viewpoint. You may or may not accept my reasons for things, and I may or may not accept your reasons. If you want to disagree with me over free will you can try the thread "Free will is bunk" which I started. However, this particular philosophical thread is about the moral consequences of there being no free will.

Overall, Gurdur you do not encourage people to debate with you because your reaction to my not unreasonable posting, is for you to rant wrong, wrong, wrong, at me. Gurdur's reaction is of a person whose mind is closed to the prospect of open exploration of this particular issue.

We hold people morally responsible for their actions. We do not hold tigers or the weather morally responsible for what consequences they bring. Even small children we hold morally responsible to a degree. If a child is beating up another child we do not say "this child is not morally responsible for this". We might repremand and even punish such a child. There are a few legal exceptions to punishing people. But for at least 99% of all people, there is at least partial moral responsibility for what they do. Approximately 0% of tigers are held to be morally responsible for what they do.

The phrase "possibility of punishment" implies a number of things. Punishment only ever occurs if a criminal is detected and apprehended. Punishment often only results after the accused has been found guilty in a court of law.

What is going through the mind of someone who has stolen something. They do not want to be found out or apprehended. But if they were not going to be punished at the end of being found out and detected, they might laugh to themselves and say "so what". The severity of punishment along with other relevant factors combine to deter crime. If you are thinking of murder you might be more detered from doing this, than if you were thinking of shop lifting a candy bar. In part you would be detered more from doing murder than stealing candy, because one crime involves potentially the death penalty, while the other one involves getting a verbal warning or a small fine.

While it is true that most people kill people they know personally, that does not mean that there are not some murderers that you do not want released from prison, as these people pose a threat to other members of society. You get serial murderers like Ted Bundy who if they are not kept in a jail, it is quite predictable they will kill again. There are gang members who have little idea of moral responsibility, and they would kill and rob if they were not put in prison for their crimes. Unfortunately, there is a high level of repeat offending for criminals taken as a whole. So unfortunately we can predict that a fairly large proportion of the people released from prison will commit further crime.

[ August 23, 2002: Message edited by: Kent Stevens ]</p>

Gurdur

A certain amount of more humility, especially when flying in the face of the majority of research opinion, may well be warranted.
And I've provided you with many points, which you've ignored.
I have already.
I'm aware of that, and I've given you several moral problems to think about, some of which you've confused, others which you've ignored.
Depends which topic, which people.
I know of a couple who like to discuss things with me.
Where you become unreasonable is when you insist on the truth of your view despite it being academically a very thorny and much-debated issue.

Naw, didn't rant.
I simply calmly pointed out where your theories were wrong, i.e. contradicted either by the evidence or by logic.
Please deal with my replies.

Nonsense.

No we don't, , not when they're clinically insane, below the age of responsibility, or suffering under states of diminished responsibility.

Some people actually do.
Also, you can check medieval European criminal law on animal malefactors.
It might surprise you.

Not in any legal sense.

Actually, a lot.
I am fascinated where you get this figure from. And IMHO, it's dead wrong.
Why not check the stats on criminal insanity as against culpable criminality ?

Wrong, wrong, and wrong.
I made the small correction that it is estimated risk of apprehension commonly, not severity of punishment, that plays a role in crime stats.
You seem to me to be making a mountain out of a molehill in attempting to avoid that point.

And as for recividist percentages, these differ widely from culture to culture, and time period to time period.

[ August 23, 2002: Message edited by: Gurdur ]</p>

abe smith

BILL's post up-there^^^^^. that (... I forget!losing it!) (stuff) "are human constructs". YOU GO! BILL MAN!

Kip

We are not being precise enough about language. I do not deny that people WOULD do the same thing "if we turned back the tape". I deny that they COULD do something else. You say, "people WOULD do the same thing" does not contradict my argument at all because I never asserted that people WOULD do otherwise. The distinction is between ability/action and correlation/causation.

Now, by "other options available" I thought you implied conceivable options or options that the person considered but ultimately abandoned. These options are conceivable but not possible. However, you assert that "If they had other options to choose from, then they could have chosen otherwise, and it would be unreasonable of them to say that they could not have chosen otherwise." According to the determinism upon which we both agreed, there can only be one "option" in the sense you have defined.

In summary, according to my logic:

1. We only hold a person morally responsible if that person could have possibly not committed the immoral action.
2. According to determinism, a person only has one possible (although many conceivable) responseses to any situation.

Conclusion: we cannot hold people morally responsible for any action.

I again fail to find an answer to the simple question I asked you: what is sufficient to require moral responsibility?

owleye

Bill...

"If you have any information on any accepted SCIENTIFIC scale for measuring such qualities, then I would appreciate your posting that information somewhere around here."

It was the absence of a quantitative theory of locomotion that I'd used to support the view that we have a long way to go before we understand how free will is possible. In his 1992 book "The Physics of Chance," Charles Ruhla covers the role chance plays in scientific accounts of phenomena. He has a particular orientation with respect to the question of whether or not the universe is essentially deterministic, but my purpose for bringing it here is to point out the various ways physicists have for dealing with randomness, where the use of probability theory falls into one of a few kinds that we know about. Ruhla describes four uses: Maxwellian processes, which use probabilities to deal with our ignorance, Boltzmann processes, which use probabilities derived from a particular conviction, Poincaretian processes, which cover what we know about chaotic systems, and Bohr processes, for which chance is (appears to be) imposed on us.

Complexity theory is worthy of consideration as well. Indeed, as I understand it, we have made considerable progress in understanding self-propulsion through models that make use of genetic algorithms. What I think is missing is a kind of unified theory which quantifies biological motion. If we are then able to come up with such a theory of motion, I believe this will be an important step toward understanding how free will is possible within a deterministic framework. Though on the surface it may appear that I'm seeking a reductionist account of free-will, I believe that any apparent reduction is more than offset by the emergence of subtleties within those very processes that make it it possible.

"Otherwise, I will stick to my basic impression that only humans, among all of the mammals, have truly distinctive forms of thought processes."

I have no objections to this.

owleye

owleye

Kip...

"1. We only hold a person morally responsible if that person could have possibly not committed the immoral action.
2. According to determinism, a person only has one possible (although many conceivable) responseses to any situation.

Conclusion: we cannot hold people morally responsible for any action."

I believe your logic is valid, though I have no reason to believe premise 2 is true. I usually attribute that position to hard determinism. To be determined in the broader sense is merely to say that all events are determined (or completely determined) by prior events. If we think of it as causal determination, all events have prior causes. This in itself does not preclude that from a given condition more than one outcome is possible or that results vary. When seeking explanations of events (say gene mutations) we are satisfied when we uncover the prior conditions (say background radiation). The level of explanation matches the level of inquiry. The spatio-temporal pattern of radioactivity from a particular core sample is due to the current state of the nuclei of that sample. The nuclei are unstable. Therefore the radioactivity can only be statistically described. Radioactivity is fully determined by the prior conditions -- thus radioactivity is deterministic. This does not mean, however, that variation is impossible.

owleye