Kent Stevens

This is mostly equating free will with self awareness. If you made it so that having free will was not dependent on awareness then many systems could qualify as having free will.

In terms of responsibility, people are responsible for their actions as they are the immediate causes of certain actions. If we want to go back far enough we could blame the initial conditions of the big bang for making someone commit murder. But the big bang made me do it would not be a credible defence.

If clouds rain down on the ground it is the clouds that are causally responsible for this. It does not matter that these clouds were in turn caused by evapouration from a far away sea. The sea did not directly cause the ground to get wet, but the clouds did.

Clutch

Xeren,
The argument of yours to which I responded is overwhelmingly concerned with the conditions of responsibility, actually; you mention it in almost every premise, and you mention free will in almost none.

I tried to make it clear from the outset what the problem is; viz, The non-sequitur has emerged in a variety of ways, but here is one them:
Judging from your use of the word "then", you seem to believe that (2) follows from (1). (And if not, what justifies (2)?) It does not follow, though. (1) seems every bit as consistent with the negation of (2).

So you have some implicit definition of "truly or ultimately morally responsible" that you think is filling in the gaps, here. What is it? Well, your argument requires the principle R.

(R) In order to be genuinely responsible for an action, you must have chosen your nature, in virtue of which you intended to perform the action.

Now, is R part of the content of the concept of responsibility itself? In my first post, I argued that it is not.

So what justifies it? Is it just the way you are defining responsibility? Because there's not much interesting about the fact that one can choose to define a word "responsible" in such a way that it contains R.

Mr. Sammi

Calvan, I am trying to show that diverting the chain of direct cause through the use of one's ability does lead to a certain amount of free will. What I wish others to understand is IF the impending effect of some cause, can be diverted at the last moment, UNDER the condition, that IF one did not divert the impending effect, then that diverted effect, would have been the effect which would have formed the chain of determinism. This shows some power over the environment and experience.

I realise the phrase is not well worded, especially when the new resulting effect still affects us. Then again the circularity of the effect may as well be free will - never having to live with a hard choice.

Sammi Na Boodie ()

xeren

sorry clutch, i'll get back to you soon. work and school.

Clutch

xeren, right there with you. Later.

xeren

Clutch, i read over the posts we've made now that i've had some time, and i realized that i made the wrong claims, because i inferred too much from the essay i was posting from.
The author's point is that because you cannot be the originator or your own mind/self, you cannot be ultimatelyresponsible for the way you are or what you do.
So if a person were to murder someone else, knowing full well that murder was wrong in the eyes of the society, they would be quite responsible for what they had done. I retract my ealier statements.

But, do you agree with me on the following statement?

No one can be truly responsible for the way they are (as a result of the above premises?)

To put it in the real world: Hitler is responsible for what he did, but no one can blame Hitler for becoming the person he became.

Clutch

Xeren, that's sounding a lot more reasonable, but still seems a bit too strong. Nobody has complete control over their nature. But we do seem to have some control. Meaning that among our desires are higher-order desires about the sort of desires we want to have. Lower-order desires that issue from these higher-order desires are aspects of our character for which we are responsible.

But of course your point of regress is correct; this cannot explain every desire one has. Still, from our state of information it is just an open question how much responsibility Hitler bears for becoming the person he became. Surely more than none; surely less than all.

Presumably what this shows is that not all events of a changing-personal-nature sort count as actions. Many, perhaps most, are simply events. But given a personal nature, genuine responsibility attaches to all actions.

K

Clutch and xeren:

I think there is a lot of confusion related to the word "responsible". While I believe that we are really just self-aware systems responding in deterministic ways to inputs, we are still "held responsible" for our actions. This is for purely practical reasons. When society holds individuals responsible for their actions, it alters the inputs and the internal wiring of those individuals. The desire to hold offenders responsible for their actions is a drive that evolved to allow us to operate in societies. This, in turn, helped us to survive and reproduce.

Mu

At the risk of fudging the question, I always feel that the nature of time and whether or not it actually 'passes' is of vital importance to the whole free-will question.

If time passing is an illusion created by consciousness, then cause and effect is equally illusory. The mathematical space of All Possible Choices Available To Me Throughout My Life is an ever shifting beast, with entire futures being regularly closed down with every decision 'I' make. I could quite easily go and smash and grab a jewellery store, get caught and do seven years in jail. I'm not going to...there goes the seven years in jail timeline based on that probability. Or I could not get caught, and be considerable richer (or at least mor jewelled up). I'm still not going to...there goes that probability.

I could move to Italy and leave my wife and child, altering their lives and my own in unimaginable ways. But I am not going to, through a perceived 'choice'.

What I am trying to get at (stodgily, sorry), is if the Universe is infinite and all time is contained 'within' it, then the Space Of All Choices I Have Already And Will Make could conceivably exists within it 'before' I choose them. In which case I am merely treading footprints in the sand to a predetermined conclusion.

Hmm. All gets a bit sci-fi, but there you have it-without a thorough understanding of what time is (remembering that physics does not accomodate that any such thing exists at all), the question of whether or not 'I' can make free-will choices 'within' it are unanswerable.

Or not.

Laurentius

Cause and effect do make mind frames for man's rational perception of the environment. Free will also allows him to perceive his own capability of making choices, regardless the fact that he will have no alternatives due to external and inernal conditioning.
However, I think there's more than that because the self represents one of the internal inputs determining most meaningful choices.

AVE