Free will, determinism and the criminal justice system

[David]

I was watching this philosophy lecture video a few weeks ago (thanks to ptid, who'd linked to it in an earlier thread). It's an hour and a half long, but I feel like the first 5-10 minutes is sufficient to get a basic grasp of the topic being discussed and some of the ideas surrounding it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxup7sxIUmg

While I disagreed with Dennett's conclusions and thought he committed a few logical fallacies that undermined his point, the video was useful for two reasons: firstly, it provides a rough overview of a mainstream compatibilist position on free will; secondly, it kicks off with a reference to a fascinating article that I later dug up on google:

http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/GreeneCohenPhilTrans-04.pdf

A few people (e.g. rocketronnie, if I recall correctly) have criticised these threads in the past for being irrelevant. Philosophy, in their view, has little if anything to do with everyday life. But articles like Greene and Cohen's suggest otherwise: the debate about free will has massive ramifications over how we treat criminals, for instance.

Free will — roughly, the concept that we control our own destinies through the conscious choices we make, and that we are free to make those choices — has been a major philosophical topic for centuries, if not millennia. The problem is this: in our everyday life, it seems quite clear that we make independent decisions. I'm typing this post instead of putting DVDs away; think positive called the friendly washing machine repair company first instead of the grumpy one; Tannin ate corn flakes instead of vita brits this morning; Booth shot Abraham Lincoln instead of letting him enjoy the play in peace. It seems to us that these are independent choices and that we could have quite easily elected to do something different.

Where this becomes an issue is that, the more we learn about neuroscience and the way the brain operates, the less likely it seems that our decisions are free in any real way. The Dilbert cartoon below is a good summary of the problem (I'm not sure I know enough about neuroscience to explain it any better!).

Otherwise, think about it this way: each one of us has a unique personality. Where did it come from? Some argue that it's mostly our 'wiring' in our DNA (genetics); some argue that it's mostly the way our parents raised us, the country we were born in, the important influences in our lives and the things that happened to us (socialisation). What everybody agrees upon is that who we are is a result of some combination of the two. Considering we more or less react to situations given our existing personality, the specific situation, and what we consider to be the best thing to do at the time, what do we control? Clearly, we have no say in either our genes nor our upbringing; even if we change our situation by moving out of home or going to the gym, we're only doing that because of the circumstances at the time, and so on.

When coupled with the philosophical concept of determinism (the concept that everything that happens is the direct and only result of what has come before) you get Hard Determinism. This is the position I subscribe to. I believe that everything that happens has a direct and specific cause (when I roll a dice and it lands on a 6, it does so because I threw the dice in a certain way from a certain height and starting point; and, if I did the exact same thing again in the exact same conditions, I'd get the same result) and I don't believe we have any real control over our own actions or what happens to us.

Of course, some see this as a rather depressing conclusion. If everything that will happen to us in the future could be hypothetically predicted and we can't actually do anything other than what we were pre-programmed (so to speak) to do, doesn't it throw concepts like morality, personal responsibility and freedom of choice out the window? I think it does, but it's easy to understand why a lot of people would have a problem with that. Not only does it seem counterintuitive, it's kind of an unpleasant conclusion.

Because, as the Dilbert cartoon below demonstrates, the idea of free will seems incompatible with our understanding of neuroscience, some people argue that there is some other part of us that makes decisions; say, a soul, spirit or some other form of energy. This is metaphysical libertarianism (no relation to the political ideology) and it's what most religious people subscribe to (many religious people have a problem of their own when it comes to this subject, i.e. the paradox of how people can make free decisions if God is all-powerful and already knows exactly what you're going to do, but that's a matter for another time). This is the idea that we have some part of ourselves that possesses awareness of morality and the cosmos, and that it is this that prompts us to do good or evil things. While, for obvious reasons, there's no real way of proving scientifically whether or not a 'soul' exists, the problem is that science quite adequately explains the way we operate and the reason we do things already. In other words, if we do have a soul, it seems to have little relationship to anything in the real world. This kind of gets us back to square one.

What if the world is not predetermined, but simply arranged according to a series of random, chance occurrences? This is what quantum mechanics appears to show (but some still argue otherwise), and metaphysical libertarians point to this as a world in which free will can exist. Hard Indeterminism disputes this. As Australian philosopher John Smart eloquently put it:

[stui magpie]

Like the Dilbert cartoon, Scott Adams doesn't believe in free will. I read his blog, he refers to humans as 'Moist Robots' and has a theory that we are all part of a massive computer simulation created by a past race.

Apart from that, without reading your post I have no idea what the options in the poll mean

[pietillidie]

^Read his post then! He has tried to summarise the various positions succinctly for us.

I have some new ideas but I'll hold them until we get some comments going.

[HAL]

That's nice. I have a very high credit score.

[David]

[stui magpie]

The fact missing is that we can learn from experiences and change behaviour based on those learnings.

Product of upbringing? it doesn't stop there, you continue to learn and your behaviour changes accordingly.

Every decision you make (your free will at work) is just your brain, an organic computer, pulling in all the inputs of your experiences over years (not just your upbringing), facts you've read and every other fact you can imagine, and presenting ou with options and risls associated with those options.

Depending on your personality or mood at the time (also a product of brain chemistry) you will make a decision.

It's not a product of some remarkable thing like a soul, but the output of a number of variable inputs that can't be predetermined.

[David]

[stui magpie]

the decision is at a point in time, made dependant on all the past experiences, and current brain chemistry/mood.

that is not predetermined, that is the result of an infinite number of variables.

You can predict behaviour to a high degree but not 100%, those last few percentiles are the "free will" component.

Have you ever done something completely out of character on the spur of the moment while sober?

[Skids]

[David]

[stui magpie]

^

I can, but I'm asking you.

[David]

Lol, ok. Do you mean something spontaneous, or pre-planned? And is there really such thing as 'out of character'? Doesn't that just mean 'slightly unusual'?

Lets say I walk home the same way every night, but then one day decided to go a different direction. Is that an example of free will, or is it just symptomatic of a quality I have of liking to occasionally break routine? Or were you thinking of something else?

I wager that you can give me any example of human behaviour and I can give a possible explanation of why it was done and why it was the only thing that could have been done in those circumstances. I think.

(Of course, it's better if you come up with an example, otherwise it looks like I'm cheating... )

[Tannin]

I take it the football has finished then? And maybe the cricket hasn't started?

[Nick - Pie Man]

I remember when I used to pontificate about things.

[David]