That's what comes up when Sam or Robert Sapolsky talk about the impacts that this should in theory have on the criminal justice system. You also have what Gabor Mate and Johan Hari would say about addiction and socio-economic structures (it's what often can happen, for example, when someone has been eating too much of what's been - to other people - free externalities and it shows no sign of stopping).[/quote]popeye1945 wrote: ↑July 31st, 2021, 1:06 am If you think about it, the belief in free will is a simplistic means of judgement and condemnation.
Someone else here had the tidy phrase 'sufficient causation', full accounting of causes seems to generate results.popeye1945 wrote: ↑July 31st, 2021, 1:06 amTo my way of thinking the realization of the lack of free will allows for concerns for context present and history of both context and subject, and it alines with being of the earth and not just thrown into it.
I think where people do get this confused and make a mess is assume that human beings are super-shallow automata, that their environments will make them whatever one might expect to be the path of least resistance, etc., when really we're almost - proportionally speaking - like black holes of integrated information and it's part of why suffering might make some people saints and other people worse than they already were, or people could assume that someone would become a serial killer based on having certain persistent things happen to them - I just hope we avoid, as a culture, taking the sloppy/lazy 'Shoot him - if he isn't evil yet he will be by the time we're done with him' approach.[/quote]
Yeah, that's the abuse of the concept.popeye1945 wrote: ↑July 31st, 2021, 1:06 amThe lack of depth and complexity is just that free will belief. What you see is what you get is the belief in free will. Never the less it is something to ponder this new approach and the waters are yet a little muddy for myself at least.
I do worry that we'd weaponize determinism against people (mentioned at the end of my last paragraph above) just as much as we weaponize free will, ie. we're apes, we like to win zero-sum games, and we like smashing 'others', so any cudgel we can use to oppress, dominate, etc. someone whose not like us will do. The trick is just making sure we have real adults mediating the dialog - without that we'll just be giving the Darwinian witch-burning /Girardian scapegoating mobs a different justification to destroy whoever they wanted to destroy anyway.