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By what grounds could you call it "nonsensical", since by your thesis I was required to make the statement because I have no free will. Nonsensicality, crimina

By what grounds could you call it "nonsensical", since by your thesis I was required to make the statement because I have no free will. Nonsensicality, criminality, judgment, quality, all go out the window if we are all just puppets on strings.

vidarh 3y ago
That you had no choice does not affect whether or not a statement is nonsensical. You seem to assume that a lot of judgements we make of actions require that the actions have been made "freely". But we judge things that we all agree does not have free will behind them all the time. E.g. we judge the weather. > Nonsensicality, criminality, judgment, quality, all go out the window if we are all just puppets on strings. None of them go out the window. The morality of how we approach some of them are affected. E.g. I do strongly believe that any judgement of peoples actions morally should account for their lack of ability to act otherwise, and that this e.g. makes punishments or reactions based out of a desire for vengeance entirely immoral, and that punishment in general should be based on an assessment of how to minimise the harm to society as a whole - and that includes taking into account harm to the person you're punishing, but that does not remove the need for judging criminals because criminals still affect society irrespective of how they make their decisions. It does mean that from my point of view a punishment is only justified if you can show that the harm from imprisoning someone sufficiently mitigates risks of harms to society that sufficiently outweigh the harm we do to the person we imprison, and that would certainly affect how you deal with those you imprison, and when you use prison sentences, but it would not end imprisonment. And we are just puppets on a string. I feel comfortable making that statement firmly, because nobody has ever even come up with as much of a definition of "free will" that isn't compatibilist (that is, an illusion over predetermination, though many compatibilists would get irate at me describing it as an illusion) or otherwise does not in any meaningful way make actions "free", much less posited any remotely testable hypothesis for what such "free" decisions even would be that would let our minds influence them without any cause and affect that isn't some mix of deterministic and randomness that we have no meaningful influence over. The burden is on those who believe in free will to, for starters, define it in a logically coherent way other than just arguing in the negative by insisting we're somehow different from all other matter and energy we've observed.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  > E.g. we judge the weather. If you can give me an example of someone putting "the weather" in jail or forcing it to pay a fine, please do so. > criminals still affect society irrespective of how they make their decisions. That's entirely not the point. If the criminals have no free will, punishing them has no effect whatsoever on society. They had no choice but to commit their crimes, and they will have no choice as to whether or not to commit future crimes, regardless of what punishment is given to them.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    > If you can give me an example of someone putting "the weather" in jail or forcing it to pay a fine, please do so. Irrelevant. We don't put every human we judge in jail or make them pay a fine, or indeed have them put in front of a court either. Most of the time we either just glare at them or tell them off or otherwise express our disapproval. > That's entirely not the point. If the criminals have no free will, punishing them has no effect whatsoever on society. They had no choice but to commit their crimes, and they will have no choice as to whether or not to commit future crimes, regardless of what punishment is given to them. This is blatantly absurd. What you are arguing here is effectively that a different input applied to a deterministic process can't affect the future output of that deterministic process. You can disprove that by flicking a light switch and observing that the light comes on. The light has no free will, and the process is deterministic, and yet the output is different when you apply a different input. In a fully deterministic universe, you were always going to flick that light switch, and so seeing it as a "change" is a point of view not an actual argument for agency. But when you do the light did not have a choice to remain off. With an entity - like a human - with more state, the relationship is not always remotely as predictable, but the notion that changing an input can't produce a different output than would have been produced if the input hadn't been changed given a deterministic universe is equally absurd. [If we add space for actual randomness as one of the inputs or state, we may not be able to say it was "always what was going to happen" but we would be able to say it'd always be what was going to happen given the same set of randomness (and randomness does still not help with the free will argument, so that distinction is not particularly relevant to this subject)]

vidarh 3y ago

That you had no choice does not affect whether or not a statement is nonsensical. You seem to assume that a lot of judgements we make of actions require that the actions have been made "freely". But we judge things that we all agree does not have free will behind them all the time. E.g. we judge the weather. > Nonsensicality, criminality, judgment, quality, all go out the window if we are all just puppets on strings. None of them go out the window. The morality of how we approach some of them are affected. E.g. I do strongly believe that any judgement of peoples actions morally should account for their lack of ability to act otherwise, and that this e.g. makes punishments or reactions based out of a desire for vengeance entirely immoral, and that punishment in general should be based on an assessment of how to minimise the harm to society as a whole - and that includes taking into account harm to the person you're punishing, but that does not remove the need for judging criminals because criminals still affect society irrespective of how they make their decisions. It does mean that from my point of view a punishment is only justified if you can show that the harm from imprisoning someone sufficiently mitigates risks of harms to society that sufficiently outweigh the harm we do to the person we imprison, and that would certainly affect how you deal with those you imprison, and when you use prison sentences, but it would not end imprisonment. And we are just puppets on a string. I feel comfortable making that statement firmly, because nobody has ever even come up with as much of a definition of "free will" that isn't compatibilist (that is, an illusion over predetermination, though many compatibilists would get irate at me describing it as an illusion) or otherwise does not in any meaningful way make actions "free", much less posited any remotely testable hypothesis for what such "free" decisions even would be that would let our minds influence them without any cause and affect that isn't some mix of deterministic and randomness that we have no meaningful influence over. The burden is on those who believe in free will to, for starters, define it in a logically coherent way other than just arguing in the negative by insisting we're somehow different from all other matter and energy we've observed.

Turing_Machine 3y ago
> E.g. we judge the weather. If you can give me an example of someone putting "the weather" in jail or forcing it to pay a fine, please do so. > criminals still affect society irrespective of how they make their decisions. That's entirely not the point. If the criminals have no free will, punishing them has no effect whatsoever on society. They had no choice but to commit their crimes, and they will have no choice as to whether or not to commit future crimes, regardless of what punishment is given to them.
- vidarh 3y ago
  > If you can give me an example of someone putting "the weather" in jail or forcing it to pay a fine, please do so. Irrelevant. We don't put every human we judge in jail or make them pay a fine, or indeed have them put in front of a court either. Most of the time we either just glare at them or tell them off or otherwise express our disapproval. > That's entirely not the point. If the criminals have no free will, punishing them has no effect whatsoever on society. They had no choice but to commit their crimes, and they will have no choice as to whether or not to commit future crimes, regardless of what punishment is given to them. This is blatantly absurd. What you are arguing here is effectively that a different input applied to a deterministic process can't affect the future output of that deterministic process. You can disprove that by flicking a light switch and observing that the light comes on. The light has no free will, and the process is deterministic, and yet the output is different when you apply a different input. In a fully deterministic universe, you were always going to flick that light switch, and so seeing it as a "change" is a point of view not an actual argument for agency. But when you do the light did not have a choice to remain off. With an entity - like a human - with more state, the relationship is not always remotely as predictable, but the notion that changing an input can't produce a different output than would have been produced if the input hadn't been changed given a deterministic universe is equally absurd. [If we add space for actual randomness as one of the inputs or state, we may not be able to say it was "always what was going to happen" but we would be able to say it'd always be what was going to happen given the same set of randomness (and randomness does still not help with the free will argument, so that distinction is not particularly relevant to this subject)]