My Thoughts on Free Will

[ak666]

I don't believe in free will. This raises a lot of questions from people about how I could possibly maintain such a view. This article isn't intended to convert anyone to my stance, but simply to answer many of the questions I've received.

And yes, I believe I was helpless but to write this MyTake article. If we could loop my entire my life up to this point, given the exact same history, memories, life experiences, brain, body, etc, my prediction is that I would write this article again and again and again.

Free Will

So what do I mean by "free will"? That's also a recurring question. This is basically what I mean:

The ability to arbitrarily choose between good and evil.

By arbitrarily, that means unconstrained by any factors. It means if someone is good or evil, there are no relevant variables that caused them to make this arbitrary choice.

If someone commits evil, no factors caused them to do so except their own free will. The only variable that matters here is their own free will. They made this totally free, unconstrained choice to commit evil.

We cannot point to their upbringing, brain disorders, socioeconomic status, political or religious beliefs, psychological state, their intoxication levels, etc. With a free will mindset, none of these variables are relevant if the person commits an evil act. The only variable that matters in the free will scenario is that they chose, independent of all such variables, to be evil.

I reject this belief wholeheartedly. I believe these types of variables are not only relevant, but crucial. I think a person's choices are absolutely constrained by their nature and nurture,. I believe that to the point of being a determinist who believes that there was only one possible outcome when we take the sum of all of these variables.

Homosexuality

I'm a heterosexual, but one of the main issues that set me on the journey to abandon any notion of free will was homosexuality.

I was in a part of the United States at a time when there was this prominent Baptist church in our community. The members of the church were protesting against homosexuality.

When I encountered them, they were encouraging kids to avoid Disney products like the plague. They thought that Disney was a very evil company for hiring homosexuals and tried to convince me that it was my duty to join in boycotting them.

The group told me that homosexuals were demonic followers of Satan who chose to act against God. They weren't quite as spiteful in their message as the photo above of the child. They spoke very gently towards me as a child, but it was still clearly driven by hatred.

At home that night, I tried to tell my mother that I don't hate gays. I couldn't articulate myself very well at that early age, but something felt wrong to me about hating gays and thinking they deserved eternal damnation.

She actually became furious and started thinking I must be homosexual. In her mind, the only way I could come to the defense of homosexuals is if I was homosexual. I wasn't and just felt, given my limited childlike mind, that it was incredibly wrong.

It somehow felt wrong even though this put me at odds against my own family and even this entire community. My mother tried to punish me repeatedly to change my mind, but that only made me grow stronger in my convictions.

It didn't matter to me that this put me at odds with this entire community and my own family. I'm a mixed person so I was always considered kind of a foreigner anyway no matter where I went. Perhaps that's why I couldn't see things the way these people saw them in the first place.

This is still a contention I have with my mother who has a habit of posting anti-gay images and texts on social media. We've become more peaceful over the years, but she still despises homosexuals and I still think she's very wrong for doing it.

Hatred

Over the years as I grew towards a teenager, I started reflecting back on the beliefs of that community and of my own mother. I tried to figure out why they could hate homosexuals to the extent of even boycotting companies that provide them a livelihood.

It dawned on me that free will had a big part to do with it. The people against homosexuals were constantly emphasizing choice as their keyword: choice, choose, chosen, chose. The concept of "choice" came up repeatedly.

There were two premises and a conclusion as I saw it:

1. (Sin) Homosexuality is evil.
2. (Free will) Humans have the ability to arbitrarily choose between good and evil.
3. (Conclusion) Therefore, homosexuals must have arbitrarily chosen to be evil.

As a child I only questioned first premise about homosexuality being evil, since I still believed the second. Over time though, I started questioning the second one as well about free will.

I started wondering if I had any choice about my heterosexuality. I have no sexual attraction towards males whatsoever. If I can't choose any sexual orientation besides heterosexuality, why on earth should I assume that anyone else can?

It seemed to me that I was helpless but to be heterosexual, and the same should go for people of other sexual orientations. Whether it be due to hereditary factors or social conditioning or a combination of both, it seemed to me that there are actual variables involved here that cause people to develop a certain sexual orientation.

Sexual orientation didn't seem like the result of an unconstrained, arbitrary choice. This was my very first step towards abandoning the concept of free will.

Abandoning Free Will

When I started to believe that homosexuals are helpless to be anything other than who they are, and that there could actually be variables we can investigate that could potentially explain someone's sexual orientation, it got me wondering what else could lead people to becoming who they are.

I started wondering about criminals. Would there be recurring factors we can discover when we investigate criminals? Perhaps even criminals can't help but be who they are.

As I started investigating this, I actually discovered recurring factors. I found that the majority of the prison population often came from backgrounds of broken homes, poverty, childhood abuse and neglect, bullying, etc. Just the first factor alone is a recurring one that contributes to over 70% of the prison population.

When I started investigating notorious serial killers, I often found recurring patterns of childhood abuse, trauma, loss of loved ones at an early age, psychological disorders, sexual abuse, and sometimes even brain defects.

I failed to discover any trends with serial killers whose backgrounds and psychological states seemed even relatively ordinary. We ought to find many perfectly normal serial killers with unremarkable backgrounds if people could just arbitrarily become evil one day. Instead I found significant trends with extraordinary backgrounds revealing recurring patterns.

It began to dawn on me that if I had the identical body, brain, and upbringing of a serial killer, the most likely outcome is that I too would become a serial killer. Fortunately I don't possess the identical body, brain, and upbringing, but that seemed to be the most logical answer given my investigations.

The Illusion

At this point I had already abandoned free will. I began to believe that the perception of choice is merely an illusion of choice.

When I go to an ice cream shop, I'm presented with that illusion. It's a convincing illusion because I'm introspectively aware of my own processing. As my brain crunches data and branches between functions to arrive at a decision, I'm largely aware of this entire processing going on.

This makes me feel like I was able to make any choice and, furthermore, that I could have just as well arrived at a different decision given the exact same circumstances.

Yet I believe this perception of choice is merely an illusion and nothing more. I'm okay with that.

While this is only conjecture, take a group of scientists and engineers who gather all kinds of information about me ranging from my personal interests, psychology, brain patterns, favorite foods, etc. They then do the same for a wide number of individuals.

As a final set of inputs, they gather data about my daily experience and mood up to the point I enter the ice cream shop. Finally, they perform data mining algorithms on the gathered data such as K-means clustering with K being the number of ice cream flavors available in the shop.

I believe, in such a case, that my data would converge to establish a centroid and cluster which would accurately predict that I would have chosen vanilla ice cream as with all other individuals similar to me even though I wasn't even aware of it in advance.

While no one has conducted this precise experiment, there are data mining experiments along a similar vein which have produced fairly consistent results.

Companies like Amazon already apply such algorithms to suggest products you may like based on the data gathered about you, though they have very limited data with which to mine making the suggestions nowhere near as accurate as they could be if they had your entire psychological profile and childhood history.

For those who buy into personality types (for example, I'm ENFP), that's also based on data mining the answers to the survey to make predictions about your character.

All of these data mining techniques would fail to produce any consistent results and would be absolutely pointless if we could just walk into that analogical ice cream shop and arbitrarily choose a flavor.

All such methods in a similar vein are able to produce decent results because we can't help but choose and behave in a consistent fashion given all the relevant data.

Implications

So what are the implications of believing there is no free will? I stopped believing in free will in my early teenage years, but the implications of that took me many more years to fully register.

Hate the Crime, Not the Criminal

First, I found that I could even sympathize with a serial killer. After all, I genuinely believe I would have also become a serial killer if I shared the same body, brain, and upbringing. I couldn't hate them given these beliefs.

Of course I might find myself fueled by anger and hatred if they killed someone I loved, but even then a rational side of me failing to believe in free will would see that they couldn't help but be who they are. This leads to a "hate the sin, not the sinner" mindset.

This doesn't mean I believe in letting serial killers go free without consequences for their actions. We have to protect members of society, and if we allowed serial killers to run rampant, all of the people I care about would be in constant danger.

Remedial Action

Yet even though I believe in establishing consequences, I don't believe in punishing the serial killer for no logical reason. Anything we do with killers should revolve around remedial action with the hope of integrating them back into society as productive citizens. If that seems impossible given our current understanding of effective remedial techniques, then we might need to keep the killer away from the rest of society for good.

As a more hopeful example, take a thief. I don't believe a thief arbitrarily chooses to steal. I believe we can investigate his background and find patterns there in common with other known thieves.

Understanding these factors is useful not only to understand the thief's reasons for having stolen from someone else, but also in preventing society from creating more and more thieves in the future.

Such an investigation could help us understand the right type of childhood upbringing and education we should provide along with the most effective laws to further discourage such behavior.

With the thief, I don't believe in simply torturing him for the crime out of spite. I don't believe in cutting off his hand and crippling him as a member of society.

Again, as part of the investigative process, I believe we should try to find the most effective conditioning methods applied to known thieves that will condition them not to steal again. The goal is to take a counter-productive citizen and condition them towards becoming productive citizens, and hopefully without crippling them in the process.

Parenting and Education

Parenting and education are now the most crucial political topics to me for creating a productive society. They trump all other topics.

Since I don't believe in free will, I believe we actually have the full capability to completely shape how individuals turn out to be.

If we set our mind to it, I actually believe that we can produce cold-blooded killers who go on random shooting sprees. If we really wanted to do it, I believe we can refine an effective technique applied to children starting from an early age, conditioning them a certain way, and consistently produce effective killers who can massacre people without thinking twice. That, too, should be impossible if we had free will.

Yet I believe we should be going for the precise opposite. We should strive to raise productive citizens of conscience with values that prevent society from turning into a disarray of violence and chaos. Parenting and education make all the difference here as I see it.

Until I abandoned the concept of free will, I didn't think that parenting and education were so important. After all, with free will, I thought we could provide a child an upstanding upbringing and the individual could still turn into a thug who joins a gang and goes on random shooting sprees. I also thought we could abuse and neglect a child and the child could still choose to be an outstanding citizen. The data I found in criminology showed me otherwise.

Accountability

Accountability takes on a slight change in mindset when we lose the concept of free will. It might lead to questions like, "How can we consider ourselves accountable for something we only had the illusion of control over?"

From my standpoint, accountability is just a useful value to promote as a self-conditioning tool to help people recondition themselves against behaviors that yield undesirable outcomes.

People who value it are able to make self-corrections to avoid undesirable behavior. They gain more "control" over themselves (relatively-speaking absent of free will), and learn from their mistakes more quickly. Those who lack it may never learn from their mistakes.

I believe this is why human societies, simulated over great periods of time, often came to favor accountability as a useful quality. Those who had it could learn more quickly and avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over. It's a tool to speed up learning.

Control

When we believe in free will, we have no control as a society to mitigate crime or evil. After all, people have the ability to arbitrarily choose evil no matter what we do under such a belief.

The individual gains powers to arbitrarily do anything under such a belief independent of anything, but society loses any power or hope of mitigating evil.

When we don't believe in free will, we transfer the power back to society. We can actually believe that good parenting will produce great citizens, for example.

Conclusion

This only touches the surface of my views on free will, but I hope it has answered some of the existing questions I've received. Again my point is not to convert others towards my views. It just became clear to me that I should attempt to justify my own.

[RedHood7]

Very well-thought out, but I largely disagree.

Free will doesn't mean you get to choose everything about you, and it certainly doesn't mean that your will won't be affected by external factors. I think you're taking man-made dictionary definitions too seriously. Free will means that you have a wide range of choices you can make. Accountability means you will be judged by those choices and be responsible for their consequences. Period.

With the serial killers, unless mentally ill, they had every opportunity to choose a different path, but they didn't. They chose to be guided by emotions, maybe urges, maybe traumas, but not by any rational moral sense. That much is a choice they can make, so unless a mental illness severely impairs their decision-making, they are guilty of every choice they made, and every crime falls under that category. So your 'hate the crime, not the criminal' speech doesn't affect me at all...

Yes, parenting shapes you. But you still have a choice. Any and all choices you make are still your own responsibility. You can reform yourself, not at your core, but on every other level. If you dont change, that's still your choice not to change.

On the control aspect of your MyTake, yes, everyone can choose what they will do. We DONT have control over crime, and we never will, because all you can do is not commit crimes and hope others will do the same. A human hive mind isn't a thing. So yes, will is chaotic by nature, and that is part of why it is so important.

[ak666]

There are several camps in this vein from free will to compatibilism to determinism, and "soft" and "hard" variants of each. Whichever one of these camps we fall into, "choice" still has some meaning.

If we see the vast array of variables influencing an individual as "guiding" his behavior instead of "causing" it, that's enough. But we need at least that to legitimize any kind of scientific query into human behavior, from psychology to criminology to social sciences to data mining information provided about individuals and trying to come up with conclusions about products they may like or what type of personality profile they might have.

All of this must rest of the assumption that variables, at the very least, constrain human choices, even if we don't go all the way to the hard determinist stance I adopt and assume they constrain it to only possible choice.

[ak666]

It's very difficult to prove or disprove the idea that human behavior is entirely deterministic, that given X, we can expect only Y. It's just what makes the most sense to me.

But let's take the hypothetical ice cream experiment. Let's say we could gather just about every single relevant variable that could influence an ice cream choice and data mine this massive array of variables. Let's say this is a futuristic scenario where we could gather just about every single possible bit of data that could possibly affect this choice.

And it can't predict with 100% accuracy what choice I'd make. It might predict vanilla and I might choose butterscotch. That'd be a problem, at least for a hard determinist like me.

But let's say it can predict with 100% accuracy what choice I'd make if it came up with *two* possibly choices: either vanilla or butterscotch. That already constrains the possible choices enough to legitimize the science of predicting human behavior [...]

[ak666]

[...] It would completely exclude chocolate as a possible choice, strawberry, rocky road, etc. etc. etc.

That would destroy the idea of human behavior being deterministic, but would still, through the exclusion of so many choices and constraining them to a very narrow range of possible choices, still legitimize this idea that we can largely predict human behavior (though not boiling down the result to a single possible outcome).

I'm very open to that kind of idea and some might call that some relative sense of "free will" or just indeterministic behavior.

[RedHood7]

Interesting concept. At the core, we only disagree at how much we are defined by external factors. But I gotta say, Im particularly weary of the modern trend of blaming society for one's failure. Because we create a never-dying 'boogeyman' to be fought and thus, we push an agenda. Plus, people will lose sight of personal fault and responsibility. So, presuming you're 100% right, should we tell the population the truth? I'd love to hear your perspective on this.

[ak666]

I think it's helpful actually, but you might think it leads to a radically liberal form of thought where we want to intervene in society and utilize government as much as possible to try to fix society in a heavy-handed way. I'm against that, perhaps surprisingly, in spite of being a determinist because I've never found such policies to actually help eliminate inequities. They often restrict freedom without addressing inequities and, in some cases, actually seem to increase inequities. So this kind of heavy-handed way of trying to set society straight doesn't work as I see it.

[ak666]

>> But I gotta say, Im particularly weary of the modern trend of blaming society for one's failure

And I wholeheartedly agree with this in spite of my thoughts, because this type of victimhood mentality doesn't lead to a type of social conditioning that motivates people to actually rise above any obstacles life throws their way.

If anything, being a determinist, I actually think we have to eradicate this victim mindset and coddling of people first and foremost, since it tends to seal their fate as a victim.

[RedHood7]

On that level we agree 100%. I struggled for years with a victim mentality. I've been taking the opposite path for just over 3 years. It severely impairs confidence and willpower. The next generation will never succeed in that kind of mentality and Im glad the world is starting to turn away from this.

[ladsin]

I largely agree with you. As a materialist obviously we have no "free" will, but I do think we still have some choice of agency. Yes I'm truth everything is mechanistic, but we have a billion plus neurons with over a billion plus synapses that I find it hard to say that we have no choice, even if it's something as simple as what flavor ice-cream I'm going to eat that day.

I also disagree about the punishment, because while yes I agree that in many cases there is an underlying factor to crime that justice and societal health necessitate punishment for law breaking. For instance, if someone murders another person but is released, not only would people be in an uproar, but it would also be unjust.

But anyway, I think I've once heard it said "it looks like we don't have free will, but society sure works better when we think we do."

[ak666]

>> For instance, if someone murders another person but is released, not only would people be in an uproar, but it would also be unjust.

Imagine a hypothetical case where we had a magical device that could guarantee, with 100% certainty, and without harming the killer, that he would never kill again.

In that case I think we have to use it and release him, knowing for certain that he will never kill again. I think we'll have to just learn to avoid those grudges.

it's a tough one and we're nowhere close to that. I think most of the time when you have a serial killer, the best thing to do is put them away for good, since I don't see any decent probability of any remedial technique actually turning them into productive citizens of society with anything close to a guarantee of success...

But hypothetically if we had it, I think we have to change our mindset and realize the reconditioned former killer is now guaranteed not repeat his violent misbehavior from the past.

[ak666]

That said, I actually believe the opposite of that last quote. When we believe in free will, it doesn't motivate us to investigate why evil happens. We just end up thinking some people are evil, maybe hate them, kill them or lock them away, and move on.

Only by rejecting the notion do we get an investigative mindset: "What factors caused this person to kill people? How can we prevent this from happening again and again in the future? What sort of upbringing and education should we provide to minimize the probability of killers being created?"

We only ask ourselves these questions if we assume a deterministic mindset.

[ak666]

If evil comes from a magical source independent of any variables we can determine as causes, so to speak, then that renders the individual capable of arbitrarily doing anything independent of their nature and nurture...

However, it renders society as a whole *powerless* and *helpless* when it comes to preventing and understanding and treating the source of evil.

[ladsin]

Imagine a hypothetical case where we had a magical device that could guarantee, with 100% certainty, and without harming the killer, that he would never kill again.

In that case I think we have to use it and release him, knowing for certain that he will never kill again. I think we'll have to just learn to avoid those grudges."
I disagree with you here. It doesn't matter if we could guarantee that he wouldn't kill again, it's not just, and I can't foresee a future where a family would be ok with that verdict.

[ak666]

Justice to me is another tricky concept. I don't really believe in it from a strict standpoint, like torturing a person because they tortured a person -- eye-for-an-eye, e. g. It's usually what the angry mobs want but it's driven by blood-lust and vengeance.

If we have those angry, bloodthirsty mobs, then I think that's a variable to account for in what we do with the criminal... but at the same time I think that's another reason we have to also help condition society against that bloodlust.

[ak666]

One of the big reasons why we probably end up with bloodthirsty mobs who, say, want to cut off a thief's hand might very well because of the belief in free will. They're not stopping to investigate why he did it. They're just stopping at the thought, "He chose evil."

[ak666]

At the very least it had that effect on me. When I believed in free will, I would have been among the angry mobs:

"Burn him at the stake!"
"Torture her! Make her suffer as she made others suffer!"
"Cut off his balls!"
"Gouge his eyes out, cut off his hands, poke needles in his ears, make him feel the worst kind of pain imaginable for what he did!"

I had all those bloodthirsty thoughts originally when I discovered people who were found guilty of a heinous crime. It was rejecting free will that largely made me look at all those types of justice-oriented thoughts above and made me feel they were wrong and absolutely counter-productive.

[ladsin]

I have sort of a doctor heckle and mr Hyde thing going on. There's an interesting Origins Debate that you would probably find fascinating (I know I did) on YouTube you can watch called "Orogins Debate: Violence" or something to that effect (look it up on YouTube and you can't miss it) it's a panel discussion on where violence comes from and they talk about violence in other primates, violence in nomadic tribes, neural basis in murderers, and what trend our modern society seems to be taking about violence. It's fascinating and one of my idols (Stephen Pinker) heads the discussion.

But anyway, it may be a result of my baser instincts or lizard brain 😂 I just think that justice necessitates that we punish offenders even though they may not have really had a say in their actions. Now one may ask how can we rightfully punish someone for basically having a disease (well consider violence as a disease for this point) and my answer is basically that because they interfered with the

[ladsin]

The other person's right to autonomy that they must give up their own autonomy. now if the person wanted to be harmed it's a different situation entirely and I'm not certain what we should do in that scenario. But I'm much more in favor of preventative treatment (say fish oil in students lunches because it improves frontal lobe functioning and would lower a person's likelihood of commuting violence in the first place.) but anyway. Just my two cents

[ak666]

Prevention is the most ideal strategy as I see it and totally agreed there.

It is very, very difficult to shrug off grievances in the past even if the person who committed them in front of us is guaranteed to be a changed person who won't do the same things again.

I've gotten better at thinking this way and dismissing past grievances, but there's probably a practical limit. I think I can dismiss and forgive past grievances of a thief who stole my stuff, for example, if we spent time in the justice system and came back seeming like a perfectly productive citizen of society, unlike to resort to thievery ever again.

If someone killed a loved one of mine though, I doubt I could avoid holding a grudge... especially if I'm constantly missing that loved one who passed away. It'd be hard not to turn that sadness into anger and a desire for vengeance.

[ak666]

[...] if we [/he] spent time in the justice system and came back seeming like a perfectly productive citizen of society, unlike[ly] to resort to thievery ever again.

[ladsin]

Agreed that's why I mentioned violence rather than thievery. Because sure, the thief could pay you back (which would be the justice) but even if they couldn't it's not nearly as bad as if someone takes a life, no amount of penance is enough for restitution.

[ak666]

Prevention should be our best bet to avoiding such difficult scenarios in the first place. This subject got me thinking a bit about A Clockwork Orange. :-D

[BlueCoyote]

I very much agree. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote quite extensively about this topic and arrived at the same conclusion. There's a allegorical story he made up that I still find very illustrative: it is evening and a man is walking home from work (this is back in the 18th century). As he strolls through the empty streets of his town, he begins to think about the concept of free will. The man believes in free will and says to himself: "It is amazing how many possible choices I have, even right now, when I'm just walking home. I could go to a bar now, drink a lot and maybe find a pretty girl. I could also return back to my workplace and labor all through the night. I could climb on the church steeple and jump to my death. Or I could walk through the city gates, travel to a far-away land and never return home again." Just when the man finishes his train of thought, he arrives at the doorstep of his house. He smells something wonderful and looks through the window, where he sees his beloved wife preparing dinner for the two of them. For a moment, he hesitates. Then, he opens the door, steps in and decides that despite all the free choices, he will choose to stay with his sweet wife and simply have dinner with her.
Kant meant this story in a sarcastic way of course. The truth is that the man never had any other choice but to go home and continue his normal life. It was the only reasonable thing to do in that situation. While there were many free choices in a theoretical sense, the man was very much constrained by his life, his experiences, his character and all the other circumstances that that actually make him, him.

One time I watched a TV discussion about this topic. A contemporary philosopher was telling this story. When he was done, a young man (a philosophy student) suddenly jumped out of his seat, started running around the TV studio, screaming and acting like some kind of wild chicken. When he calmed down and took a seat again, he said to the philosophy professor: "What I just did proves that you're wrong. This was the most unreasonable and strange thing for me to do. Nobody would have expected me to act like this. Yet, I chose to do so because I have free will. The philosophy professor just smiled and said: "Actually, you were very much constrained. Had we not been sitting here, having this discussion and had I not recounted this story, you would have never come on the idea to do that." I thought that was a pretty great answer.

[Bandit74]

I agree about the everything probably being predetermined.

Like if you were to be reborn in a different universe with the same genetics to the same family, and all of human up to that point was the same then I think you and the rest of the world would end up following the same exact path. If all the variables are the same then the output will be the same.

Or in any scenario you do make a choice, but you end up making the choice that you were predetermined to make based on your emotional state, all accumulated knowledge, and what you perceive as your options at that given point in time. It appears random because you are not aware of all the factors that influence your choices, but it still plays out the way it was meant to based on all the variables at play during and prior to that moment in time.

The one area I disagree with you on is that you shouldn’t hate the sinner. Like if someone kills someone close to me, sure maybe I could rationalize that they were meant to do it and that it was part of their predetermined path bal bla bla… But I am still going to hate them and have a desire to gouge out their eyes, rip them limbs off and then light them on fire for good measure.
Just as they were predetermined to kill one of my loved ones, in that scenario I would also be predetermined to feel however it is I feel and if I feel intense hatred in that moment then that is how I was predetermined to feel.

Why should a killers predetermined urge to kill be accepted while the victim is supposed to suppress their predetermined urge for vengeance or justice?

[ak666]

>> The one area I disagree with you on is that you shouldn’t hate the sinner. Like if someone kills someone close to me, sure maybe I could rationalize that they were meant to do it and that it was part of their predetermined path bal bla bla… But I am still going to hate them and have a desire to gouge out their eyes, rip them limbs off and then light them on fire for good measure.

I'm with you there and if someone hurt my wife, for example, I might be unable to suppress my hatred and bitterness there. I think it'd take a saint not to do that in this scenario, and I'm no saint.

Main part is "should". Say the killer is released many years later and he appears, for all intensive purposes, to be a productive citizen. To make it a bit easier, say he killed someone you cared about by accident, like negligence behind the wheel.

He has now become a productive member of society. *Should* we get vengeance? Does it help anything in society?

[Bandit74]

Punishment acts as a deterrent for others and also trys to get some form of justice for the person who was harmed by the other persons actions.

If it was someone who accidentally killed a loved one I would be content with them serving time in jail and being released. I wouldn't ever be friends with them, but I could be fine with them being released.

However, if it was intentional, I would want them to really suffer. I could never be content knowing they purposely killed somone I loved and that they are allowed back on the streets and able to live a happy life.

[ak666]

I think I'd be the same, but even more so because the remedial system for killers doesn't even seem effective. If they get released again, there doesn't seem to be any decent probability that they're not going to turn back to crime. That unreliability tends to make me even more fueled in my convictions to be a vigilante, for example. We tend to step in where we think the law fails.

[Other_Tommy_Wiseau]

I don't think you understand the concept. It's not that we don't have free will to make our own decisions because of the way we're programmed, but god is doing the controlling. An omnipotent god has laid out every single action that has existed, is existing and will ever exist. And that all of our choices are predetermined. Thus, the question isn't "do we have free will?", but "if we do have free will, is there a point in believing in god so long as every action I do or don't do has no reflection on whether or not I get into heaven?" and "why will I be judged in front of god if he already knows everything I'll ever do and he's the 1 who put me in these situations, good or bad?". That's what the questions of free will are, with many others, not just whether or not it exists

[ak666]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSfXdNIolQA

[evenlift]

"And yes, I believe I was helpless but to write this MyTake article." No. Actually, if you don't have free will, you don't believe anything. A clock doesn't believe the time. It has just been programmed to show the time.

Free will is an axiom of knowledge. In other words, without free will, there is no knowledge.

[ak666]

Could you explain how that works?

[evenlift]

That's the simplest way that I can explain it.

[lord_chilled]

is it the westboro baptist church?
i heard about that from a fitness models page (lauren drain) who once was a part of it.
i think its a cult and a disgrace to christianity. fucking idiots...

and while i agree that some criminal, i. e serial killers didn have much of an alternate lifestyle,, or wer "made" that way, a hellot of criminals had a choice, no sympathy for them and fuck them. i dont completely agree with you

[ak666]

Not Westboro and not so famous. It was just a Baptist church in South Carolina. I forgot the exact name of it and they weren't quite as extreme with their protests and signs as Westboro.

[lord_chilled]

i see. i dont like that kind of activism from religious institutions.

[Doffydood]

One of the most interesting reads I've had here since... well, I got here. Good job!
www.smbc-comics.com/.../...2592-20170315%20(1).png
^reminded me of this :p

[ThisDudeHere]

Didn't you once say that nothing other than you yourself should be blamed when a wrong act is done?

[ak666]

Not quite like that, but I believe the only thing we can expect to to have some level of control over is ourselves.

For example, I used to have anger issues as a teenager. Back then I felt helpless against it, and technically by this free will view I had, I was. I blamed every time my temper fired up and I snapped at various things: "I insulted this person because something they said didn't sit with me right and I was having a bad day, etc. etc. etc." I just kept looking for reasons to justify my actions.

The problem with that, even from the standpoint lacking free will, is that this wasn't an effective way to condition myself to avoid doing this again and again repeatedly. It was only when I adopted the mindset, through repeated failures to control my temper, that I am totally liable for my actions that I started conditioning myself against it. After that I ceased to have anger management issues.

[ak666]

I needed to alter a variable to get over those issues, so to speak, and that alteration came from a realization that being totally accountable here is the only effective way for me to start conditioning myself again repeated misbehaviors.

I adopted that mindset only through failure, but often try to promote this concept to others in hopes that they don't have to learn this the hard way as I did. I'm hoping we can alter that variable in others, so to speak, without them repeating my overall experience.

It's all part of the conditioning process as I see it. Conditioning becomes a keyword dictating just about everything -- remedial action.

[ak666]

In the exceptional case you mentioned where you got drugged against your will and misbehaved as a result, that's one of the very exceptional cases since there is no point in conditioning/remedial action there. There's nothing to suggest you would repeatedly misbehave short of someone drugging you against your will repeatedly, and that shouldn't be happening in the first place.

[Deathraider]

Free will is an illusion, but the universe isn't determined. Also I'm an INTJ.

[ak666]

Even if it's an indeterministic model, everything we operate on is based on the notion of causation with respect to human behavior. Otherwise there wouldn't be a point behind, say, behavioral economics, psychology, criminology, etc.

[Deathraider]

We don't have free will, we cannot choose. But quantum mechanic leaves the future undetermined.

[ak666]

Quantum mechanics is tricky and it's really not a subject I'm well-versed in. I tend to think the indeterministic nature of Schrodinger's equation is more an aspect of limited observation and unknown factors. For example, we might describe a coin toss in terms of probability simply because the variables determining the outcome are too complex to measure. With QM, I think some of the variables are impossible to measure and observe. It's an interpretation but I still find it difficult to grasp anything except a deterministic model there.

[ak666]

Or maybe my whole idea of time is overly simplistic and flawed. QM gives me a headache. My brain lacks the capacity to really comprehend it. :-D

[Nightinggale]

Wow. Very very good myTake, ak666. A wonderful read.

[Dingsbums]

Can't disagree

[COCOCHANEL]

i'm infp

[lord_chilled]

just took the test,,, me too. apparently were 4 percent of the population

[Anonymous]

great