Skeptic
The concept of free will is profoundly important to our self-understanding, our interpersonal relationships, and our moral and legal practices. If it turns out that no one is ever free and morally responsible, what would that mean for society, morality, meaning, and the law? Just Deserts introduces the concepts central to the debate about free will and moral responsibility by way of an entertaining, rigorous, and sometimes heated philosophical dialogue between two leading thinkers.
SUPPORT THE PODCAST
If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a donation. Your patronage will ensure that sound scientific viewpoints are heard around the world.
https://www.skeptic.com/donate/
SPONSOR
The Great Courses Plus
https://thegreatcoursesplus.com/shermer
#michaelshermer
#skeptic
Listen to The Michael Shermer Show via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn.
https://www.skeptic.com/michael-shermer-show/
Source
Gregg Caruso would be an absolutely horrible Prof to have, as he is so arrogant and fundamentalist in his beliefs, that if you did not conform to his beliefs, he would punish you with bad grades. It seems like a put-on he is doing, to give himself a career niche.
Moral consequentialism to influence future determinism? Sacrifice the currently ignorant to influence future violators of moral norms? What about rehabilitation? What about shifting moral norms? Agree with me if you disagree. Then you have free will! Disagree with me if you think im right. Then YOU have free will! I suspect you will think what you think. Once you think what you think only further information will shift your opinion. I was a dennet fanboy. Now im thinking again…
this guy constantly dragging Trump really takes away from his arguments. it gets old fast. talking about how he's committed crimes? really? with a Biden in the white house? and you're accusing some other guy of 'crimes,' based on what? bc he contested an election? any idea how many times both sides have done that throughout history? such an npc level of understanding here.
What would a population of 8 billion people profit from the non existence of free will? WHO profits from that discussion, are those who speculate, debate, and wright books about it. Those debate the existence of non existence of free will are also atheists, who follow Lenin’s teachings. Lenin said: Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.
A nonsense repeated by, say 300,000 self-enlightened intellectuals, reiterated by their acolytes from the media, still remains a nonsense. So…
Here are the points made by each participant and my evaluation of them:
– Daniel Dennett:
– He defends compatibilism, the view that free will and determinism are compatible.
– He argues that free will is a natural phenomenon that evolved in humans and other animals, and that it is not a metaphysical mystery or a gift from God.
– He defines free will as the ability to act according to one's reasons and values, without being coerced or manipulated by external forces.
– He claims that we are morally responsible for our actions, as long as we have the capacity to reflect on our motives and control our impulses.
– He supports a consequentialist approach to legal punishment, which aims to deter crime, rehabilitate offenders, and protect society, rather than to exact retribution or desert.
– He criticizes free will skepticism as a self-defeating and dangerous position, that undermines our sense of agency, dignity, and moral obligation.
– He challenges the arguments of Caruso based on empirical evidence, logical consistency, and practical implications.
– **Evaluation**: Dennett presents a coherent and plausible account of free will, that is consistent with naturalism, science, and common sense. He also raises some valid objections to free will skepticism, and defends the value and importance of free will for human life and society. However, he may be accused of watering down the concept of free will, by ignoring the role of luck and randomness in human behavior, and by dismissing the intuitive notion of alternative possibilities or could-have-done-otherwise.
– Gregg Caruso:
– He advocates free will skepticism, the view that free will and moral responsibility are illusions.
– He argues that free will is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism, and that there is no evidence for the existence of free will in the natural world.
– He defines free will as the ability to act otherwise in the same circumstances, and to be the ultimate source or originator of one's actions.
– He denies that we are morally responsible for our actions, as they are ultimately the result of factors beyond our control, such as genes, environment, and luck.
– He supports a public health-quarantine model of legal punishment, which aims to prevent harm, treat offenders, and restore justice, rather than to assign blame or desert.
– He argues that free will skepticism is a liberating and beneficial position, that fosters compassion, empathy, and social justice.
– He defends the arguments of free will skepticism based on empirical evidence, logical consistency, and practical implications.
– **Evaluation**: Caruso presents a radical and challenging account of free will, that is consistent with naturalism, science, and logic. He also offers some compelling arguments for free will skepticism, and proposes an alternative and humane model of legal punishment. However, he may be accused of ignoring the psychological and social reality of free will, by dismissing the role of reasons and values in human behavior, and by undermining the sense of agency, dignity, and moral obligation.
Source: Conversation with Bing, 10/2/2023
One thing to always remember, is that it's all included.
You aren't allowed to cut any scenes out of this ultimate Movie.
Also praise for good behavior and some sort of punishment or correction for bad behavior, is also all included and very much important in this deterministic path we are on, and in.
To Dan: Maya could not have "controlled" otherwise.
Controllers don't cause events.
Controllers are constraints that are placed on a system that shape the probability of what kind of events can occur.
Constraints limit the possible states a system can encounter; a semipermeable membrane controls the probability that certain intracellular catalytic events will occur.
Dan treats "control" like it's the proximate source of an action at the end a causal chain. Event A happens leading to Event B, then just add a pinch of "control" and.. presto! We get an Event C that is worthy of praise or blame.
Controls don't cause events, they shape the probability that particular events will occur.
What does any of this have to do with attributing praise or blame to an individal? Praise and blame is a useful fiction for social cohesion / cooperation. Isn't it a category error to then go looking under the hood of the organism for "blame-worthy / praise-worthy stuff"?
Greg makes inyeresting points, but overall I think Dan won this one. I don't think we can ever have a system of law with no concept of agency, weather or not we have "free" will, which we obviously don't have is irrelevant. We clearly have a will of some kind, and we call good people good for their good actions and intentions and vise versa, NOT because of some absolute causality in which they "could" have been otherwise.
Free will is an illusion and here is the argumentation:
From the lense of neuroscience:
Marcus Du Sautoy (Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and the Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science) participates in an experiment conducted by John-Dylan Haynes (Professor at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin) that attempts to find the neurological basis for decision making.
Short summary:
The experiment explores the relationship between free will, decision-making, and brain activity. Marcus Du Sautoy participates in an experiment in Berlin where they have to randomly decide to press either a left or right button. Brain scans and computer records track when the decision is made in the brain and when the button is physically pressed.
The results reveal that up to six seconds before the narrator consciously makes a decision, their brain has already made that choice. Specific patterns of brain activity can even predict which button will be pressed. This finding challenges the notion of free will, suggesting that unconscious brain activity significantly shapes our decisions before we become consciously aware of them.
The experiment also delves into the nature of consciousness. It argues against dualism—the idea that the mind and brain are separate entities. Instead, it posits that consciousness is an aspect of brain activity. The unconscious brain activity is in harmony with a person's beliefs and desires, so it's not forcing you to do something against your will.
Marcus Du Sautoy the results shocking, especially the idea that someone else can predict their decision six seconds before they are consciously aware of making it. The experiment raises profound questions about the nature of free will, consciousness, and the deterministic mechanisms that may govern our decisions.
From the lense of pysics:
In order to question the belief in free will, one can conduct experiments and contemplations. Take an action you are convinced you performed and reverse-engineer it until you realize you had no control over it. This leads to the conclusion that all actions in life are the same, and the notion of claiming ownership falls away, so free will is non-existent.
By 'reverse-engineering an action,' I mean tracing back the steps that led you to make a specific decision. Upon close examination, you'll find that your choice was influenced by a series of past events and conditions over which you had no control, and that your choice didn't originate from a single point. This realization may prompt you to reconsider how much 'free will' you actually possess, as your actions are shaped by factors beyond your control, both in the past and likely in the future as well.
So you can summarize everything is a happening according to cosmic laws.
Here from Robert Sapolsky’s book. This debate was referenced in a footnote.
Dan: We need retributive justice because it's an effective tool to keep people obeying the law.
Gregg: People aren't ultimately responsible for their actions and so retributive justice isn't rational in principal regardless of it's practical use. Besides, there are other tools at our disposal that are effective at incentivizing people to obey the law.
Dan: RESPECT THE LAW!!!!
Secular Santa is wrong here. Respect for the law doesn't mean anything. Either people are sufficiently incentivized to obey the law or they're not.
Regarding the problems with the belief in the fallacy of free will, why is there so much emphasis and talk about the judicial-system rather then the insane injustice that the whole socio-economical construct is maintaining, where luck and luck only has one human born a "crack baby" and another with a spoon of gold, where society makes negligible effort to shift the track each baby is going down.
Isnt this seventyfold more crucial? and also preventative to potential judicial-system encounters.
Cuz regarding the judicial system, after acknowledging that no free will makes the immorality of the death penalty more immoral. (most "western" countries don't have a death penalty)
Practically speaking, i think currently the system is so fudged up that rehabilitation is not even a viable option. Firstly, the convict has to agree and want to be rehabilitated and cooperate and i've heard much of the time that's not the case, also a lack of resources for rehabilitation, and i think many convicts might be at psycopathic stages. so sadly the jails defacto are "the quarantine model".
And which i think points us back to the need to emphasize the more crucial social- economical damage to our society.
Dunncett has got to be the single most obtuse failure in all of philosophy. What an utter embarrassment. Taking the opposite stance to everything he spouts is practically a sure way to attain a rational worldview.
This halfwit shouldn't have a platform anywhere — talk about moral responsibility.
39:23 White collar crimes are also physical crimes. If you think that stealing money and dignity from people doesn't have physical effects you must think you're not responsible for all the downstream effects of your actions. White collar criminals also harm others physically. Punching someone in the nose is not the only way to harm someone physically.
Input – Output.
What virtue signaling! 'I can't imagine doing violence.' Nonsense. We watch movies. We have dreams. We have fantasies. We just don't act on them.
So are they both Behaviorists? Input from environment – output from our brain?
Thought experiment land? Better than thinking you have control over your thoughts, ideas or beliefs which all effect your actions.
How can Dan say the self is an illusion, but you have the ability to choose. Who is choosing???
Society is responsible for the corruption of the cycling industry, but not personal decision making? How does that work?
Free will on an absolute metaphysical level is not real. But speaking on an experiential level, since we are within the same cognitive illusions as everyone else, the concept of free will may be operationally essential in many social dimensions: if we wish to have a coherent system of rewards and punishments versus a social order that would strike us as highly arbitrary. If AI can one day perfectly predict (and perhaps direct) individual behavior in key domains, we may wish to alter our legal assumptions of rational agency/free volition so that systems and not just individuals are held responsible for behavioral outcomes. All we will ever get, however, are probabilities — at birth: 93% probability that Jane Doe will score between 1380 and 1415 on the SAT in 16 years. The way we consign and allot the benefits in our systems to favor these Satanic likelihoods, throwing out the age old "everyone has a chance" based on old fashioned notions of free will, will paint our future orders graceful or grim. Nonetheless, our social expediencies and psychological desires do not make free will real.
Can’t wait for Sapolsky and dennet debate… I think Sapolsky can explain much better what Greg is trying to say
Introduction:
Our neighbors couldn’t have done otherwise (of their own accord) because we are all subject to logic and to the idea of time and to the logical dichotomy that: every 'event' must be either: caused- or- not.
When an 'idea' is already internally logically incoherent (like the idea of a 'square-circle'), then there's no need to search for it in the physical world.
As conscious beings we obviously can’t obtain “absolute knowledge” but this subject holds the same standard for knowledge we use for any & all other urgent moral practical issues. If someone is saving a life or entering data into excel for a cure for cancer, no one stops just to argue that '7=7 isn't absolute knowledge.'
******
Any idea of 'a cause' is also an idea in terms of an 'event', because the ‘idea’ of any 'cause' takes 'time'.
Everything here is in terms of 'events'; a process.
There’s no static, unmoving, beyond-time 'self' that creats the events within the universe. the 'self' is also a process.
And our neighbors don’t have the ability to manifest a “first cause”; The fabric of our world is woven via the idea of causality.
An idea of an indeterministic event can only either be one of the following:
1. via an idea of true randomness
2. via an idea of some specific real-probability.
3. only seems indeterministic to us due to lack of potential human knowledge, and so really via the idea of determinism/causality.
this is a logical trichotomy of ideas.
And none of these logical-options give any of our neighbors the ability of CHDO (Could Have Done Otherwise) of their own accord.
The Main Point:
Both Compatibilists like Dennett and Incompatibilists like Sapolsky agree that everything is determined (with or without acausal events – this is not of importance)
And they both want to make the world a more just place regarding social circumstances and equal opportunity for children.
But for doing so its critical to specifically teach that our neighbors could not have done otherwise. Not being clear on this or understanding that its actual knowledge of the only epistemological standard that humanity has, is hindering us.
For example, it’s already difficult enough to help the greatly suffering as they are also naturally irritable and difficult, so in order to much better succeed one needs to be fully grounded by the knowledge that at every moment this neighbor could not be doing otherwise.
Or if a police officer needs to arrest a violent person who's hitting them and spitting on them, the officer needs to really understand the logic behind "can not be doing otherwise"
When we don't teach it thoroughly, we get a world that’s on emotional steroids, instead of us being grounded by our rational and its efficient forward looking consequential method.
This knowledge needs to be grounded and firm, otherwise in challenging situations when we witness an immoral act being committed we will continue, as throughout history to be inefficiently swept by our emotions and by our baboon-like instincts to achieve the immediate relief of our distress by venting via violence that at times is even towards people that are just “passing by”.
Professor Sapolsky has found and researched this behavior in baboons in the wild and it’s also what we see everyday when a “Chef yells at a waiter that yells at the customer”.
The world is spiraling into uncontrollable anger and vengeance between ‘neighbors’ because we aren’t filling in a this dark void with the the grounding knowledge/rational and forward looking consequential perspective based on the the building blocks of 'thought' itself: the idea of causality.
Another terrible problem with our belief in the fallacy of free will is how it makes us all somewhat comfortable with social inequality. Where luck and luck determines who we were conceived to be. One baby born into abuse and heroine addiction and another baby born with a spoon of gold, and where society de facto has negligible effect to shift the track each baby is causally going down. And luck and luck alone has each of us standing in each of our shoes at this moment.
I personally don’t understand why there is so much emphasis and talk about the judicial's system need to acknowledge “could not have done otherwise”
when the utmost crucial and urgent need for its effect is on our atrocious social construct of inequality. Because we would be treating the root problem instead of fumbling with its symptoms. And it would be preventative to potential judicial-system encounters.
Not being clear regarding this (because instead Compatibilists Professors and Incompatibilist Professors have focused the debate mainly on the semantic of the term free will) is costing human suffering.
Compatibilists must not be aware that our “baboon-like” propensity to naturally and quickly slip towards emotions like rage, violent behavior and social inequalities, is fueled and maintained by our lack of rationale, ie this specific knowledge that our neighbor could not have done otherwise.
And its causing seventyfold more immorality and violence (which in itself also maintains the inequalities), than any hypothetical future harm that compatibilists fear.
I came here to see what Sapolsky is talking about in his new book DETERMINED.
1:02:50 – This might be the first time I've heard "we live in a society" and it wasn't a meme…
I want to see Dennett debate Sapolsky.
So, per Dennett, the noble lie is that people have control over their behavior?
Wow look at the TDS on that guy.
Criticism of higher education or intellectuals are woven in this debate. These people articulate in intellectual jibbersh without any concept of our electoral values.
Free will an illusionary evolutionary adaptation that is advantages on the societal and individual level.
It is fascinating how an apparently normal human brain can organize it's perception as to fit any set of implanted concepts to the exclusion of all conflicting verifiable facts.
Scarry, but interesting.
I personally don't think compatibilism is logical. Either the word is deterministic or it's not. If it isn't I have no idea how that would work. I understand the concept of free will but I cannot imagine any practical process or mechanism for it.
Morality is the wisdom of society over time. The law is not about whether people actually deserve praise or punishment in the cosmic sense but changing behavior in a positive way. The punishment should not just fit the crime it should fit the criminal.
I dig the green goggles. It's like he has x-ray vision.
You have to ‘take’ responsibility for a reason. It’s an effort. Because free will isn’t ‘free’. It requires work. Thought work. Emotional work etc.
47:50, I disagree, yes they have been making themselves for 20 years, but that's also down to events beyond their control. I can't see why this is so difficult?
Why so much talk of dessert and no mention of ice cream, pumpkin pie, or chocolate cake?
Determinism vs Free Will: Consequential justification and punishment are a great conversation piece. Michael Shermer, Gregg Caruso and Daniel Dennett, 2:06:07 Morality! Thank you for the recommendation Michael Schermer just dessert from Daniel Dennett.
A fascinating discussion and many thanks for hosting it!
These discussions continue and these brilliant minds collide, but each time, they speak past each other and seem to live in different realities where the possibility of actually understanding the other seems firmly impossible.
The reality of free will is a fiction. But it’s a fiction that is just as real as you are.
As far as I can tell, we are trapped in this conscious experience we share. We are chained to the unavoidable truth of choice and as a result free will.
Real or not, we have to face the consciousness we think we have.
You cannot put philosophy in a box as with materialism or Darwinism; it comes from consciousness and mind, Materialism and Darwinism is based on matter and biology not on consciousness or mind. Discussions in philosophy are valid and science evolved from it.