I’m not making an argument for or against compatibilism, just noting that one can develop a logical and rational philosophical argument for it, and there’s no necessary logical compulsion that requires a world-view of metaphysical naturalism to also assume humans have no free will/moral responsibility for moral choices.
Personally I am more in Hume’s boat than the others, in which case one needn’t worry about ascribing unknown quantum-magic to “explain” consciousness or worrying about emergence creating some meta-ontological category with alternate causality, but it’s not something I’d really like to drown this thread with an account of.
If we’re really stuck having to assume a creator-god/other supernatural cause endowing people with moral agency, then we’re abandoning any hope of a rational account in which case I’d go with karma rather than a god (much simpler, and much easier to build a parsimonious case with fewer assumptions), but I don’t see any compelling reason to believe that if the world is natural that human moral intuitions and agency aren’t also natural.
There can only be logical compulsion if both sides agree on the axioms (and a few other things), and that is where it all tends to fall down, especially between theologians, philosophers and natural philosophers!
Personally I am of the view that the universe turns out to have interesting emergent properties but that attributing any kind of higher-level mind as a causative agent just causes an infinite regress. But that’s an opinion; it is not provable.
In my opinion, if you postulate a God, you’ve basically basically cast Ockham’s razor and his entire beard into the ninth circle of hell. Remember, I was one of the atheists on this thread. But once you’ve postulated a God that is “eternal” and “separate from creation”, it’s no longer a matter of applying the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
So, you define “free will” as “my actions are unpredictable in advance”?
Chaos can easily create unpredictability out of determinism.
A thought experiment:
Let’s assume I build three AIs. Also lets assume that this is possible.
AI#1 will be completely deterministic.
If you recorded all the input it gets, then wiped its memory and then replayed the tape, it would react exactly the same way all over again.
AI#2 uses a quantum-mechanical true random number generator to inject some unpredictability in its behaviour.
AI#3 uses a pseudo random number generator instead. That is, it starts with some number, like the current time when it is turned on, and repeatedly does some calculations on that number until it gets a series of numbers that are indistinguishable from random numbers.
Would that have any influence on those three machines passing the Turing Test?
Would it be possible to detect a difference in the behaviour of these three machines?
Would any of these machines give different answers when asked the question, “Do you posess free will?”
Is there any reason to hold one of those machines more morally responsible for its actions than another one? As in, both Skynet #1 and Skynet #2 launched nukes at us, but only Skynet #2 is responsible for its actions because the random number generator could have gone the other way?
That might be the core of the matter.
In a materialist world view, there is no third option. And the consequence for me is that the very concepts “to have free will” and “to have no free will” don’t make sense for me.
Back when hardly anything was known about how the brain works, a non-reductionistic “mind” separate from the “body” was an entirely reasonable concept. Now, we have been able to understand some “reductions” so the third option covers only part of what we consider the “mind”. Which leads me to abandon the rest of the concept, as well, but that’s not a logical necessity at this point.
Well, I’d say I instinctively abstract mechanisms I can’t possibly understand and call them “people”. And I consider many of those forces that cause people to act the way they do to be part of the people themselves. So if I just call the whole package a “person” and don’t look inside, then that “person” is indeed causa sui and not just the effect of outside forces.
I agree that random events don’t make a person any more free. If there’s another kind of metaphysical event hiding behind random events (non-disprovable, and I have no reason to believe that), that might be God’s will - which doesn’t give us any free will, either. If it’s my metaphysical mind/soul, which is irreducible, then we’ve got that third option that I don’t believe in.
The two are different in the same way that a novel is different from the book its printed in. But I wouldn’t say that one is the “effect” of the other, as I do not think it is a cause-and-effect relationship as we know it from physics.
Yes, but that’s a matter of how you define responsibility, isn’t it? Personally, I get by without an exact definition of responsibility; whenever my intuitive definition does not give me an answer, I fall back to other ideas that are more important to me according to my ethical system.
Is Breivik fully “responsible” for his crimes? I have no idea, my intuition of responsibility and deserved punishment breaks down at these orders of magnitude. I can handle making 13-year-old boy scouts volunteer for toilet cleaning as a means of holding them responsible for screwing up in regular 13-year-old ways. But Breivik? Totally off the scale. So instead of trying to come up with a general definition of what he “deserves”, I try to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of different courses of action. If we make him suffer, we have one more person who suffers (bad), and some people who are happy that he suffers (I consider that slightly bad, as well, but it might also be good). We decrease his chances of ever becoming saner (bad), but we have a very very slight chance of scaring other people away from doing bad things (and that would be good). So then I get to think about how important those various things are and decide without ever having to come up with a precise answer to the question of responsibility.
Personally, I’ve found that I am happier when I don’t hold a grudge against people who might deserve it according to some definition. I hear there was this guy two thousand years ago who recommended something similar.
I’m not sure what kind of “justification” you want; the way I interpret the world in abstract, human-level terms is my own; it is very similar to yours, but it differs in important small points. Those differences are small enough for us to be able to communicate and large enough for us to disagree.
And of course I do not have a recipe of how we can all arrive at the same system of assigning “meaning” and “ethics” to this world. It’s the same age-old unsolved problem - most of us humans agree most of the time about most of what’s good and evil, but that’s all.
So I guess my point is that as a materialist and atheist, I can derive meaning from this world, act as a normal human being, act ethically (or unethically), judge other people’s actions, decide to forgive them or hold a grudge, feel responsible for things I’ve done, enjoy beauty, deplore ugliness and injustice, etc., all without having to ignore any uncomfortable philosophical facts.
But I hope we at least do agree that the city of Atlantis and the city of Bielefeld are just myths?
No: I say that if I am able to set up an experiment in which my actions cannot be predicted in advance, then both determinism and predestination are invalid. Free will seems to me to be a terribly vague concept, we simply do not know enough about the brain and decision making to make categorical statements about it. But in the Protestant mindset that this thread is about, determinism, predestination and free will get put through the wringer - with no clear result.
18The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.) 19These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth.
20Noah, a man of the soil, proceededa to plant a vineyard. 21When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. 22Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside. 23But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s naked body. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father naked.
24When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, 25he said,
“Cursed be Canaan!
The lowest of slaves
will he be to his brothers.”
That’s an interesting interpretation. It’s implied that Ham does something to Noah besides just get an eyeful, and it’s not stated what he does, but sodomy is a possibility. Incest of some sort was instant damnation, so definitely something along those lines.
Noah was my daughter’s section for her Bat Mitzvah. When we read that together, I really did not get what was going on.
In my Torah study group, we read that section with my rabbi. She studied with the person who translated our edition. She is VERY good with this stuff. She was the one who clued me in on the actual meaning.
The part where it says he was naked - that means they had sex. They are really covert about the language in the bible.
Noah was an old guy and his son was exerting dominance by raping him.
There’s other Bible-expert interpretations of that section:
• Ham masturbated onto his father or masturbated his drunk father
• Ham castrated his father to prevent any more sons being born to take favor
• Ham seduced his mother while Noah was asleep
All of these would have the same effect of being a terrible thing to do to your dad and emasculate him. More so than just walking in on your dad naked, which baffled me as a kid when we read the Bible in church.
According to my rabbi, anytime they say something like “saw him naked” or “touched her leg” or “laid beside her,” it = S-E-X. Also, every time things like that happen, horrible awful things result that seem way out of whack to just a touch or a glimpse of nudity.
I think the other interpretations are still trying to take the naked thing very literally and trying to add in some kind of additional action there that must have been deleted. It you see it as a straight up metaphor, to me that makes the most sense.
