There isn't really a 'freewill problem'.

[ruby sparks]

No, but the sense in which you are defining 'freedom' makes it a useless word, because nothing satisfies that definition. Is there any reason to use words that don't refer to anything when talking about commonplace things?

What is freedom if not the ability to have done otherwise under the same conditions?

As I said: that's a useless definition. Please prove me wrong by naming one thing larger than an electron that can be said to have "the ability to have done otherwise under the same conditions".

Two electrons stuck together?

Sorry. Now I wish I hadn't said that. I'll leave it there to embarrass myself.

 

[PyramidHead]

As I said: that's a useless definition. Please prove me wrong by naming one thing larger than an electron that can be said to have "the ability to have done otherwise under the same conditions".

Two electrons stuck together?

Sorry. Now I wish I hadn't said that. I'll leave it there to embarrass myself.

It's not a bad suggestion. Reconsidering my objection, I think I might be wrong about it. Before a certain point in the history of science, maybe it was indeed believed that "the ability to have done otherwise under the same conditions" was an applicable description for any number of things, human will included. So, the fact that current knowledge leaves no more room for that definition to be represented by anything we care about is perhaps reason in itself to abandon the concept of free will if it is defined in this way.

 

[ruby sparks]

As I said: that's a useless definition. Please prove me wrong by naming one thing larger than an electron that can be said to have "the ability to have done otherwise under the same conditions".

Two electrons stuck together?

Sorry. Now I wish I hadn't said that. I'll leave it there to embarrass myself.

It's not a bad suggestion. Reconsidering my objection, I think I might be wrong about it. Before a certain point in the history of science, maybe it was indeed believed that "the ability to have done otherwise under the same conditions" was an applicable description for any number of things, human will included. So, the fact that current knowledge leaves no more room for that definition to be represented by anything we care about is perhaps reason in itself to abandon the concept of free will if it is defined in this way.

That's a good point. maybe that definition has dust on it. I've thunk about myself at times but I mostly come around to the idea that it's still ok to use that definition, although at times I amend it slightly.

 

[Emily Lake]

I'd like you to take a moment and re-read my post, please.

Maybe you should rephrase your post - ''Brain is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the existence of a mind.'' - implies mind that is independent from brain.

Maybe you meant something else, but what that may be is not clear.

No, it most certainly does NOT imply that mind is independent from the brain. Do you seriously not understand what the term "necessary" means in that sentence?

 

[Emily Lake]

...


If possible and probable contains more than one element in the set, then it is not deterministic. If multiple possibilities exist prior to action being taken, then that action is not deterministic. Unless you're using a special version of deterministic that is at odds with the mathematical definition.

We seem to be using different versions of possible and probable. Or perhaps only of the word possible. In my understanding both refer to a prediction of future events based on past and current conditions. They are both widely used when describing circumstances that have nothing to do with free will, but are only limited by the quality and completeness of available information. There is no Platonic idealisation of the word that is useful when describing reality. Probable is a way to assign a relative value to what is considered possible. It can change when conditions become more certain.

Okay - statistically speaking, if there is only one possible outcome (as there is by definition in the deterministic framework proposed) then the probability of that specific outcome is 100%. That necessarily implies that the probability of all other outcomes is 0% - which literally means that they are all impossible.

Consider a standard six-sided die. If you assume a deterministic framework as proposed, then for any toss of the die there is one and only one face that will come up. That means that if you toss a die, then the probability of rolling a 3 is either 1 or 0. It means that the standard view of that distribution providing a 1/6th probability of rolling a 3 is false - the distribution does not exist. It means that there is no probability associated with any roll, ever. For more than one possibility to exist prior to the action taken... there must be probabilities >0 and <1 for each possibility in the likelihood set. Otherwise there is literally only one possibility. That's how statistics works.

I tend to think that most of the people who argue for a deterministic framework are conflating a posterior observation with a prior probability. They're (errantly) assuming that because X is observed to have occurred, then P(X) = 1.

 

[Emily Lake]

What's the difference between 'freedom' as "commonly used" and 'actual freedom'?

What's the source of your definition for 'actual freedom'?

I gave the definition of 'actual' freedom as the ability to have done otherwise under the same circumstances, regulative control, etc, as per the arguments already given and discussed;



If you accept regulative control as a necessary part of free will, it seems impossible either way:
1. Free will requires that given an act A, the agent could have acted otherwise
2. Indeterminate actions happens randomly and without intent or control
3. Therefore indeterminism and free will are incompatible
4. Determinate actions are fixed and unchangeable
5. Therefore determinism is incompatible with free will


This is not just a matter of 'free will' alone, but the nature of freedom in general....the distinction between something moving 'freely' and having 'freedom'
- the ability to have done otherwise.

And we've gone through this several times. Your logical construct here disallows the existence of ANY freedom.

And again, you've got an assumption presented as fact: That interterminate actions are random and without intent or control - that's an assumption on your part, not factual. You have assumed that an indeterminate action can only be random.

 

[Emily Lake]

No, but the sense in which you are defining 'freedom' makes it a useless word, because nothing satisfies that definition. Is there any reason to use words that don't refer to anything when talking about commonplace things?

What is freedom if not the ability to have done otherwise under the same conditions? If we are just as subject to causation as a 'freely' moving object, a falling rock or the moon in orbit around the earth (unimpeded), albeit with far greater complexity of behaviour, how can we have 'freedom of will or action? We may be unimpeded in our actions, bur so is the Moon. Our actions are based on our will, which in turn is determined by brain state and condition, which is not open to conscious regulation, or able to be different in any given instance in time.

1) A non-deterministic outcome is NOT free from causality. This is a strawman that just keeps being reintroduced.
2) At least some brain state and condition IS open to conscious regulation - that's why mental rehearsing, visualization techniques, and therapy work. Not perfectly because it's a complex system... but they DO work. Meditation is conscious and purposeful and has a measurable and observable effect on brain state. Relaxation techniques, breathing exercises, etc - there is a very long list of conscious activities that LITERALLY alter brain state.

 

[Emily Lake]

Interesting documentary on Channel 4 last night, about the cases of 8 men on death row in Arkansas, USA. There were many issues raised during the programme, but there was one case which caught my eye, a guy called Marcel Williams, who had murdered a woman and had assaulted (raped?) two others, and might have killed them if he could, it's not clear. He locked one in a cupboard, which is where she was discovered.

To cut a long story short, it came out during his series of appeals against his death sentence that he had had almost the most awful upbringing a child could possibly have had, including repeated violent physical assaults and beatings and sexual abuse from his mum, and that's just the start. His defence lawyer from the original trial could hardly speak for crying when he was apologising to him (at an appeal) for screwing up his defence (Williams' traumatic life circumstances before the crimes were not raised in his trial). The woman he had raped and locked in a cupboard appeared at an appeal hearing and said that when she realised what he had gone through in his life, that despite what had happened, she could understand and she openly in fact forgave him, to his face. Williams himself was full of remorse. As far as could be told, he was not suffering from a medical condition or disability, at least it was not raised during the programme, and he knew the difference between right and wrong.

So they executed him anyway. But aside from that, aside from whether he deserved clemency and temporarily assuming he was not deemed not responsible for reasons of insanity or mental disorder, I suppose one question is, did he do what he did of his own free will? Secondly, does anyone here think they would have done differently if they had been him?

We're just in the middle of a similar case here in France, only worse as to the crimes, but less as to the sentence (no death penalty here). Society definitely has to be protected from such people, which makes a very long prison sentence necessary, but it is also a case of diminished responsibility, which calls for limited punishment. Diminished responsibility is just another way to describe the subversion of somebody's free will.

This sort of "psychological" descriptions help us to make sense of what we human beings do and are necessary as part of our living together in increasingly complex societies.
EB

That seems reasonable - need to protect society balanced against diminished responsibility.

Now... IF we were to accept that human activity is perfectly determined... then it is elementary to see that everyone's responsibility in any situation is zero. Nobody would be responsible for any of their actions - they have no possibility of control, no possibility of doing other than they did. Which would argue that leniency in cases like this is pointless, and that such leniency should be shown in ALL cases.

 

[PyramidHead]

What's the difference between 'freedom' as "commonly used" and 'actual freedom'?

What's the source of your definition for 'actual freedom'?

I gave the definition of 'actual' freedom as the ability to have done otherwise under the same circumstances, regulative control, etc, as per the arguments already given and discussed;



If you accept regulative control as a necessary part of free will, it seems impossible either way:
1. Free will requires that given an act A, the agent could have acted otherwise
2. Indeterminate actions happens randomly and without intent or control
3. Therefore indeterminism and free will are incompatible
4. Determinate actions are fixed and unchangeable
5. Therefore determinism is incompatible with free will


This is not just a matter of 'free will' alone, but the nature of freedom in general....the distinction between something moving 'freely' and having 'freedom'
- the ability to have done otherwise.

And we've gone through this several times. Your logical construct here disallows the existence of ANY freedom.

And again, you've got an assumption presented as fact: That interterminate actions are random and without intent or control - that's an assumption on your part, not factual. You have assumed that an indeterminate action can only be random.

I would defend DBT on both of these points, after some reflection. Sometimes, a definition that we used to apply to a certain range of things turns out to be applicable to fewer things than we thought. Sometimes, it works the other way around (see my post on the "me-ness" of being me) and it applies to more than we thought. If freedom as "the ability to have done otherwise" is the first kind of case, then saying that definition no longer applies to anything isn't really an objection; it's conceding that we ought to recognize how a more accurate model of reality forces us to change what we originally believed about human decision-making.

 

[PyramidHead]

2) At least some brain state and condition IS open to conscious regulation - that's why mental rehearsing, visualization techniques, and therapy work. Not perfectly because it's a complex system... but they DO work. Meditation is conscious and purposeful and has a measurable and observable effect on brain state. Relaxation techniques, breathing exercises, etc - there is a very long list of conscious activities that LITERALLY alter brain state.

That's kind of begging the question by asserting that the techniques you mentioned are initiated by the consciousness of the person who does them, rather than being the result of inexorable brain-level responses to stimuli happening "under the hood". To put it another way, a person's conscious decision to regulate their brain state may be the effect, and not the cause, of the brain's internal calculations leading to the initiation of breathing exercises, meditation, etc.

 

[Emily Lake]

....but it is also a case of diminished responsibility, which calls for limited punishment. Diminished responsibility is just another way to describe the subversion of somebody's free will.

Here's the kicker though, not only would you or I have done what those guys did if we were in their shoes, we would, it seems impossible to avoid concluding or explaining, do the same as anyone if we were in their shoes and subject to all the myriad things which continuously affect them (or that they were born with). If afreewillism is true (and I think it likely) then we all essentially have the exact same level of diminished personal responsibility. The fact that a 'normal' relatively non-damaged person (presumably such as you and I) doesn't murder is actually, it seems, down to the good fortune of not having experienced certain things or been born with them in our biology. We might even call our experiences privileged. We cannot, ultimately, take any personal credit for being non-murderers.

Now, I realise that's controversial, and counter-intuitive, and really tricky and challenging to know what to do about, or even to know what's possible to do, and more to the point it's not known for sure yet (so we should refrain from calling for dramatic changes to the way things are done in society). But to me, those paradoxes and mindfucks are not good reasons to avoid absorbing the likelihood into one's worldview. We don't know for sure there's no god. Many of us don't believe in one because it makes no sense, or we say that what some call evidence for it is in fact not actually good evidence. You think of raising your arm and it goes up. That doesn't mean you, the person your system calls speakpigeon, really, actually freely willed it any more than a prayer being answered means god intervened. It could just feel like it, or convincingly seem to be true.

I get that you and probably many others don't want to get into free will all the way. You are happy to run with a pragmatic sort of concept of free will, the sort that you say most people think they have. That's fine, although purely as a respectful side note I wish you wouldn't inject the word ideology so much when talking about others who prefer to dig deeper. I would not be surprised if such things about ideology were said about atheism (still are) or about those who questioned whether the earth is at the centre of the universe when most people thought it was, or when it was pragmatic to think of the sun as rising and falling over the earth, as it indeed still does, pragmatically-speaking, for most situations involving earthbound creatures. Which is probably why the words sunrise and sunset are still used. But we know they're not really accurate or correct terms. Imo, there are enough non-ideological scientific and philosophical signs and arguments to suggest that free will is not what most people think it is, or at least enough reasons to doubt.

And here we've come full circle to the scenario that I presented previously, and that you dismissed as absurd. In a perfectly determined framework, everyone has zero responsibility for their actions, and since each person is only able to do whatever they did... including rape and murder and child molesting... punishment of them is simply cruel. All would merit forgiveness and acceptance on the basis of them having not had any possibility of control over their actions. Punishment would be a fools errand. At the very best, you might be able to argue that removal from society for the protection of other people is justified... but no other punishment of any sort would every be logically justifiable.

Indeed, rehabilitation would be pointless. Anyone attempting to provide rehabilitation is unable to do otherwise - they are pre-ordained to attempt rehab. And any recipient of such rehab efforts would be pre-ordained to either incorporate new behaviors or not. Indeed, a perfectly deterministic framework implies that every iota of human knowledge, growth, and change is foreordained. Musk had no choice but to launch his car into space. Hitler had no choice but to attempt to exterminate people of jewish ancestry. The Unabomber had no choice but to blow up buildings. The registered sex offender down the road from you had no choice but to rape children.

Teaching that what those people did was wrong would be tantamount to teaching that left-handed people are bad or that gingers have no souls. It's irrelevant lunacy. The entire concept of morality and ethics is destroyed in a deterministic framework - morality and ethics innately depend on freedom of will and agency to choose one's actions.

 

[PyramidHead]

....but it is also a case of diminished responsibility, which calls for limited punishment. Diminished responsibility is just another way to describe the subversion of somebody's free will.

Here's the kicker though, not only would you or I have done what those guys did if we were in their shoes, we would, it seems impossible to avoid concluding or explaining, do the same as anyone if we were in their shoes and subject to all the myriad things which continuously affect them (or that they were born with). If afreewillism is true (and I think it likely) then we all essentially have the exact same level of diminished personal responsibility. The fact that a 'normal' relatively non-damaged person (presumably such as you and I) doesn't murder is actually, it seems, down to the good fortune of not having experienced certain things or been born with them in our biology. We might even call our experiences privileged. We cannot, ultimately, take any personal credit for being non-murderers.

Now, I realise that's controversial, and counter-intuitive, and really tricky and challenging to know what to do about, or even to know what's possible to do, and more to the point it's not known for sure yet (so we should refrain from calling for dramatic changes to the way things are done in society). But to me, those paradoxes and mindfucks are not good reasons to avoid absorbing the likelihood into one's worldview. We don't know for sure there's no god. Many of us don't believe in one because it makes no sense, or we say that what some call evidence for it is in fact not actually good evidence. You think of raising your arm and it goes up. That doesn't mean you, the person your system calls speakpigeon, really, actually freely willed it any more than a prayer being answered means god intervened. It could just feel like it, or convincingly seem to be true.

I get that you and probably many others don't want to get into free will all the way. You are happy to run with a pragmatic sort of concept of free will, the sort that you say most people think they have. That's fine, although purely as a respectful side note I wish you wouldn't inject the word ideology so much when talking about others who prefer to dig deeper. I would not be surprised if such things about ideology were said about atheism (still are) or about those who questioned whether the earth is at the centre of the universe when most people thought it was, or when it was pragmatic to think of the sun as rising and falling over the earth, as it indeed still does, pragmatically-speaking, for most situations involving earthbound creatures. Which is probably why the words sunrise and sunset are still used. But we know they're not really accurate or correct terms. Imo, there are enough non-ideological scientific and philosophical signs and arguments to suggest that free will is not what most people think it is, or at least enough reasons to doubt.

And here we've come full circle to the scenario that I presented previously, and that you dismissed as absurd. In a perfectly determined framework, everyone has zero responsibility for their actions, and since each person is only able to do whatever they did... including rape and murder and child molesting... punishment of them is simply cruel. All would merit forgiveness and acceptance on the basis of them having not had any possibility of control over their actions. Punishment would be a fools errand. At the very best, you might be able to argue that removal from society for the protection of other people is justified... but no other punishment of any sort would every be logically justifiable.

Indeed, rehabilitation would be pointless. Anyone attempting to provide rehabilitation is unable to do otherwise - they are pre-ordained to attempt rehab. And any recipient of such rehab efforts would be pre-ordained to either incorporate new behaviors or not. Indeed, a perfectly deterministic framework implies that every iota of human knowledge, growth, and change is foreordained. Musk had no choice but to launch his car into space. Hitler had no choice but to attempt to exterminate people of jewish ancestry. The Unabomber had no choice but to blow up buildings. The registered sex offender down the road from you had no choice but to rape children.

Teaching that what those people did was wrong would be tantamount to teaching that left-handed people are bad or that gingers have no souls. It's irrelevant lunacy. The entire concept of morality and ethics is destroyed in a deterministic framework - morality and ethics innately depend on freedom of will and agency to choose one's actions.

Then we should abandon retributive justice. Whether or not we do so is of course determined, but that doesn't change anything. Everything you said is true, except for the unspoken assumption that praise and punishment must be preserved even in light of information that renders them pointless.

 

[The AntiChris]

Reconsidering my objection, I think I might be wrong about it. Before a certain point in the history of science, maybe it was indeed believed that "the ability to have done otherwise under the same conditions" was an applicable description for any number of things, human will included. So, the fact that current knowledge leaves no more room for that definition to be represented by anything we care about is perhaps reason in itself to abandon the concept of free will if it is defined in this way.

The point is that this isn't the only way free will is defined. Classical compatibilist free will does not require the ability of an agent to do otherwise in exactly the same conditions.

 

[Emily Lake]

As I said: that's a useless definition. Please prove me wrong by naming one thing larger than an electron that can be said to have "the ability to have done otherwise under the same conditions".

Two electrons stuck together?

Sorry. Now I wish I hadn't said that. I'll leave it there to embarrass myself.

It's not a bad suggestion. Reconsidering my objection, I think I might be wrong about it. Before a certain point in the history of science, maybe it was indeed believed that "the ability to have done otherwise under the same conditions" was an applicable description for any number of things, human will included. So, the fact that current knowledge leaves no more room for that definition to be represented by anything we care about is perhaps reason in itself to abandon the concept of free will if it is defined in this way.

If an electron has the ability to have done otherwise under the same conditions... then things that depend on the flow of electrons could also feasibly produce different results under the same conditions. Depending on the "width" of conducting element, it may or may not create a material variance. How thick are the connections between neurons in the brain? Are they much larger than an electron, so that the flow of electrical impulses in the brain represents many thousands of electrons being transmitted at essentially the same time? Or are they close in size to an electron so that the flow of impulses represents only tens of electrons at essentially the same time?

 

[Emily Lake]

2) At least some brain state and condition IS open to conscious regulation - that's why mental rehearsing, visualization techniques, and therapy work. Not perfectly because it's a complex system... but they DO work. Meditation is conscious and purposeful and has a measurable and observable effect on brain state. Relaxation techniques, breathing exercises, etc - there is a very long list of conscious activities that LITERALLY alter brain state.

That's kind of begging the question by asserting that the techniques you mentioned are initiated by the consciousness of the person who does them, rather than being the result of inexorable brain-level responses to stimuli happening "under the hood". To put it another way, a person's conscious decision to regulate their brain state may be the effect, and not the cause, of the brain's internal calculations leading to the initiation of breathing exercises, meditation, etc.

What? Are you suggesting that conscious meditation is actually a subconscious process? Unless I'm really missing the point here (always a possibility), it would seem that your interpretation here would mean that nothing humans do is conscious, it's all non-conscious... and consciousness itself is a lie.

 

[Emily Lake]

And here we've come full circle to the scenario that I presented previously, and that you dismissed as absurd. In a perfectly determined framework, everyone has zero responsibility for their actions, and since each person is only able to do whatever they did... including rape and murder and child molesting... punishment of them is simply cruel. All would merit forgiveness and acceptance on the basis of them having not had any possibility of control over their actions. Punishment would be a fools errand. At the very best, you might be able to argue that removal from society for the protection of other people is justified... but no other punishment of any sort would every be logically justifiable.

Indeed, rehabilitation would be pointless. Anyone attempting to provide rehabilitation is unable to do otherwise - they are pre-ordained to attempt rehab. And any recipient of such rehab efforts would be pre-ordained to either incorporate new behaviors or not. Indeed, a perfectly deterministic framework implies that every iota of human knowledge, growth, and change is foreordained. Musk had no choice but to launch his car into space. Hitler had no choice but to attempt to exterminate people of jewish ancestry. The Unabomber had no choice but to blow up buildings. The registered sex offender down the road from you had no choice but to rape children.

Teaching that what those people did was wrong would be tantamount to teaching that left-handed people are bad or that gingers have no souls. It's irrelevant lunacy. The entire concept of morality and ethics is destroyed in a deterministic framework - morality and ethics innately depend on freedom of will and agency to choose one's actions.

Then we should abandon retributive justice. Whether or not we do so is of course determined, but that doesn't change anything. Everything you said is true, except for the unspoken assumption that praise and punishment must be preserved even in light of information that renders them pointless.

Personally I would think that if they are pointless, praise and punishment should NOT be preserved. It's ruby sparks and DMT who have argued that praise and punishment still serve a valid function in a system where they are pointless... because it changes future behavior I guess. Or maybe it's because we're destined to engage in praise and punishment for no particularly good reason at all because that's how this gigantic universal scam works?

I'm arguing that the entire concept of purposefully behavior modification is meaningless under a deterministic framework.

 

[bilby]

It's not a bad suggestion. Reconsidering my objection, I think I might be wrong about it. Before a certain point in the history of science, maybe it was indeed believed that "the ability to have done otherwise under the same conditions" was an applicable description for any number of things, human will included. So, the fact that current knowledge leaves no more room for that definition to be represented by anything we care about is perhaps reason in itself to abandon the concept of free will if it is defined in this way.

If an electron has the ability to have done otherwise under the same conditions... then things that depend on the flow of electrons could also feasibly produce different results under the same conditions. Depending on the "width" of conducting element, it may or may not create a material variance. How thick are the connections between neurons in the brain? Are they much larger than an electron, so that the flow of electrical impulses in the brain represents many thousands of electrons being transmitted at essentially the same time? Or are they close in size to an electron so that the flow of impulses represents only tens of electrons at essentially the same time?

A synapse is in the order 10^-6m wide; an electron is in the order 10^-15m in diameter. So the number of electrons you need to consider is not tens, nor thousands, nor even millions, but rather billions of billions (area being proportional to the square of diameter).

Electrons are really, really, small.

If an electron were scaled up to the size of a soccer ball, a synapse to the same scale would be a surface about a hundred thousand miles in diameter.

Neurons, axons, and even synapses, are vastly larger than they would need to be in order for quantum effects to be relevant to their behaviour.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Interesting documentary on Channel 4 last night, about the cases of 8 men on death row in Arkansas, USA. There were many issues raised during the programme, but there was one case which caught my eye, a guy called Marcel Williams, who had murdered a woman and had assaulted (raped?) two others, and might have killed them if he could, it's not clear. He locked one in a cupboard, which is where she was discovered.

To cut a long story short, it came out during his series of appeals against his death sentence that he had had almost the most awful upbringing a child could possibly have had, including repeated violent physical assaults and beatings and sexual abuse from his mum, and that's just the start. His defence lawyer from the original trial could hardly speak for crying when he was apologising to him (at an appeal) for screwing up his defence (Williams' traumatic life circumstances before the crimes were not raised in his trial). The woman he had raped and locked in a cupboard appeared at an appeal hearing and said that when she realised what he had gone through in his life, that despite what had happened, she could understand and she openly in fact forgave him, to his face. Williams himself was full of remorse. As far as could be told, he was not suffering from a medical condition or disability, at least it was not raised during the programme, and he knew the difference between right and wrong.

So they executed him anyway. But aside from that, aside from whether he deserved clemency and temporarily assuming he was not deemed not responsible for reasons of insanity or mental disorder, I suppose one question is, did he do what he did of his own free will? Secondly, does anyone here think they would have done differently if they had been him?

We're just in the middle of a similar case here in France, only worse as to the crimes, but less as to the sentence (no death penalty here). Society definitely has to be protected from such people, which makes a very long prison sentence necessary, but it is also a case of diminished responsibility, which calls for limited punishment. Diminished responsibility is just another way to describe the subversion of somebody's free will.

This sort of "psychological" descriptions help us to make sense of what we human beings do and are necessary as part of our living together in increasingly complex societies.
EB

That seems reasonable - need to protect society balanced against diminished responsibility.

Now... IF we were to accept that human activity is perfectly determined... then it is elementary to see that everyone's responsibility in any situation is zero. Nobody would be responsible for any of their actions - they have no possibility of control, no possibility of doing other than they did. Which would argue that leniency in cases like this is pointless, and that such leniency should be shown in ALL cases.

No. You're assuming a very abstract concept of responsibility which doesn't even fit how responsibility is really considered in society. You're doing the same as what some people here are doing with free will, i.e. discussing notions made up by ideologues. Come back to Earth.

And then, cool, all I have to do here is copy and paste my reply to PyramidHead about responsibility, here:

What do you think of Galen Strawson's refutation of responsibility, EB? In a nutshell, his argument is as follows:

1. We do what we do because of the way that we are.
2. In order to be responsible for what we do, we must be responsible for the way we are.
3. To be responsible for the way we are, we must have contributed to bringing it about in some relevant way.
4. But any contribution we might have made to the way we are must have been the result of the way we were when we made the contribution (from 1).
5. Thus it is impossible to be responsible for the way that we are.
6. Thus it is impossible to be responsible for what we do.

By "responsibility" he means the robust, intentional kind that is necessary for moral agency. His argument seems to apply equally whether you accept determinism or not. Even if you believe you freely chose to do something, it still is true that you chose what you did because of antecedent conditions. Even if you brought about those antecedent conditions intentionally, your having done so would itself be rooted in prior antecedent conditions, and so on into the past until inevitably there would be an antecedent condition you did not bring about.

If I had to poke holes in Strawson's argument, I think premise 1 and maybe 2 are the most suspect, but they are arguably true if the terms are defined properly. I haven't given it a whole lot of thought, but I wondered if this was something you'd come across before.

Well, this seems to show that Galen Strawson's concept of a "robust, intentional kind (of responsibility) that is necessary for moral agency", as he thinks of it, doesn't really work.

He should try thinking differently about responsibility, for example as a "robust, intentional kind (of responsibility) that is necessary for moral agency.

We're actually told how to go about this, if we're prepared to face the dictionary definition of what it means to be responsible, here:

responsible
adj.
1.
a. Liable to be required to give account, as of one's actions or of the discharge of a duty or trust: Who is responsible while their parents are away?
b. Required to render account; answerable: The cabinet is responsible to the parliament.
2. Involving important duties, the supervision of others, or the ability to make decisions with little supervision: a responsible position within the firm.
3. Being a source or cause: Viruses are responsible for many diseases.
4.
a. Able to make moral or rational decisions on one's own and therefore answerable for one's behavior: At what age does a person become responsible?
b. Able to be trusted or depended upon; trustworthy or reliable: a responsible art dealer.
5. Based on or characterized by good judgment or sound thinking: responsible journalism.

I don't see how one could possibly refute responsibility as it is defined here. Somebody who's asking you to give an account of your action will do so presumably because they see you as responsible for your actions. Whether you can be held responsible in this sense could be debated within a legal framework for example. If so, at some point, a judge will just decide if they hold you responsible or not. And that's it. It's not that you are responsible in some abstract sense. You are held responsible and it's usually somebody else who will make this call.

Strawson is talking about something else. He is talking of responsibility in his argument as if it was something similar to being the causal factor of an event. And from there, it's easy to go the infinite regress route. It's been done so many times before. Easy do.

So, yes, we should follow Strawson's logic and count the concept of responsibility he's using in his argument as incoherent, ineffective, just wrong.

And then go back, if we ever left it behind, to the dictionary definition of what it means for most people to be responsible. This one seems to work, although, clearly, it's not going to stop people arguing they're not responsible. The dictionary definition works because it doesn't say we have to accept arguments about somebody not being responsible.
EB

So, we can live with our ordinary notion of free will and our ordinary notion of responsibility. We do that every day. Nothing absurd comes out of that. It works.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Neurons, axons, and even synapses, are vastly larger than they would need to be in order for quantum effects to be relevant to their behaviour.

I'm sure you must mean something else here.

Neurons, axons, and even synapses, are vastly larger than they would need to be in order for quantum effects NOT to be relevant to their behaviour.

Yes?

Or, short of sticking a "NOT" in there, you could have turned the sentence round:

Electrons are vastly smaller than they would need to be in order for their quantum effects to be relevant to the behaviour of neurons, axons, or even synapses.

Always pleased to oblige.
EB

 

[bilby]

I'm sure you must mean something else here.

No; I mean what I said.

Both of your proposed alternatives give the incorrect impression that quantum effects matter to large objects, such as neurons, axons, and synapses.