iaswob t1_j98hvv2 wrote
Reply to comment by OldMillenial in Compatibilism is supported by deep intuitions about responsibility and control. It can also feel "obviously" wrong and absurd. Slavoj Žižek's commentary can help us navigate the intuitive standoff. by matthewharlow
We don't put moralistic judgements on things we think don't have choice, but if determinism is true than this is sort of trivially untrue: we have in fact been making moral judgements on humans who don't have control over their choices. I think what some compatibalists are saying is that regardless of all the arguments and assumptions pinning morality, judgements of the choices that are made, to determinism, to the causal origin of choices, the one function is useful and points to soemthing real while the other isn't. Usually it seems to be framed as keeping one register of what freedom means socially while loosing others, identifying a function freedom has had and identifying freedom with whatever serves that function.
Basically, a choice is an empirical fact one could argue. I'm not talking about "a thing determined by nothing other than a person's agency" when I say a choice, but I am talking about whatever we have been pointing to for over a thousand years and calling a choice, an emergent phenomenon of the brain. So, what a compatablist might argue is that anything which undergoes a sufficiently close analogue of certain neural processes, and/or perhaps if treating it/them as free we can enter into a meaningful social relationship with it/them seeing it/them as free, then we can call it free.
The reason I wouldn't call a volcano free is that I can't enter into a relationship with a volcano as if it were free, and it does not have any (deterministic) process of determination. AI is in many ways I think free, but I don't think modern AI is necessarily conscious by virtue of being free. I think freedom as such likely preceeds consciousness. Even humans I think are free to varying degrees, not just politically and socially but phenomenologically. Just because something makes a free choice doesn't mean it should be held accountable IMO, if an AI decide to do harm, even nondeterministically with quantum randomness, that could be a free choice, yet I wouldn't think it should be held morally accountable if it didn't have sufficient sense of self. The more I think about the more morality and accountability seem to have little do with freedom to me.
OldMillenial t1_j98lek1 wrote
> We don't put moralistic judgements on things we think don't have choice, but if determinism is true than this is sort of trivially untrue: we have in fact been making moral judgements on humans who don't have control over their choices
>Basically, a choice is an empirical fact one could argue. I'm not talking about "a thing determined by nothing other than a person's agency" when I say a choice, but I am talking about whatever we have been pointing to for over a thousand years and calling a choice, an emergent phenomenon of the brain.
>The reason I wouldn't call a volcano free is that I can't enter into a relationship with a volcano as if it were free, and it does not have any (deterministic) process of determination.
All of this boils down to "determinism destroys choice, but as long as we pretend it doesn't and just continue doing the same thing as we did before, then it's all OK."
Which makes determinism worthless and compatibalism so much hot air.
iaswob t1_j98op6n wrote
That inherently depends upon fixing our understanding of choice to only one dimension of it, the particular ways it has been defined in certain academic arguments about it being a choice determined solely by an individual. If we accept that choice, as a concept, has been a bundle of multiple things, some of which are not salvageable and some of which might be indispensible or at least very valuable, then why is it an illegitimate rhetorical move to accept only some of those things which are bundled with the idea of choice? I could equally say that choice was never destroyed because it has always been determined, but as long we continue to pretend there are no social dimensions to the idea of choice then we can pretend choice is destoryed. I think if one is claiming this reduction is accurate, they need to specifically justify the claim that we ought to view free will as determinists do.
Accountability is the field of should and determinism is the field of is, if we accept that determinism destroys accountability we are bridging from an is to an ought. I would be curious to see what the exact chain of logic is from "the world is determinists" to "therefore we cannot be accountable", because here I think is where we could find a bit of a rhetorical sleight of hand among some determinists. When I say I am holding someone accountable, all I have ever been saying (since childhood) is that I am relating to them in a specific way, that is why people hold other people accountable. Even the idea of "accountable" inherently is social linguistically, what is an account (financial or narrative) but a social relationship? To try to surgically remove these social dimensions seems ahistorical, and I think wrong inasmuch as it is ahistorical.
The crux here is that these terms don't exist as absteact precisely defined little neat categories with some presently exhaustible and easily enumerable ideas, leading in some logical chain from A to B. Free will, accountability, choice? They are messy, historical, social terms who are subject both to flux and to unveiling (as well as veiling). If the social dimension is ignored and it is treated as being exhausted by this one facet of its intellectual dimensions, then that strikes me as a fundamental categorical and communication error which inhibits understanding. I think choice is a social object, which can be metaphorically picked up and repurposed while maintaining a sense of identity.
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments