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Michamus t1_jd7uzkz wrote

Reply to comment by Rugged_as_fuck in In-depth interview with Gregg Caruso, free-will skeptic by fatsosis

Sure. Why not? This is like saying people choose who they’re attracted to or choose what they believe. Sure, one could speculate about them deciding to be attracted to things they aren’t or believe things they don’t. The reality is that we really don’t actually control either of these things.

When you get down to it, we don’t really control anything. We may soon discover that what we call consciousness is just the communication between our multiple brains. That is, our consciousness is an observer of the brain’s decisions, rather than the controller. In other words, what we consider “self” could just be along for the ride. Purely output from the brain.

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Rugged_as_fuck t1_jd7zvrn wrote

Right, first of all your position isn't that your view is a possibility, it's that it's a fact. You aren't approaching it from a point of debate, there is no room for "I disagree" so there is effectively no point in engaging you.

That said, your take on it seems to be even more extreme than the interviewee, which runs up against the same problems. The interviewee himself acknowledges the problems inherent in the view. If we assume there is no free will, then no one is responsible for their actions, so there is no point punishing someone for any action or taking measures to prevent it. Guy shoots up an elementary school, tough shit, nothing we could do about it, he was always going to do that. Likewise, there is no point in praising great actions. A man invents a new method for clean, cheap energy and gives it away for the good of the planet instead of for profit. Who gives a fuck, he was already going to do that.

In addition to that being one of the most boring and passive "I'm just here waiting to die" takes on life, taken to the extreme it goes from an unimaginative, milquetoast viewpoint to detrimental to society as a whole. It's also no different than believing a higher power (God) controls all actions and outcomes regardless of human input, everything will always go according to His Plan, a belief that many philosophical individuals would consider small minded and naive.

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Michamus t1_jd8v6y8 wrote

What do you mean by “responsible for their actions?” If a machine is faulty, we don’t absolve it of blame for creating sub-optimal output conditions. If a person murders someone else, the murder still happened and they still committed it. We would still react deterministically to this event, whether by demanding capital punish enemy, imprisonment, or rehabilitation. You then can look at the conditions this murderer emerged in and see if patterns emerge. If mitigating those environmental conditions reduces the occurrences of murder, then what other conclusion could you draw?

That doesn’t even go into the myriad of data that decision making processes occur prior to conscious recognition of the decision. That is, fMRI data highly indicates that the “sub-conscious” structures of our brain make decisions and then what we call our “consciousness” is informed about it.

Then you have the fact that chemical and physical alterations to our brain structure cause behavioral and psychological changes to a person. For instance, chemical hemisphere separation creates two personalities with two narratives. If a blinder is used, and the one hand gives the other hand something, when prompted the person will make up a story about how they received it. Without separation, the person says they handed it to themselves.

Once you look at things beyond individual decisions, it becomes pretty clear that there’s nothing special about the human brain that could possibly separate it from natural determinism. There’s no “soul” to override our physical brains.

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