Science

What's the odds that this author is up to some heinous shit in his free time and this is just a philosophical cover?

While we can identify influences that have common outcomes, the fact that there are different outcomes at an individual level supports free will. Free will does not mean you are free from influence, just that there is an opportunity to make a choice.

Poverty leading to increased crime does not result in everyone in poverty committing crimes.

I mean, I am on board with that. There probably isn’t free will.

But, we should continue to jail those not following society’s rules. If we could jail hurricanes so as to not cause damage, we would—why is jailing a person any different?

Definitely not onboard with letting criminals off the hook for bad deeds. If your “brain script” leads you to kill, you just need to be removed from society. Sorry.

Yea the article wasn’t particularly thoughtful. As you say, justice can simply preventative without being punitive. But on balance, aiming for rehabilitation can still make some sense even without compassionate anti-blame arguments. There are limits to how much we want to keep people out of society and it costs money, so prisoners will return to society at some point.

So what’s the best approach for preventing harm? If a blame-worthiness approach premised on free will is fundamentally false, or at least not correct enough, then ideas about punishment and deterrence would likely be ineffective compared to more rehabilitation based approaches.

There's always been one piece of this that has bugged me. I'd like to hear - from someone who is familiar enough with both neurons and quantum theory - an explanation on why thoughts are physically too big to be influenced by quantum randomness.

If your “brain script” leads you to kill, you just need to be removed from society

If you accept strict determinism, the fact that killers should go to prison is one of the "biases formed by prior events" that will determine that most people won't become killers. Which in turn determine us as individuals in a society to create and enforce justice systems.

I think that we have free will but it's extremely limited, but we are capable of weighing our emotions and logic to make a choice. I'm always extremely skeptical of people that say we don't have free will, so when they do they better have some really solid evidence. Otherwise what's the point of nature evolving consciousness? Merely to be a passive observer in our predetermined lives? Evolution is effective, if it didnt need it then it wpuldnt have evolved it woth so many animals. Consciousness is there to help us make decisions and map out visions that are beyond the capability of simple automatons.

My bone to pick with this article is that there is no talk about the research that was done to reach the conclusion, so I just have to take this dudes word for it. And I don't feel like reading his book. And based on where we are in science either this is a sensationalized take or this dude is filling in a lot of blanks with his opinions.

if thought truly is entirely deterministic, then it's surely both sufficient and necessary that you could build a machine that, given the state of the universe as input, could fully simulate what your answer to any given question would be

but if you suppose that, then you basically run into an issue very similar to the halting problem

you put your subject in the room with your magic machine, tell them to disagree with whatever the machine spits out, then tell the magic machine to predict what they're going to say after they've been told the result of said prediction

whatever the machine spits out, there's nothing stopping your subject from just disagreeing

Maybe you couldn't but I'm different, sorry bout it