Saw this article, thought you might be interested considering that earlier topic.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/your-move-the-maze-of-free-will/
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
This apparent responsibility paradox seems to arise more from muddiness in the concept of responsibility than in the concept of free will. Or, at least, I think I've got a better or equal idea of what free will entails than what responsibility does.
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Shake your windows and rattle your walls.
Just wanna put this out there, that Mark is awesome to talk philosophy with, in person or online.
And DIM, you were the one who asked about "praise and blame", right? It's not that I had previously read Steven Pinker, but today I stumbled across this from Wikipedia:
Pinker claims these fears are non sequiturs, and that the blank slate view of human nature would actually be a greater threat if it were true. For example, he argues that political equality does not require sameness, but policies that treat people as individuals with rights; that moral progress doesn't require the human mind to be naturally free of selfish motives, only that it has other motives to counteract them; that responsibility doesn't require behavior to be uncaused, only that it respond to praise and blame; and that meaning in life doesn't require that the process that shaped the brain must have a purpose, only that the brain itself must have purposes. He also argues that grounding moral values in claims about a blank slate opens them to the possibility of being overturned by future empirical discoveries; and that belief in a blank slate human nature encourages destructive social trends such as persecution of the successful and totalitarian social engineering.
I may have. And, yeah, Pinker's pretty awesome (I saw him speak once but it was about a different, if equally fascinating, topic). This is the first I've heard of The Blank Slate, but it sounds like a book with which I'd probably find myself agreeing a whole lot, so I heartily recommend it.
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Shake your windows and rattle your walls.
Cool article, Jace.
I definitely think that, for all worldly intents and purposes, we are fully accountable for our actions, and should be punished accordingly. Nothing would make me more violent, hopping mad than a sociopath being let off the hook for killing people because he was "not accountable for his actions, since he was born with a weird set of genes, into a family that taught him to kill." And I mean, I know that the Chaos Theory applies here, and we're not solely products of our parents and genes but a lot of other things too, invisible things kinda. I'll assume we're all familiar enough with it, at least inasmuch as the Jurassic Park scene with the water drops tells. So, that, too.
But as far as an otherworldly, divine spirit laying eternal judgement on us? I don't think that's fair.
As far as making decisions in every day life, like deciding between buying the cake and helping someone out with cash, well I don't think we can justify ourselves by saying "not helping out was predetermined, so it's not my fault." I mean, it is your fault. You were able to make the decision, barring the unlikely, and so if you have the idea that not helping out a guy is a bad thing, and you choose the bad thing, you've done a bad thing. Determinism is not fate. We're not forced into fulfilling a scenario, regardless of how hard we try to avoid it. We do not have to kill our fathers and marry our mothers.
It's just, whatever we choose, it was predictable to an all-knowing entity. So like Di says, I think that responsibility and free will are not entirely connected. Like Cool Hand Luke tells the prison guard, just because it's your job doesn't make it right.
I feel unorganized. But it's hot and sticky out. So that's why.
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