h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

While this analysis seems to solve the problem there are important issues which it fails to address. For example crime and punishment in region three. If we accept that our perceived reality is predetermined then surely we should not punish 'criminals' as if they had free will? Especially if we believe that we should behave as if we have the free will to choose how to deal with them!

Punishment of criminals is justified if you are doing it for consequentialist reasons as opposed to blame/revenge. If the threat of punishment stops people doing things society doesn't want them to do, then we should have punishment no matter if free will exists or not.

Region 3 says nothing about 'accepting that our perceived reality is predetermined'. It *does* say however, that "We do not have the freedom to choose to live believing in our freedom. We are incorrect in our belief in our freedom, but we were always going to believe this (our belief is predestined), so this can't be said to be sad or wrong. It's just how it is."

We don't have a choice about anything in region 3, so how can we choose not to punish 'criminals'? If we lived in region 3, we wouldn't even know that we had no free will! Thus, we'd punish criminals as if they had free will.

Yeah, it's too bad that there is no free will in region 3, since that means the criminals aren't criminals. However, it also means the punishers aren't really punishers -- they have no free will!

Ok, I think I made my point 57 times now. I'll quit.

Indeed. And we have no choice but to bring up stupid arguments about whether we should punish or not...

For me, its simple: the only reasons to punish people are to deter others from doing the same, and to reform the criminal in question from repeating his error. Modern prisons are reasonable in the first way, but hideously dire in the second. Oh well.

Sorry, but I don't see punishment as anything but revenge. If it was to reform our "poor misguided offenders" then we are doing an incredibly bad job of it.

We become like those we associate with I am told, so let's lock up the shoplifter with people who are guilty of violent assaults and see who benefits hmm?


I am absolutely convinced we are living in region 3, logically it is the only one which makes sense. One day I must get around to writing that entry, mutter mutter.........

If there is no free will weather or not to imprison criminals has nothing to do what we want. It's already been decided.

That's the beauty of determinism, nothing's really anyone's fault. Since you don't really have free will, just the illusion of free will, you're not responsible for anything. It was predetermined and you could have done nothing differently, so you shouldn't feel guilty.

Of couorse weather or not you feel guilty is also predetermined.

This post was predetermined to, complete with typos and spelling mistakes.

If there is free will, then we are responsible for our actions. I personally prefer this thought. I don't want to be a computer program. Or a character in a melodrama, or is it a tragedy? A comedy?

Maybe I'm just driving myself with these questions. Maybe I'm predestined to drive myself crazy. I give up. This is too hard.

I think the problem with free will has and always will be the if-then relationship. If cause A happens then effect B couldn't have happened any other way than the way that it did.

One could argue that a cause is simply that, a cause, without it there is no effect and then the whole arguement for free will disintigrates. Which is why I don't think that free will should be argued for from that angle.

However, contrary to logic as the case may be I simply refuse to see the Truth of the matter in that light. I think that humans have the ability to choose the course in their lives. I think that perhaps we are influenced by certian actions that took place in our pasts and perhaps there are some direct causes, but an all inclusive, everything has one cause one effect is nothing short of ludicrous. I actually tried to put an article explaining this on the edited guide, however it is lost in peer review at the moment.

And if one truly looked at it, is it even possible for the cause of a murder (as this conversation was discussing) to be linked to one past event? Surely there are several influences instead.

Perhaps what I'm really trying to say in my long winded soap box speech is that perhaps a redfinition of terms is in order. There are influences, not causes. This leaves the decision making process within the mind of the person, instead of the mindlessness of fate. This is the premise for the article I wrote about free will, and I'll late that post speak for itself.

Sounds good to me.

Given the influences on my mother during her childhood she should not have been a wonderful Mother. However, she broke the chain of violence, although imperfectly.

A toast to all the people who have escaped from influences that could have destroyed them!

Lucien, you're attacking a straw-man in place of a sensible cause-and-effect model. Nobody with any sense would hold to a "one effect, one cause" model of causality. Obviously one effect has many, many causes, but that doesn't make it any less determined.

I don't know whether you're a maths person, but imagine a formula that takes several variables as input. To calculate X (the effect), you need to know what A, B, C, D, E and F are. Put all six causes into the formula, and you get the effect. Now, only a fool would say that A and A alone is the cause of X. You could say that A through F are all influences on X, but changing the terminology doesn't change the fact that X is totally determined!

Among the causes determining your actions could be such things as your brain chemistry, your upbringing, your culture, your diet, your overall health, your ideas and feelings about free will vs determinism, your various drives and urges, what your friends say, what you read on h2g2, and a myriad of others. Attempting to trace and know all the causes of any effect would be impossible (except, presumably, for God), but that doesn't make the universe any less deterministic.

Now, the author of *this* entry makes the bizarre distinction between acting as if we have free will and acting as if we don't. I'd like to meet someone who acts as if they don't. The very idea makes no sense to me. I believe in determinism, yet I make choices every day. I'm not some kind of resigned, slothful goon, who just lets my life fall apart around me, all the while sighing, 'it was determined...'

Can I recommend an excellent book? It's _Jacques the Fatalist_ by Denis Diderot. Diderot was a buddy of Voltaire and those other French Enlightenment dudes. _Jacues_ is a picaresque about a character (Jacques) who believes that everything which happens on Earth is written in a book up above. Whatever we do, we couldn't have done otherwise. Jacques is, despite his philosophy (or perhaps because of it) an active, dynamic, interesting, and quite likeable character. He reminds me a lot of Ford Prefect, actually.

Lucien, I read your entry on Free Will which you submitted to Peer Review, and I've followed the conversation(s) about it. I think it's a fascinating subject, and I'm definitely interested in discussing it. I hope that someone writes a balanced entry on the subject one day, but that would, by necessity, be an entry which does not come down on one side of the question. Maybe someday when I'm at sea for weeks with nothing else to do....

Briefly, on the topic of Free Will as it relates to criminal justice, I would certainly agree that our criminal justice system is completely misguided and ineffective, except possibly for the purpose of revenge, which is misguided. I say this having served time in, and later been employed by, a jail. In history, the crime rate has followed the health of the economy, and nothing the jailers do has ever changed that. They might as well offer rehabilitation, job training, anything with dignity, and stop placing criminals always in the society of other criminals, where they can learn new tricks and have their contempt for the law reinforced by their peers. The current system is ineffective and corrupt beyond anything resembling good sense.

Revenge is based on the idea that criminals have free will. Rehabilitation is based on the idea that causes can bring about effects. Hmmm...

GTB