Hermit wrote:zoon wrote:This evolved method of prediction gives us a somewhat indirect method of partial control: if an action is followed by a consequence that person doesn’t want (that is, punishing them), then they are less likely to repeat the action.
It's called operant conditioning, and it works with reinforcing stimuli as well as aversion.
zoon wrote:This control by consequences is only going to work if the person’s action was in fact chosen and neither forced nor the result of mental illness, i.e. only if it was “free willed”. There is no point in punishing someone, or otherwise holding them responsible, unless the action they are being punished for was “free willed” in that limited sense.
If that were the case we could conclude that dogs have free will. Cats not so much…
Yes, I oversimplified what I was trying to say. When I wrote: “if an action is followed by a consequence that person doesn’t want (that is, punishing them), then they are less likely to repeat the action”, I agree that I was unintentionally describing operant conditioning, as when Pavlov’s dogs salivated on hearing a bell which had in the past heralded food (though as you say that’s a reinforcing stimulus rather than aversion).
I was intending to talk about the fear of consequences which, much of the time, keeps us following specific social rules, and which is rarely learnt through operant conditioning. For example, a driver in the UK generally tries to stay within the speed limit because they don’t want to get points on their licence, and this is not simple operant conditioning, it’s a balancing of risk and reward which requires massively more information processing. It’s a fear of consequences, but in the context of a shared complex model of social rules and expectations. A society which tried to control people only through operant conditioning would not be recognisably human.
As a default, drivers in the UK who break the speed limit are taken to have been free-willed and responsible, i.e. liable to be punished. If someone was holding a gun to the speeding driver’s head and telling them to go faster, then they were coerced and there’s not much point in punishing the driver, better to get the person holding the gun. If the driver had an unexpected epileptic fit, then again there’s not much point in punishment as such, though their driving licence would probably be taken away for safety reasons. In both those cases, the speeding driver would not be taken as having exercised free will, or as having been responsible for the speeding. (The cases where the driver is not held responsible are both worse for the driver than merely getting points on the licence, I think this is where Keep It Real may not have thought things through. We are only likely to be excused punishment on grounds of lack of free will where things are already worse for us than the punishment would have been, otherwise evasion could be too easy. Young children are not taken to have legal responsibility, but their parents are expected to control them as they would not be allowed to control other adults.)
(Perhaps the gun to the head driver might have chosen to be shot, and it becomes a case of deciding what’s reasonable.)
All of this is entirely compatible with our being mechanisms following the laws of physics: I am describing legal rather than theological free will and responsibility. If science enabled us to predict each other in detail as mechanisms, instead of using evolved and often inaccurate guesswork, I expect that societies would not be organised as they are now, and the concepts of free will and responsibility might well be discarded.
by 
yes, it's true. Call me Comfort 
