rationalskepticism.org

susu.exp wrote:

Keep It Real wrote:So I'd revise what I said to "people aren't responsible for who they are (and therefore what they do (ultimately)). Every action a person takes, from reading a book to shooting somebody, is based on a decision influenced purely by neuron configurations in their brain and the environment (eg - somebody threatening the decision maker with a gun). Neither of these factors are within the decision maker's control. The configuration of their cerebro-neural makeup isn't within their control because all actions which had changed that brain (eg. Choosing to read a book on the importance of assertive self defence) were also based on those solitary two influences, neither of which were within the decision maker's control: the brain and the environment. This process tracks back to the formation of the neural pathways in the brain at their earliest point in the womb. So people aren't responsible for who they are, and by extension, how they act.

I fail to see how that is remotely "silly".

Who then are people? This argument seems ultimately to posit that there are physical features of people that are responsible for how they act. The only way for people to not be responsible is then to posit that they are something beyond that. It seems like this posits a ghost in the machine that happens to be an innocent bystander...

susu.exp wrote:

Keep It Real wrote:I don't understand this: why does a lack of personal responsibility refute that moral/immoral behaviour is possible?

The issue here is that you either make the claim that people are not responsible for their actions for all people, including lawmakers, policemen, judges and juries, or you do not make such a claim. The argument that there should not be a system of punishments for crimes, because criminals can not control their actions is flawed, because going by that argument the system of law enforcement is equally beyond the control of actors within that system.

susu.exp wrote:

Keep It Real wrote:I don’t see how any of those things negates determinism. The quantum mechanics doesn’t suggest there is no cause to a phenomenon AFAIK, just that no cause has yet been identified.

There´s a difference between a lack of determinism and a lack of causality. What we can show through violations of Bells inequality is that local realism is false. That means you either have a universe that is non-local or one that is not counterfactually-definite. Non-locality isn't that in line with classical ideas about causality (it allows causal loops: event A causes event B, event B causes event A in the first place) and it also includes cases where there are multiple possibilities (causal loop happens or not for instance), without assigning probabilities. It gets worse (event A causes event B, event B prevents event A from occuring, B doesn't happen because A doesn't happen-> back to the start), you end up with Physics that are pretty much the plot of the Back to the Future movies.

susu.exp wrote:

Keep It Real wrote:The maths, biology and chemistry stochastics are analytical tools, not true quantifications of what’s going on AFAIK. Please enlighten me if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick.

In maths probability theory is just that: probability theory. You do have a hard time justifying thermodynamics without assuming actual stochasticity - the 2nd law of thermodynamics has a directionallity in time that directly flows from the stochasticity and is hard - if not impossible - to recover from a deterministic physics. In evolution there are various issues, the biggest one is that a deterministic population dynamics only allows integer-values for the fitness of individuals. Generally the fitness differences we find are on the order of 0.001 and smaller, a deterministic version would not have values below 1. You can't really get rid of the stochasticity unless you look at idealized infinite populations.