Posted: Jul 22, 2018 10:56 am
romansh wrote:Zoon
Again I have no problem with the concept of not being coerced etc.
We live our lives in our mental inner selves or whatever. But all that is chemistry/physics … cause and effect whether deterministic or indeterministic. There are a whole bunch of compatibilist versions of free will. Some will overlap legal descriptions of so-called free will.
Also, I don't agree with chemistry/physics follow laws. Laws are to varying degrees very accurate descriptions of what we observe.
Can my chemistry/physics do otherwise? My chemistry/physics allows me to envisage other possibilities, but is completely [well almost] oblivious to the moment to moment mechanisms that drive my so-called decisions and consequent actions. I see little freedom in all this, if any. We put a whole bunch of faith into consciousness and its powers. I can't help surmise it is misplaced.
The fact that science is useless in predicting human actions is irrelevant.
So answer me … in what sense can your chemistry/physics do otherwise? If your answer is it can't then all this compatibilism is an interesting distraction. Our environment shapes us and we our environment.
I agree with you that we are, almost certainly, in the end deterministic mechanisms. If scientists understood brains in sufficient detail, we may well be as controllable as any machine – i.e. not at the level of quantum indeterminacy, but enough for practical purposes. As you say, our environment shapes us and we our environment.
I may well be misunderstanding you again here, but is the problem the apparent disconnect between thinking of people as deterministic mechanisms on the one hand, and as autonomous agents who are subjects of experience, on the other? To think of a person (myself or someone else) simultaneously as a deterministic mechanism and also as an autonomous agent does seem to be, at least on the face of it, an example of doublethink (“Doublethink is the ability to hold two contradictory opinions at the same time without noticing the contradiction.”).
Perhaps the reconciliation comes in the way we shape, and are shaped by, our social environment. We control, or are controlled by, our physical environment in a direct, physical manner; for example, picking up a key and turning it in a lock, or being prevented from entering a room by a locked door. By contrast, adults in a normally functioning human group tend to be actively discouraged from attempting this kind of individual physical control over each other. Locking someone up or shoving them without their consent is assault in British and US law (unless done by an authorised person). This community disapproval of individual bullying is also usual in hunter-gatherer societies, as described in a 2000 paper by Christopher Boehm here:
In effect, a large, ad hoc, community-wide political coalition serves as watchdog over individual behaviours that could lead to victimization of others, or to conflict within the group (see Boehm, 1982, 1999b). This macro-coalition is prepared to use coercive force, if it must, to protect individual group members from predatory exploitation or other harm, and to protect the entire group from disruption and stress brought on by disputes.
We do control each other physically, but the final control is at group, not individual, level. Attempting to control another adult as we control ordinary objects is likely to result in group sanctions; freedom from coercion by individuals within the group is actively policed. One result is that we are actively resistant to thinking of other people as mere physical objects, as science does, and we are especially sensitive to other people treating us as mere objects and attempting to bully illegitimately.
This active community discouragement of individual bullying does seem to be usual both in hunter-gatherers and in other human groups, it’s probably an evolved predisposition. With this in mind, it’s possible to see ourselves both as the determinate physical mechanisms we are, and also, for many practical, social and emotional purposes, as autonomous agents?