Chrisw wrote:

kennyc wrote:morality has nothing what-so-ever to do with free will other than it's a tacked on higher-level sociological concept.

It has everything to do with it: you are only held morally responsible for actions that you make under your own free will.

This is one of the few uses of the phrase "free will" that is actually reasonably clear: free will is the kind of freedom that is necessary for someone to be held morally responsibility for their choices.

Willie71 wrote:
I spent much of my career working in forensic psychiatry (as a psychiatric nurse trained as a family therapist) and we worked under the mantra that every sentence we wrote down could be challenged by a defense lawyer. This honed our skills significantly. We had to be aware of the fallacy of accurate memory, and our many perceptual shortcuts. We had to convey those ideas to judges and other untrained personnel. We also had to learn to not trust common sense, as it was incredibly misleading. We used structured risk assessments as they could be as high as 80% accurate compared to 33% accurate for clinical judgement. So, we are complex, yet simple . With accounting for 40 variables, I could mostly accurately predict recidivism with a young offender, and because of my perceptual limitations, the risk assessment often contradicted my intuition.

Willie71 wrote:Our brains are not well suited to our modern world, for the most part, and what we describe as mental illness, at the mild to moderate level, is actually adaptive in a hunter gatherer society.

kennyc wrote:I see it as somewhat related to randomness. Can the decay of radioactive particles be predicted? Is there true randomness or not and how might this play into a much higher level of 'freedom' as in sentient thought and decision making?

For me at that level -- higher level thought processes -- the complexity supporting it (chemical processes, neural firings and branching/connectivity) is such that it is equivalent to free will whether it actually is or not.

kennyc wrote:Please note that this is the Psychology and Neuroscience forum not theology or philosophy.

kennyc wrote:If you throw out all the religious baggage and just look at the science that's the core.

I suppose it starts with the definition of free-will.

Chrisw wrote:

kennyc wrote:Please note that this is the Psychology and Neuroscience forum not theology or philosophy.

Free will is a philosophical concept. No reason why psychologists and neuroscientists shouldn't contribute to that but it isn't a scientific problem. You aren't ever going to be able to settle this with an experiment.

Willie71 wrote:I am aware of compatibalism, and see why its appealing to many. I don't think the emerging neuroscience is going to support it as the evidence comes in, but we'll see as the research is being done.

Spearthrower wrote:

Willie71 wrote:
I spent much of my career working in forensic psychiatry (as a psychiatric nurse trained as a family therapist) and we worked under the mantra that every sentence we wrote down could be challenged by a defense lawyer. This honed our skills significantly. We had to be aware of the fallacy of accurate memory, and our many perceptual shortcuts. We had to convey those ideas to judges and other untrained personnel. We also had to learn to not trust common sense, as it was incredibly misleading. We used structured risk assessments as they could be as high as 80% accurate compared to 33% accurate for clinical judgement. So, we are complex, yet simple . With accounting for 40 variables, I could mostly accurately predict recidivism with a young offender, and because of my perceptual limitations, the risk assessment often contradicted my intuition.

That is fascinating because I have been arguing just this recently: to overcome the limitations of our cognitive processes requires extensive, rigorous training. No doubt the threat of legal recourse serves only to hone that even more finely!

I can't say that my own academic background engendered anywhere near such robust cognitive refinement - in fact, the reason why I didn't take any social anthropology courses in my final year, and instead specialized in the biological side thereafter, was because the social side seemed to positively revel in, even reward sloppy thinking.

I would suggest you avoid refining the cognitive awareness to this level. As they say, "ignorance is bliss." When I look at ads, political debates, or even the mainstream media, all I see is manipulation of processes people aren't aware of. If this is interesting to you, I suggest Derren Brown. A lot of what he does is simply suggestion, not mind reading. Its scary to see what is likely to come from issues such as radical Islam, as the components of right wing fascism are building in western culture. I have no power or influence to stop this. I have to remind myself repeatedly that I'm not being fucked with, that people simply aren't aware of what their brains are doing to them . A little bit of fear, an enemy, confirmation bias, and framing violence as defensive is quite simple, and has very predictable results. We have quite a few examples of this throughout recorded history.

This forum, however, over the years has really helped a lot - as often as not from encountering well reasoned positions with which I initially disagreed. It's a fairly unique environment, even if there are sometimes a few elbows thrown, and I've seen the effects this degree of engagement has had on many a member's critical thinking capacity.

As long as one opens oneself up to introspection ,and engages metacognition. These traits are not engaged by everyone, and research is starting to show not everyone is capable of thinking in these ways. It's likely part of our domestication. A few retain these abilities, and the rest just have to follow.

Willie71 wrote:Our brains are not well suited to our modern world, for the most part, and what we describe as mental illness, at the mild to moderate level, is actually adaptive in a hunter gatherer society.

And it certainly provides an explanation of many of humanity's less noble traits, a perfect example being the in-group bias with regards to receiving and processing information. The problem is that even being aware of it, you still feel the compulsion to accept stuff you want to hear from people you like and reject things you don't want to hear from people you don't! What a wonderful but fucked up bunch of apes we are!

Chrisw wrote:

kennyc wrote:If you throw out all the religious baggage and just look at the science that's the core.

No one has brought up religion here. Morality does not have to have any connection to religion (e.g. atheists are not all moral nihilists).

I suppose it starts with the definition of free-will.

Look up "compatibilism". That should be the starting point for any scientifically grounded discussion of free will.

It's depressing that there are neuroscientists who have clearly never heard of compatibilism (the idea is hundreds of years old!).

Abstract:
Abstract: Many philosophers appeal to intuitions to support some philosophical views. However, there is reason to be concerned about this practice as scientific evidence has documented systematic bias in philosophically relevant intuitions as a function of seemingly irrelevant features (e.g., personality). One popular defense used to insulate philosophers from these concerns holds that philosophical expertise eliminates the influence of these extraneous factors. Here, we test this assumption. We present data suggesting that verifiable philosophical expertise in the free will debate—as measured by a reliable and validated test of expert knowledge—does not eliminate the influence of one important extraneous feature (i.e., the heritable personality trait extraversion) on judgments concerning freedom and moral responsibility. These results suggest that, in at least some important cases, the expertise defense fails. Implications for the practice of philosophy, experimental philosophy, and applied ethics are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

minininja wrote:This might be of interest to some. Harris fairly accurately highlights what the experience of not having free will, feels like to me. As I think I've heard him say before, 'if you look closely, free will isn't even a particularly good illusion'.

kennyc wrote:

Chrisw wrote:

kennyc wrote:Please note that this is the Psychology and Neuroscience forum not theology or philosophy.

Free will is a philosophical concept. No reason why psychologists and neuroscientists shouldn't contribute to that but it isn't a scientific problem. You aren't ever going to be able to settle this with an experiment.

Ha! You wish.

Willie71 wrote:I am aware of compatibalism, and see why its appealing to many. I don't think the emerging neuroscience is going to support it as the evidence comes in, but we'll see as the research is being done.

Willie71 wrote:....
I spent much of my career working in forensic psychiatry (as a psychiatric nurse trained as a family therapist) and we worked under the mantra that every sentence we wrote down could be challenged by a defense lawyer. This honed our skills significantly. We had to be aware of the fallacy of accurate memory, and our many perceptual shortcuts. We had to convey those ideas to judges and other untrained personnel. We also had to learn to not trust common sense, as it was incredibly misleading. We used structured risk assessments as they could be as high as 80% accurate compared to 33% accurate for clinical judgement. So, we are complex, yet simple . With accounting for 40 variables, I could mostly accurately predict recidivism with a young offender, and because of my perceptual limitations, the risk assessment often contradicted my intuition.

Our brains are not well suited to our modern world, for the most part, and what we describe as mental illness, at the mild to moderate level, is actually adaptive in a hunter gatherer society.

Chrisw wrote:But compatibilism is just the strategy of defining free will in such a way that we can be said to have free will even if the world is deterministic. The motivation for defining it in this way is that the alternative, traditional definition makes no sense.

Chrisw wrote:Furthermore, this difference has to be something other than blind randomness, it has to be "me" making the choices. This implies that I am something more than a physical being.

ughaibu wrote:All that is required for the libertarian position is that in a non-determined world an agent can control some of their actions.

ughaibu wrote:

Chrisw wrote:But compatibilism is just the strategy of defining free will in such a way that we can be said to have free will even if the world is deterministic. The motivation for defining it in this way is that the alternative, traditional definition makes no sense.

In the contemporary literature, both compatibilists and incompatibilists define free will in pretty much the same way, that an agent has free will on any occasion on which that agent makes and enacts a conscious choice from amongst realisable alternatives. The difference is in what the two camps consider sufficient for "realisability". Compatibilists tend to argue that logical possibility or sometimes physical possibility, is enough, ".

incompatibilists hold that there must be a time at which there is no true statement about which action the agent will subsequently perform.

Notice that neither require acting "differently given identical physical circumstances"

Chrisw wrote:Furthermore, this difference has to be something other than blind randomness, it has to be "me" making the choices. This implies that I am something more than a physical being.

All that is required for the libertarian position is that in a non-determined world an agent can control some of their actions. How does that imply that such an agent is "more than a physical being"?