Anything and everything we can and will do is bound by the state of molecules in the universe before our birth. Physics does the rest. We are like a computer which reacts to inputs, doing different things depending on the state of the molecules inside the computer. What the computer will do can be predicted. If we break it down to quantum mechanics, we simply get more chaos and uncertainty, not more free will.
We are the sum of our experiences and physiology which we get by chance. Free will is an illusion. When a brain tumor forces a man to kill his family, we understand the man is simply unlucky. Similarly, I see criminals as malfunctioning people who got the wrong environment, the wrong genetics, the wrong physical causalities that compels a person to commit the crime they did. They could not have done otherwise given those inputs.
This doesn't mean that punishment is therefore useless. Nothing good is lost and something good is gained. We now have a basis for incredible amounts of empathy. Vengeance now makes no sense. Our goal now is to rehabilitate, not to punish for the sake of it.
The argument was that if there was no free will and humans are just products of their biology and environment then humans would be doomed to repeating the same actions over and over again. In other words, there will never be moral progress, for example.
To me the fact that humans are a product of the environment and biology (and biology ultimately being a product of physics) seems obvious. What other possible answer could there be? Even if you believe god breathes life into dust we come shooting out, we did not choose our soul. You're starting out from the premise that you are given a brain/soul/etc that you did not choose which will more or less determine everything you do or think to do.
To address the actual argument, I think humans are far too complex for us to end up repeating the same actions like a dumb computer. People are an amalgamation of a wide range of motivations, failings, and idiosyncrasies. The world is full of varied environments, and even identical twins living in the same household have different epigenetics. When we look even deeper, the twins do not have identical atomic structures, and neither is the environment exactly the same for both twins down onto the micro level. This is just a very pretentious way for me to say that there are always very small differences in everything (chaos theory).
So, everybody's atoms are different, their environments are different, and they affect other humans (such as passing on of history and past failings) to form this super complicated system that allows for so much diversity in human behavior and history. (But in some cases, it seems like history repeats itself.)
Thinking back about the computer analogy reminds me of chess engines. Strong chess engines are non-deterministic, in other words they do not always do the same move or analysis if you rewind the position again. The chess engine has no free will. It is just the interaction between lines of code and the cores of the processor. And over time differences emerge, and the position just deviates from there until we get something totally new. Imagine a chess game with idiosyncratic and error-prone humans whose actions and feelings change from day to day and hour by hour. Now imagine 7 billion people all playing this gigantic game of chess. Anything can happen.
A hypothetical posed by the commenter is as follows: If we know that murderers are simply malfunctioning people, since there is no free will it must be due to genetics or environment. Can we then start killing the person's offspring to stop future murderers?
Well, no. We can, but we shouldn't. We don't know if the cause of the murder was due to genetics or the environment or some vague mixture of the two which we cannot untangle. Obviously if the problem is environmental killing the baby is as dumb as killing yourself to prevent cancer. We also don't know that the murder gene will pass on and manifest in the same way to their offspring. Ideally we would rehabilitate criminals but the world is not ideal and we do not have the time, resources, or means to fix criminals. 'Rehabilitation' can very well involve punishment, it's just that punishment for the sake of vengeance makes little sense. It may very well be that a child will respond to a scolding or grounding after being caught with his hand in the cookie jar, for example. So when I mentioned 'rehabilitation' I don't always mean a life of free food and Xbox inside the same room all day. The question is what gives the best results, but who the hell knows?
To me the fact that humans are a product of the environment and biology (and biology ultimately being a product of physics) seems obvious. What other possible answer could there be? Even if you believe god breathes life into dust we come shooting out, we did not choose our soul. You're starting out from the premise that you are given a brain/soul/etc that you did not choose which will more or less determine everything you do or think to do.
To address the actual argument, I think humans are far too complex for us to end up repeating the same actions like a dumb computer. People are an amalgamation of a wide range of motivations, failings, and idiosyncrasies. The world is full of varied environments, and even identical twins living in the same household have different epigenetics. When we look even deeper, the twins do not have identical atomic structures, and neither is the environment exactly the same for both twins down onto the micro level. This is just a very pretentious way for me to say that there are always very small differences in everything (chaos theory).
So, everybody's atoms are different, their environments are different, and they affect other humans (such as passing on of history and past failings) to form this super complicated system that allows for so much diversity in human behavior and history. (But in some cases, it seems like history repeats itself.)
Thinking back about the computer analogy reminds me of chess engines. Strong chess engines are non-deterministic, in other words they do not always do the same move or analysis if you rewind the position again. The chess engine has no free will. It is just the interaction between lines of code and the cores of the processor. And over time differences emerge, and the position just deviates from there until we get something totally new. Imagine a chess game with idiosyncratic and error-prone humans whose actions and feelings change from day to day and hour by hour. Now imagine 7 billion people all playing this gigantic game of chess. Anything can happen.
A hypothetical posed by the commenter is as follows: If we know that murderers are simply malfunctioning people, since there is no free will it must be due to genetics or environment. Can we then start killing the person's offspring to stop future murderers?
Well, no. We can, but we shouldn't. We don't know if the cause of the murder was due to genetics or the environment or some vague mixture of the two which we cannot untangle. Obviously if the problem is environmental killing the baby is as dumb as killing yourself to prevent cancer. We also don't know that the murder gene will pass on and manifest in the same way to their offspring. Ideally we would rehabilitate criminals but the world is not ideal and we do not have the time, resources, or means to fix criminals. 'Rehabilitation' can very well involve punishment, it's just that punishment for the sake of vengeance makes little sense. It may very well be that a child will respond to a scolding or grounding after being caught with his hand in the cookie jar, for example. So when I mentioned 'rehabilitation' I don't always mean a life of free food and Xbox inside the same room all day. The question is what gives the best results, but who the hell knows?
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