Asklemmy

48107 readers

697 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Do you believe in free will? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

98 comments fedilink hide all child comments

There is an argument that free will doesn't exist because there is an unbroken chain of causality we are riding on that dates back to the beginning of time. Meaning that every time you fart, scratch your nose, blink, or make lifechanging decisions there is a pre existing reason. These reasons might be anything from the sensory enviornment you were in the past minute, the hormone levels in your bloodstream at the time, hormones you were exposed to as a baby, or how you were parented growing up. No thought you have is really original and is more like a domino affect of neurons firing off in reaction to what you have experienced. What are your thoughts on this?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 5 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

This is my favorite take on this topic. I also feel this way and its hard to get people to look at it this way I've noticed. People tend to loop back to "If theres no free will why do anything?" Or "If there is no free will why should murderers be punished?" Just because theres possibly no free will doesnt mean we should change the way we live our lives.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago

It's a good question, though people tend to treat it as a thought-terminating cliché rather than exploring the implications. Why should murderers be punished, actually? Enacting punishment is an external incentive, a stimulus, supposedly structured to make the cost to the potential murderer higher than the benefit they hope to get by killing. Belief in punishment, therefore, is consistent with the non-free will position. But if there's no free will, then why not instead try to "solve" murder, and not have murderers anymore, by discovering the root causes that drive people to murder, and mitigating them? We'd all be better off!

On the other hand, free will implies that the mechanism of punishment may or may not be punishing to the murderer. We don't know what they feel in response to stimulus; they have free will! Like in the story of Br'er Rabbit, trying to determine a foolproof method of punishment that's hateful to the murderer is an exercise in futility, since we can't know their mind.