[ExI] Humans losing freewill

[Stathis Papaioannou]

"Instinct", "intuition" and "gut feeling" can be defined quite easily. They
are not logically problematic, even if they are wrong. For example, a "gut
feeling" is a belief not fully based on rational evidence. We can argue
that we should, or should not, follow a gut feeling, we can do research to
see whether following a gut feeling leads to a good outcome, speculate on
whether people have access to subconscious information that manifests in a
gut feeling, and so on. But "free will" is nonsensical unless you use it in
the trivial sense of "I choose to do what I want to do, if I wanted to do
otherwise I would have chosen otherwise, and I'm not sure what I'm going to
do until I've actually done it". That definition works, but it's not what
most people have in mind when they use the term.

On 21 November 2016 at 09:52, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I can say nothing about "free will" because I don't know what it means.​
>  john
>
> I do love someone who wants their words defined properly.  Yet, in
> everyday conversation, I'll bet that you use words like 'instinct',
> 'intuition', 'gut feelings' and more and cannot give a proper, that is to
> say, a more scientific definition than is usual among the insufficiently
> educated.
>
> And if you don't, then welcome to my club!
>
> bill w
>
> On Sun, Nov 20, 2016 at 3:29 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Nov 20, 2016 at 3:43 PM, William Flynn Wallace <
>> foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> ​> ​
>>> In the absence of compelling data, we assume that a person meant to do
>>> what they did, and use that as the basis for a legal decision.
>>> ​ ​
>>> Determinism fits in here too:  we have to assume it in criminal cases,
>>>
>>
>> ​Well yes. Nobody is saying that events never have causes, just that
>> they don't always.
>> The only useful purpose for criminal law is to stop someone who hurt
>> somebody else from doing it again and to deter others from doing something
>> similar; that is to say criminal law causes people to behave in certain
>> ways and civilization would be impossible without it.
>>  ​
>>>
>>>
>>> ​> ​
>>> just like free will, even though both constructs are arguable.
>>
>>
>> ​I can say nothing about "free will" because I don't know what it means.​
>>
>>
>> ​> ​
>>> When something better comes along, we may have to change
>>> our way of thinking about people and re-write our entire legal system.
>>> But for now, we have no good alternatives.
>>>
>>
>> ​How about treating it as irrelevant if a person is a moral monster
>> because he had bad genes or a bad environment and instead punish him if and
>> only if doing so will prevent him from doing bad stuff again and or deter
>> others. ​If you can explain why
>> ​somebody is a monster that doesn't stop him from being a monster, and I
>> don't care if he's insane or not.​
>>
>> John K Clark
>>
>>
>>
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-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
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