the village idiot

Damn you all! Arbtalk, my last remaining sanctuary, corrupted. poor village idiot...poor village idiot...poor village idiot...poor village idiot...

You're almost there Vesp I think you are attaching too much significance to the concious mind. It is certainly true to say that the concious mind influences the unconcious mind. This is undeniable. The important thing to appreciate here is that what appears in conciousness (thoughts) are themselves products of the unconcious mind. These thoughts can and do feed back to the unconcious mind generating more thoughts (ad infinitum) until death. The unconcious brain is constantly automatically churning out stuff. A small proportion of this stuff appears in conciousness as thoughts. This is what gives us the sense of being a Self. We have no control over the unconcious, what appears in conciousness or how these appearances feed back to the unconcious. These are the processes that dictate how our lives pan out in every way, and as we have no control over any of it, by extension, we have no free will. The sense of Self in conciousness gives us the very strong impression that 'we' are pulling the levers of life experience, but this too is all just part of the automatic feedback loop generated by our marvelous but ADHD smitten crazy unconcious brain. Your points about crime clinics and forgiveness are very interesting. Forgiveness is a very helpful response for people affected by crime. Would the certainty of being forgiven result in more crime being actioned? Quite possibly. The threat of imprisonment (removal from society because you are a danger to it) acts as a useful preventative input to peoples brains and should certainly remain for the time being. Whether or not the criminal is forgiven is important but a bit of a side issue. What would be most beneficial is to get to a stage where we understand the significant inputs that put the criminal's brain into the state it was the moment he/she performed the crime. This is a fairly monumental undertaking but essentially possible, at least for the main drivers. We can then structure things to make the criminal action less likely to occur in the first place. This is a much more productive way forward than demanding revenge for an individual's act when they are essentially a meaty computer that thinks it has got itself sussed.

Hi Mesterh. We haven't yet got a grip on quantum mechanics, it may well be that it provides a barrier to ever being able to predict the future. This doesn't in any way bolster the free will argument. If anything it supports the argument against it. If there is unpredictable randomness at a sub-atomic level this would suggest that we have even less control over events (thoughts and actions). Even if nothing is determined at quantum level our brains still do what they do with what they have access to. This is determined. We have no control over what our brains command at any given moment, it just feels like we do. Our brain state in any given moment is dictated by our genes, stored memories, the strength of particular neural connections, the environment and ultimately every event (including thoughts) from the beginning of time up until a microsecond ago. We have no initiation control over any of these things. The only logical inference from this is that we don't have free will. If someone truly lost their memory their actions and thoughts would be different but their 'amount' of free will would be the same. None. Chaos theory doesn't affect free will either. To think about the nature of free will you have to consider the state of the brain that preceeds any thought or action and understand that you have no control over that exact state. You could have a thought that changes the mind at the last second causing you to carry out a different action, but that thought itself arose automatically too. It feels very much like 'You' have changed 'Your' mind but this is just an illusion (again, created automatically by the brain). It is absolutely possible to know we have no free will. There is nowhere for it to be in the material world. Even if you imagine a 'supernatural' force independant of the physical brain/body deciding which option to go for (this is what it can feel like sometimes), that in itself would be contrary to free will as it would not be you deciding. Hanging 'thieving scum' is certainly an option. It would presumably stop them thieving, but it would be immoral and do we really want to go down that road. If you accept the no free will argument, and I don't really think there's any way you can't (admittedly, as a humble stick technician I am crap at explaining it), then purposefully punishing a murderer would be akin to torturing a grizzly bear for killing a human. The murderer should be locked up, but every effort should be made to change his brain. This should be entirely possible with the right inputs and we will get better at this over time. Understanding that we have no free will will also help governments and societies to put things in place to reduce the frequency of bad behaviour in the future. People worry that the realisation of no free will will lead to more destructive behaviour. In actual fact it has great potential to take things in completely the opposite direction.

You lucky bastard Mull! If I hear the words 'par boil' pass granny's lips one more time she's going down. centenarian or no!

Was anyone fortunate enough to not have the 'what's the best way to cook roast potatoes' conversation? In my experience it is a universal constant, whenever roast potatoes are served to a family gathering. You'd think that human civilisation would have had enough time to reach some form of generally accepted consensus by now!?

Very similar thing happened to me Egg. Mrs Idiot bought a mynah bird a few years ago, she also took it back after a week saying it refused to utter a single word. "Oh not again!" fumed the shopkeeper. "those bloody mynah's are forever going on strike!"

What does a native american do after drinking too much PG Tips? A tea pee.

What do you do if you trip over a native american's peace pipe? Sioux. Can I join, Big J?

Not sure about that Stubby. I know Stalin was prone to twitter

I feel your pain Vespasian. Rather than thinking about free will both existing and not existing, try framing it in terms of 'free will doesn't exist but the illusion of it certainly does'. It is very difficult to think your way through the illusion because your brain is creating the feeling of free will and tagging it onto every thought and action including thoughts on whether there is free will! The brain creates a 'You' and attributes some of it's automatic processes to it, giving the impression that there is a You thinking about these things. In reality there is no 'thinker of thoughts'. You can get a slight sense of how thinking is automatic, beyond the control of a 'self'. It is just a bit of fun but gives a small amount of insight into how the brain does what it does independantly, given what it's got. Sit and think for 1 minute. You can think about absolutely anything you want. The only rule is to use your free will to not think about a pink elephant. Ok, Go.

Just shave one butt cheek geoffers. This results in mono-glutinal slippage. When combined with spontaneous microkeratonially induced reuptake on the opposing contour your chaffing issues will soon be a thing of the past. I wear a lot of leather.

That's certainly one way to clear the house once weird uncle Albert's behaviour starts to cross the line.

Ok. It is worth thinking about the fact that our Christian ancestors would certainly have had this girl burned alive at the stake. Celebrating our Christian heritage is a pretty disturbing concept. It is perfectly legitimate to state that Christianity has moved on since then, but it is very important to note that it is secular reasoning and science that have shaped Christian thinking on what is correct in the bible. The bible is getting shorter. Eventually it will be able to be viewed as a pretty decent book on ethics, once God's perfect word has been extremely heavily and permanently edited. It would be very easy for almost anybody to write a much better code of conduct in a few minutes right now. In the interests of thread integrity I will try very hard to make this the last I say on this matter here!

Let it go VI, let it go!

Hope you have a wonderful day everybody, remember to go with the flow!

Mushrooms are certainly another route into experiencing the feeling of 'no self'. It is certainly an avenue worth exploring for some. The issue with psychedelics is that (as Sam Harris points out) it is akin to embarking on a journey by strapping yourself to a ballistic missile with no guidance system. Meditation is more like raising a sail on a steady ship with a rudder and cruising gently towards a better life. Each leg of the journey is more interesting and enhancing than the previous one. There are a few light storms on route, but by steering a good course the voyage is transformative. Blimey, that was a bit flowery wasn't it!

Absolutely! It doesn't have to be a complicated activity though like snowboarding or motorcycling. The reason these colouring books have become so popular is because they put people in a state of flow. They lose themselves/ tap into the ever present state that exists beneath the 'self' illusion, and this feels good. Attachment to the Self has served us very well in the past, it has helped us to stay alive long enough to reproduce and ensure the passing on of our genes. The world is a very different place now, we no longer face anything like the same level of threat. Our brain evolution has not been able to keep pace with the rapidly changing modern world and as a result the 'self' construct is now generally causing us more harm than good.

Pretty close, and you're certainly thinking along the right lines to internalising the argument. Young babies have not had time to develop the Self illusion. They get the same signals from their bowels to their brains and from their brains back to their bowels and they subsequently fill their nappies. They just have no concept of themselves having done it! We dont blame the baby, we understand that it had no free will to act otherwise. Once the infant has constucted the illusion of self we feel justified in apportioning blame if there is a toiletting error. This is unfair as the infant (or adult) had no control over how it's biology acted. It is just suggested by the brain that it did immediately after the event. After inputs from the parents (potty training) the brain learns new patterns of behaviour and the process, in adulthood, is thankfully a little different. Adults are still acting automatically though, and as you point out the brain signals to us that we masterminded the whole enriching experience. Do we blame an elderly relative with a damaged brain (dementia) when they soil themselves. Could they have acted differently? Did they have free will? Their brain was in exactly the state that it was to produce the result. This is the state of affairs for all of us all of the time. The state of the brain dictates our actions and we do not pick our brain state in any one moment in time. There is a hack (mindfulness meditation) which can make a huge difference to the probability of potential outcomes and dramatically change how your life unfolds and your enjoyment of it. Hopefully we can talk some more about that over Christmas. It would be great to get your thoughts.

I fully understand the sentiment, and this individual certainly needs to be kept away from society. But what we need to ask for pure moral clarity is 'what caused him to do it'? It needs to be broken down into smaller chunks than 'because he has an evil temperement'. Really love the first sentence though!

Fundamentally you can't, but if the brain is seeded with the appropriate information and it processes/stores it in a certain way (dictated by the brain's physiology and chemistry which is constantly morphing) it may 'open your mind'. If these inputs don't happen in this way you will have a different outcome. A human brain that has never been exposed to the initial input (in whatever form) that free will doesn't exist can never come to the conclusion that it doesn't.

The main problem with getting your head around the issue of free will is that to do the topic justice you have to discount the evidence presented by your own subjective experience (a necessary control for almost all scientific endeavor). The complication is that it is subjective experience itself that is the article of examination. You end up in a spiralling loop of brain bending confusion. It's no wonder it makes our brains hurt. Most people are convinced that free will is a real phenomenon because it feels to them obvious that they have it. You have to try and bend your brain around the obstacle of subjective experience to carry on down the road of discovery!

If I may, I would like to revise my statement above. I think it is probably entirely possible to predict the future in the specific terms of which posts Matelot is going to click the 'like' button on!

Good questions Mesterh! I don't think we are able to predict the future in any meaningful way, however I do believe that it is theoretically possible to do so. The barrier to doing this, as pointed at in an earlier post, is that some computing device would have to be able to be aware of every single causal influence that has affected everything in the universe since the beginning of time. I dont think we are ever going to have this, even given the fact that our developments in AI are truly terrifying. I believe that everything that we think and do is the effect of an unimaginable number of causal influences, none of which we picked, stretching back to the beginning of time. When Vespasian noted that it doesn't really matter whether our outputs are predetermined or not I think he was probably right. It does have important implications for things like our criminal justice system, and systems of governance, but in terms of living out our day to day lives it pretty much is business as usual. To accept the existence of free will you have to either assume that there is some kind of central collection point for information in the brain that collates all the neural firings and combines them in a sensible way to issue a directive with the additional power to 'change it's mind'. We know there is no such region, and this is not how the brain works. Or you have to assume that there is some kind of non-material force independant of the brain that can veto it's deliberations. This would be, by definition, supernatural. The worry that we would all become psychopaths is an interesting one, but there is no reason to assume that this would be the case. Ultimately we may not have free will but our actions are most definitely influenced by outside forces. This is where aspects like good governance come in. Despite perceptions, the world has become a hugely less violent place over time. This is largely due to the development of governmental structures which influence cultures and by extension our behaviours. The question of whether we have free will is still certainly a hotly debated topic amongst scientists and philosophers. We do not yet have a definitive answer. All we can do is weigh up the available evidence that we become exposed to and make a choice (or not)

Seriously top marks for conceding on free will. It is an exceedingly high hurdle to clear. The problem with the rest of the post is that if you agree there is no such thing as free will then you have to accept that individuals cannot be held accountable for their actions. It is certainly true that the threat of punishment could have an effect on peoples brains and reduce criminal behaviour in the population, but the individual (by definition of no free will) cannot choose for that information to be utilised by the brain in issuing it's directives at any one point in time. It would be wrong to assume that they could have acted any differently even given the threat of punishment.