Quote:
|
Originally Posted by mother engine
a teacher was speaking about b. f. skinner and determinism when a student spoke up that the belief in determinism gave rise to an excuse to 'do whatever you want' and to my horror the teacher smiled and agreed and that was that. .
|
Hi, there, and welcome to the Unending Discussion of free will and determinism! This first example is a conundrum that pops up continuously -- If I am fully determined by the laws of physics since the Big Bang, what's to keep me from doing just as I please? Here's the answer: If I'm fully determined, then I can't possibly do ANYTHING "just as I please". I can only do what I've been determined to do from the beginning of time! I have no free will to do anything -- just a illusory sense that I have freedom. If embracing determinism leads me to a life of dissipation or violence, there is nothing I can do to prevent it.
So the question, which pops up in all sorts of contexts, has an answer, after all, although it's not a very satisfying one for most people. We have the
feeling that we are free to do what we want. Our neural machinery has a mental cue that has evolved to tell us when our perceptions arrive at the conclusion we can do or are doing something that is not determined. But, as you said, "It may not be true", which I don't think is stated often enough. I think every scientific paper (and certainly ANYTHING touching on religious ideas) should end with those words as a matter of social ritual, to force to face the fact that we just might not know what we're saying.
My favorite story that captures the sense of this argument is a fragment from Stoic philosophy. (I'm remembering the story - some details may be fuzzy.)
Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher emperor, had a slave, Epictetus, (later freed) who was also a philosopher. As the story goes, Epictetus knocked an expensive vase off a table and it shattered on the floor. Marcus Aurelius starting beating him for it. Epictetus cried out ,"Master, as a believer in determinism, you know that I had no choice in this matter, but was predestined from the beginning of time to break that vase!" Marcus Aurelius replied, still swinging, "And you, as a believer in determinism, know then that I have no choice but to beat you!"
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by mother engine
i mention all of this because i believe that there may be a defense system built up in the brain of the average person that prohibates them from approaching true logic when discussing a subject which challenges his or her morality..
|
Cognitive dissonance theory is a well-documented function of the mind, and is one of my favorite subjects. Cognitive dissonance occurs whenever your word view and what you observe in the outer world don't jibe. All indications are that this is a built-in mechanism that operates continuously. It gives us our primary motive for learning -- to resolve the conflicts we encounter every day in all activities between belief and empirical fact.
Cognitive dissonance is the foundation of science, where a method of analysis and evaluation has learned to seek resolutions through the interaction between inner conceptual representations of the world and observations taken from the world outside the boundaries of our skin. Science takes explicit recognition of the fact that our senses may not be accurate and our understanding may be wrong, which means that if the outer world doesn't match our theories, either a) we need better observations, or, b) we need to adjust our theories.
But science in a special case. Usually, when we're faced with a glaring discontinuity between our internal picture of the world and what we observe in the world around us,
is first to deny the observation, we "can't believe our eyes". This has been the mountain science has had to climb from the beginning, as every new discovery offended some cleric's idea of what the Bible said should be true, and for which the scientist had to be silenced, or punished (or today, ridiculed, or outvoted, or de-funded). The current point of attack by those deep into cognitive dissonance over science is biological evolution, and this, if nothing else, makes it worth studying up on the subjects (i.e, of evolution and also cognitive dissonance).
There's a lot more to this, but this is too long already. Try Googling "cognitive dissonance" and you'll find plenty of examples of what you yourself have seen when people are confronted with something they "know in their heart" just can't be true.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by mother engine
this all comes around to negating ideas of judgment, punishment and good and evil and so a reconstruction of social laws would be the first thing on the list if difinitive proof were to come about..
|
If pure determinism is true, this will or will not happen because it's already on rails. It won't be because we decide to do it and have the freedom to do it. We will have no choice, though we will think we do. (Please note -- I'm not convinced this is the only possibility, but it seems to be the only possibility (no free will in the sense we like to think about it), given the current state of our understanding. There are lots of other posts about this subject on Hypography.)
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by mother engine
i am not sure what i mean by all of this but it is my form of uncontroled inertia for the day.
|
Hope it gets better... Are you determined to make it so?????
