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I can get into more detail, but the line of thinking is not only compatible with neuroscience, it is as far as I am concerned a necessary conclusion from everything we know about neurobiology (and biology in general). I am a theoretical biologist myself and can get into detail, but Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky has written extensively on the subject, and the conclusions of that school of thought are fully compatible with the conclusions of philosophers of consciousness and the self such as Thomas Metzinger.
So no, I do not think that “the person wanted and intended to do that” is a statement that is compatible with what we know about how brains work. But let’s take a closer look at that. Let’s say you have a person who had his daughter kidnapped, and the kidnappers told him that they would execute his daughter unless he robbed a bank for them. The person believes them. He knows robbing the bank is wrong, he put a plan together to do so anyway, and he carried it out. He gets caught, and the kidnappers get caught as well. Assume for the sake of argument that these are undisputed facts. Would that person be guilty of armed robbery? Or would the prosecutor not even bother to bring charges, because the person was compelled to do so via what we’d call a forced move in chess? That’s just a philosophical illustration and still builds on the idea of choice, but it illustrates that even what we consider “choice” isn’t always a free choice and that the justice system accounts for that.
Let me illustrate what I’m actually talking about though. I’m going to make up some values to show what I mean. These are not the actual values, but the relationship holds. Let’s say that for any randomly chosen American, there’s a 1% chance that they will commit a murder in their lifetime. Now let’s start tweaking some of the dials. Our random person, P, grew up in a community where they experienced strong degrees of racism and violence. This physically alters brain structures like increasing the size and influence of the amygdala, which has influenced over fear and threat reactions. It reduces the size and influence of the prefrontal cortex, which is charged with deliberation and predicting consequences. As a result, person P now belongs to a population where they have a 5% probability of committing a murder, because their brain is going to be far more sensitive to threat perception and having a response less regulated by their PFC. Let’s throw in malnutrition, which also affects both brain development and (if the mother was also having such problems) epigenetic developmental factors, which again make changes to both the physical brain and to the genetic processing at the cellular level. Throw in drug addiction. A highly population disproportionate of people in jail for committing violent crimes also have a medical history of traumatic brain injury.
None of those factors were even theoretically able to be affected by the choices made by P, but they heavily biased the probability function. The relationships between all of these factors and a given action are highly characterized. We can look at causal factors from seconds before the physical event (pulling the trigger happened) seconds ago - there were a chain of neural activations in which a specific area of P’s brain caused the muscle contraction in the finger. We can look at what happened hours to days ago that biased those neurons to be triggerable by that level of stimulus. P did not make a conscious decision to have the threat-response associated neurons building to a state of high excitability - that came from the way the brain was wired up in the first place, which happened months to years ago.
What it boils down to is that there is no neuronal argument for free will that can identify a specific chain of causality that identifies and isolates free will as a phenomenon.
Far from being lazy, my position is based on a career in the study and teaching of biology and complex systems analysis, and I can come up with a lengthy bibliography including experimental and philosophical research to defend my position.
The takeaway is that we need to address these as issues that have causal explanations, rather than failures of individual morality. This has been a process that we’ve been performing throughout history, as concepts like demonic possession and trafficking with the devil turned out to be caused by psychological and neurobiological conditions, such as epilepsy. Eventually, should we make it long enough, I think that’s where we will end up.
This feels like a scientism method to arrive at compassionate justice reform and I have no problem with that.
You don't understand. Obviously everyone is a product of their environment. But after all of that, if the person wanted and intended to do something because of all of these different dispositions and upbringings and backgrounds, then they have mens rea.
Like I said before, it's purely a finding of fact. Does it mean that there shouldn't be mitigating circumstances? No, there might well be reasons to argue that they were only doing so out of desperation. Nonetheless, they had mens rea.
Recognising that there are all these complicated factors but not taking the time to at least make sense of them is the worst kind of determinism. Sure, there's no free will in your conception. There still needs to be laws and concepts like mens rea still need defining to allow for the protection of "innocents" under the law.
No, I do understand. What I am saying is that the concept of “wanted” does not apply in a framework that’s grounded in modern neuroscience and biology. There’s teleological behaviors, yes, but there no will involved.
Let’s break it down to something simpler. A protozoan (a single cellular animal) will swim towards food and away from poison. It has receptors on its cell surface that, when activated by a series of molecules indicating an increasing gradient of food, there is a cascade from activated cell surface molecules to internal chemical cascades that has a direct causal link that’s as deterministic as what your accelerator does to your car. Cell surface molecules undergo a conformational change which causes the phosphorylation of molecules inside the cell, which ultimately drive the motors that make the protozoan swim in that direction. It’s deterministic.
We no longer think of people with leprosy as being cursed by god because of their sins. This is the same thing.
You're wilfully applying a very stunted concept of "wanted" to a legal system that deals in fact. I'm not saying you don't understand whatever it is you claim to be supporting. What I'm saying you do not understand is the concept of "wanting" and "mens rea" (as it applies in law, but also as it applies under your framework - you've chosen instead to just pretend it's no longer relevant instead of redefining it under your framework - like I said, the laziest kind of science.) And there's really no point in me repeating what I've said before.
Maybe what I'll leave you with is a possible definition of "want" under your system, which is one step further in thought than it seems you've ever gone: an action is wanted if the action would have been taken with no immediate or overt external (needs to be defined) motivation. This means if they were abused as a kid and later this translated into abusing other people, they still wanted to abuse them.
(As a note, I'm not saying this is the correct definition, but this is what is needed for people to start discussing what should and shouldn't be in this definition.)
Saying "nobody can want to do anything because determinism" is an incredibly lazy determinism because it's starting with the axiom and then not bothering to come up with a proper framework to explain everything else in the world. If you continue to protest it not being lazy there's really nothing else we have to talk about.
I will welcome any input that has a basis in biology, physics, or neuroscience. I think you’re taking the position that the conclusions you see as implied by a statement of physical and physiological fact as backed from every field from neuroimaging to developmental biology leaves us in a position that’s philosophically incompatible with the world as envisioned by the way we’ve currently constructed the law. Honestly, I would consider that to be the intellectually lazy position as it’s a rote defense of the status quo without making an attempt to address the actual argument.
The law already recognizes that there are circumstances that are outside the control of the individual, and that our concept of justice demands that those conditions are exculpatory. I’m arguing that our present day understanding means that we need to increase the scope of that interpretation, and that criminal problems should be reimagined as medical problems with evidence-based treatment regimes.