Free Will, Science, and the Media

Hi Gardeners,
There has been, as the intell people put it, a lot of "chatter" recently about the relationship between free will and the neurosciences, here at the Garden with posts about the Financial Times review (which I found problematic, to put it mildly) to Searle's book to the NYTimes article "The Brain on the Stand," not to mention several recent NYT articles on morality and neuroscience, Time's recent issue on the Brain, and this recent article printed in my local rag, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which discusses the experiment described in the previous post here. 

Those of you who know me and my Neurotic Compatibilist (TM by Manuel) position know that I think neuroscience (and the other sciences of the mind) have the potential to threaten free will and responsibility in ways that are more significant than any potential threat posed by the thesis of determinism.  But I do not think it poses a threat in the way most of the scientists suggest, or the way the media presents their research.

I hope to get a book done on this before, say, the end of the decade, but since we all know how that is, I thought some people might be interested in looking at this powerpoint (link below) of a talk I recently presented to the Neurophilosophy reading group here at Georgia State.  (I was trying to explain to the neuroscientists here what I take the problems to be).  It also includes some recent survey results--the actual survey scenarios and questions are the last three slides of the powerpoint, because my audience had already taken a written version.  (It would be interesting to consider my results in light of Luke's.)

Keep in mind that I had to jam a lot into 30 minutes and simplify certain extremely complex issues, but let me know if you have any comments.  Thanks, Eddy

Download free_will_for_neurophilosophy_version_3.ppt

Comments

[john a]

Eddy
I found your presentation to be very interesting. I have a comment/question concerning an possible implication of the findings your report on the slide titled "Folk Intuitions about Determinism, Reductionism, Free Will, Moral Responsibility." It is interesting to note that more people think that moral responsbility attaches to agents then free-will does in both cases. I am wondering if this is an indication of a disconnect between the concepts (intuitions)concerning free-will and moral responsibility such that free-will is not a necessary condition for moral responsiblity even for those who might be inclined to think that there is a necessary connection between FW and responsibility. What is it that those who attach moral responsibility to the action but not free-will 'see' that the others do not?

[Eddy Nahmias]

The issues are complicated, I think, and it's very difficult to try to get at ordinary people's conceptions on these connections. The most difficult problem is that people have a conception of moral responsibility (MR) and blame, punishment, praise, etc. that is forward-looking such that they think you need to hold people MR to influence their future behavior. This conception can float free from any deep sense of free will. The question is whether people think you can be MR in the backward-looking (retributive) sense without FW. This seems less likely.

We are trying to test this in part by asking MR questions in several ways and also by asking:

"When Ertans commit a crime, the Ertan judicial system imprisons them. Two of the goals are to prevent the criminals from committing further crimes and to make other Ertans less likely to commit crimes.

In addition to these goals, do you think that the goal should also be to make the Ertan criminals suffer because they deserve it for what they have done?"

And then asking (and comparing responses):

"Here on Earth our judicial system also imprisons criminals. Two of the goals are to prevent the criminals from committing further crimes and to make other people less likely to commit crimes.

In addition to these goals, do you think that the goal should also be to make the criminals suffer because they deserve it for what they have done?"

The idea is to get participants to separate the forward-looking (e.g., deterrence) and retributive aspects of MR and punishment and see if the scenarios provoke any differences in their responses.

[Kip Werking]

This presentation is amazing. Gardeners: be sure to also check out a paper Eddy coauthored on Experimental Philosophy:

http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/

Here are some comments on the presentation:

1. I think Eddy’s response to the question about fw vs. mr is great and I would love to see how those experiments turn out. I agree 100% that, if one is concerned about general and special deterrence (as all non-realists like Pereboom and Strawson, etc., are), then it is more awkward to say “don’t hold that person morally responsible” than it is to say “that person isn’t morally responsible”, and even this is more awkward than saying “that person doesn’t have free will.” Another explanation for the data might be: people think of mr as admitting of degrees more so than they think of free will as admitting of degrees (Al Mele seemed to agree with something like this in another thread). Instead, they might (to a greater degree!) think of free will as a unitary and special power.
2. The only threat I consider to be “the free will problem” is “the horizontal threat.” I think this is what motivated Nietzsche, Spinoza, Einstein, and Russell. I do not think they worried about epiphenomenalism (e.g. Wegner). I do not think they worried about automaticity or akrasia (e.g. Nahmias and neurotic compatibilism—what a great name). I think the fact that Nahmias is using a conception of free will, according to which its most famous problem is obviously not problematic (the horizontal threat), and according to which its most pressing problem never motivated its most famous deniers (automaticity and akrasia), should give him pause.
3. Nevertheless, I have to congratulate Nahmias for at least presenting an error theory for incompatibilism—even one that I think is wrong. Too often, I think compatibilists are content to defend their (weak) conceptions of free will and just leave it an unexplained mystery why so many incompatibilists argued, so passionately, that free will meant something else.
4. Since we’re discussing empirical research, here are some studies I would like to see (and would perform if I was less lazy): I’ve suggested that a multitude of cognitive biases influence beliefs about free will. To test this, all one would need to do is repeat the original experiments and then ask participants at the end “how confident are you that free will exists on a scale from one to ten?” One could do this with the experiments for wishful thinking, the illusion of control, the just world phenomenon, the fundamental attribution error, demonization and biased recall of transgressions, etc. Similarly, Knobe and Nichols speculate that emotions cloud the judgments that compatibilist subjects make about moral responsibility. But one does not need to leave this as mere speculation: you can develop a test for whether emotions cloud judgment and then see if the compatibilist subject also perform less well on this test.
5. If the above experiments are inconclusive, the only conclusion seems to be that “free will” and “moral responsibility”, not being rigid designators, are simply too vague and poorly defined—rough around the edges—to answers these subtle and fine-grained philosophical questions. The ultimate answer may be that there is no answer and we might need to resign ourselves to this fact.
6. One can pursue this other possibility with an entirely different series of experiments: those where you go out and ask people to define free will or ask them how natural/awkward certain uses of the term “free will” sound. Nahmias suggested something like this in another thread (following Knobe’s suggestion, I believe) and I think it’s a great idea.

[Anibal]

A really remarkable effort in pedagogy, very concise but no simplified and with a clear logical structure in presentation.

Regarding the general assumption that neuroscience could be a serious threat to the idea of free will and derivates such as responsibility and blame conceptions, why evryone believe neuroscience is a discipline with unmovable tenets.
The mechanistic explanation was valid during the most part of the consolidation of neuroscience and science in general but today non-linearity, multi-level interactions, multi-level analysis, what neuroscientist themselves call "system neuroscience", i think: is an open window of fertile ground to allow free wil to wander and graze and not even to mention what contemporary exotic physics promises.

An if all this results to be incorrect, neuroscience itself must clarify why the brain deceive itself creating in us such a grand illusion dubbed free wil, and what is its functional purpose.

[Tom Clark]

Eddy, really interesting presentation, thanks. You said

"The question is whether people think you can be MR in the backward-looking (retributive) sense without FW. This seems less likely."

A related question is what characteristics of human agents do people believe exist that make it the case that we are backwards-looking MR and therefore should be punished retributively? It seems like you’re saying whatever these characteristics are, that’s what people think of as having free will. And then the question arises of whether those characteristics survive on a scientific understanding of ourselves. Since you think FW does survive this account, this suggests you’re a retributivist.

Since you think reductionism is the real potential threat to FW, I’m wondering if you think the causal, behavior controlling powers of reasons-responsive conscious processes have to be over and above the powers of their neural realizers for conscious processes to be irreducible. If their causal powers are the same, what about conscious processes gives us FW that neural states don’t?

[Eddy Nahmias]

I don't think that you have to be a retributivist to believe we have the sort of abilities related to free will sufficient to ground our being MR in the retributivist sense. You may have other reasons for rejecting retributive punishment at least. I think I do have such reasons. But I think people are genuinely deserving of praise and blame in the deep sense that matters to people, etc. Though I suspect people are deserving of far less of such praise and blame than we typically think...

I think the free will problem (well, some of it at least) reduces to (pun intended) the problem of mental causation. And I don't know how to solve the problem of mental causation. But that's part of what I think about a lot (and why I am a philosopher of mind). Put succinctly, I don't think the fact that conscious processes are (in some sense of "are" consistent with naturalism) neural processes indicates that the conscious processes are not causal. One reason to think that they are *not* causal is to hold on to a dualistic (or emergentist) picture that suggests they can't be causal since the neural processes do everything such that the conscious processes have no work left to be done. That dualistic picture is the one that some scientists think they are showing to be false without recognizing that the dualistic picture can be replaced in such a way that our sense of free will is not an illusion. I hope that makes sense but I can't expand on it now cuz I have to go coach my kid's soccer practice!

[Eddy Nahmias]

My previous post is an illustration of an all too common problem with blogging: writing quickly and therefore poorly. If any of my students are reading, do not write like that.

[john a]

Is a retributivist commited to free-will if having free-will commits one to believing in the principle of relevant alternatives (ought implies can which in turn implies could have done otherwise)? Many have interpreted a person having free-will to mean that at time1 (the time at which the action is performed) person A is morally responsible iff A could have performed either x or -x. But, this is not the case. People can only be morally responsible for actions that they perform (no one doubts this), but this does not entail that there have to be options available to choose from at the time person A performs an action. On the standard (dictionary) usage of 'can' there are three conditions that must be met if we are to hold person A responsible for x; A has 1) the ability to do x, 2) the knowledge to do x, and 3) the right to do x. If person A does x then the first two criteria are met. Assigning MR in terms of blame or praise attaches to the third criteria. The right to do x is dependent on the reasons A has for doing x. The reasoning process is deterministic in that one simply follows where the argument logically leads regardless of whether one 'wants' to go there or not. This does not require that at the time A performed x that A had any relavent alternatives available to her. If this is the case, then MR and FW are disconnected concepts regardless of whether a person is forward looking (deterence) or backward looking (retributivist).

[Paul Torek]

Despite being the president of the Eddy Nahmias fan club, I must protest. I protest the implied contrast between backward-looking considerations of desert and forward-looking considerations of general deterrence. This is of course the exact same protest I make every four or five topics, but so be it.

It is possible - not to mention right - to hold that both backward- and forward-looking considerations are germane to the justification of, e.g., imprisonment. To borrow a page from Herbert Feigl and oversimplify a bit, backward-looking considerations validate imprisoning a murderer and forward-looking considerations are essential in vindicating the practice of imprisoning murderers. And neither of these justifications makes a lick of sense without the other.

Now, how you offer that idea as a comprehensible alternative to subjects in an experiment, without forcing them to read a tome, I don't know. Maybe you can't, but it's worth some thought how one might try.

Kip,
at the risk of going off-topic, isn't coming up with an error theory the easiest thing in the world? To wit, as a first approximation, why not just take the arguments of the other camp(s) as one's error theory?

[Kip Werking]

Paul:

Coming up with an error theory *is* the easiest thing in the world to do (but coming up with a sincere, or accurate, error theory is not). This is why if (as I suggest) philosophers in this area too often do not offer one for their opponent's views, then they are conveniently ignoring problems with their own positions and not even trying to understand where their opponents are coming from. One conception of free will looks more plausible if you don't even acknowledge, or try to understand, other conceptions of free will.

You ask: "why not just take the arguments of the other camp(s) as one's error theory?" This is a good question. Let me first say: my comments about error theories are tentative and I worry that I've spoken too soon. Yet I've always felt that this lack of error theories is a problem here, even if I have difficulty articulating exactly how.

To answer your question: the arguments that some offer for their positions are so at odds with other positions that the arguments themselves need an error theory (or so it often seems to me). One doesn't just think: "well, obviously, they reached this mistaken conclusion because they were convinced by these bad arguments." Too often, I think, I further ask "wow, how could anybody ever be convinced by this sort of argument? The concept of free will they are using is so radically different than the one I am using. Now, *why* is it different? I need an error theory for how they came to think this argument, which seems so wrong to me, is ok."

My personal favorite error theories are cognitive biases and semantic ambiguity. But all of this talk of error theories may be premature.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Paul, I am sympathetic to your point. Do you think the way we phrased the question about punishment (in the post above) is misleading? We don't present the three goals as mutually exclusive (though we suggest you could reject the retributive goal without rejecting the others) or explicitly mention forward- and backward-looking justification. What exactly is problematic about that way of asking people the question? Is there any way--barring a tome--to get at ordinary people's intuitions about this issue? (fan club?!)

[Mike Tintner]

Nice presentation, but you and everybody seem to be missing something stunningly obvious about these latest experiments. And it's quite amazing.

"Each participant took the test more than 250 times, choosing independently in each trial. The computer then looked at a sample of the scans, along with the final answers that revealed what choices were made. It calculated a pattern and used it to predict, from each participant's remaining scans, his or her decisions in the corresponding trials. The computer got it right 71 percent of the time."

71%. THAT IS SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE FOR FREE WILL! It's not evidence for determinism at all.

I pointed out on this blog a few months ago that there is no scientific evidence for determinism - i.e. "vital determinism" - that living creatures and humans are determined. None. Science has produced NO laws of behaviour whatsoever in 100's of years. To show determinism, you have to show that animals behave in lawful, consistent ways. Matter does, living organisms don't. Hence lots of laws for matter, and no laws for life.

If you care to look, I've argued, you will find no end of evidence on the contrary that humans are free - faced with much the same decisions over and over, humans decide and act freely, i.e. in crazy, mixed up and downright conflicted ways, rather than the rational, consistent ways science claims. They do go first one way, then the other. Look at how humans work, eat/ diet, exercise, relate and (as all religions & folk cultures have told us for 1000's of years) people actually struggle to behave consistently/ deterministically !! - oscillating between work and idleness, gluttony and abstinence, exercise and inertia throughout their lives.

If people were determined, they would show some high consistency somewhere in their activities - of something like 90-100% - which would make scientific laws possible.

The reality, I've always argued, is that humans are typically something like 60-80% consistent - figures arbitrarily plucked out of my head, but based on the basic truth that people do behave with a considerable degree of consistency - that's how we recognize them as distinct characters and personalities - just nowhere near enough to be determined.

And this experiment agrees with my "prediction." Let's have more and more experiments like this. And even better, let's have some figures on the consistency of people's patterns of normal activity, like working, eating etc. The evidence will PROVE free will.

It is truly amazing that the vast majority of people are talking if as science proving determinism is almost a done deal. The truth is it isn't even a begun deal. And the absurd interpretation of this experiment is an example of just how ridiculously brainwashed the scientific and philosophical establishments are.

[Tamler Sommers]

Mike,

I'm pretty sure we went over this already, but no one here is claiming that determinism is true or that these experiments show it to be true. Where in Eddy's presentation do you find him saying that? (Hint: there's a slide where he says that most physicists believe that determinism ISN'T true, but that doesn't count because it's making the opposite claim than the one you're accusing him and all of us of making). In fact, the whole point of Eddy's presentation is that the truth of determinism is not the real issue!

Compounding your confusion and amazement is your implicit assumption that if determinism is false then we automatically have free will. But a quick glance through the philosophical literature will show you how problematic that assumption is. What if it were only possible to predict the behavior of snails 60-70% of the time? (Maybe it is, why wouldn't quantum indeterminacy affect snail behavior if it affects ours?) Would you automatically assume that snails have free will? Obviously, there needs to be something more to free will than just the falsity of determinism. In fact, it's very hard--although not impossible, according to some--to show how indeterminism would be of any help at all for free will.

Hopefully that clears things up a little and you won't be as truly amazed by future discussion.

[Paul Torek]

Eddy, suppose I presented you this question:

"In my pocket are some U.S. coins. Two of the coins are one with JFK on the heads side, and one with FDR on the heads side.

In addition to these coins, do you think that I also have a coin which is worth 10 cents?"

I think you'd be confused - "wait," you'd say, "the FDR coin is the same one that's worth 10 cents, but you (Paul) just implied it's not." Notice that the objection is not that I implied that having one type of coin in my pocket is mutually exclusive with having another type. No, the objection is that I implied, or strongly suggested, that the 10-cent type and the FDR-type are different types, when in fact they're the same type.

The goals of deterrence and "making criminals suffer because they deserve it" need not be separate; they can be two sides of the same coin. That is, if you view the achievement of deterrence as justified only when the punishment as deserved, and the punishment as deserved only if the rules of punishment serve vital social functions such as deterrence.

[Mike Tintner]

Tamler,

Of course, the experiments provide evidence for free will not proof.

But yes, I think it is amazing that no one questioned the deterministic interpretation of the experiments. You don't? Isn't such questioning and scepticism supposed to be basic to philosophy?

And yes, if we keep compiling evidence - which isn't really hard to do - that humans faced with the same decisions keep going EITHER way, that will add up to proof.

Correct me on this: I have never seen it observed in philosophy that our unshakeable sense of our freedom (which no one denies) clearly derives not just from a prospective sense of what we can do in the immediate future, but the retrospective knowledge of what we have done in the past. We know that we have gone either way on innumerable occasions in the past, and have immense problems in acting consistently/ deterministically, (even if we forget this when we come to philosophise). We have actually demonstrated our freedom to ourselves, over and over - shown that it's not an illusion.

And the confirmation of that is on a few occasions we do doubt whether we have free will - doubt, for example, whether we can give up smoking, or take some action which requires a major effort of will.

Where is the philosophical acknowledgment that our sense of freedom is retrospectively as well as prospectively based?

[Mike Tintner]

P.S. I thought of a neat example of philosophy's failure to acknowledge our retrospectively based (i.e. experimentally tested) sense of freedom.

It's the classic deterministic image of the illusory nature of our sense of freedom. Einstein's image is the best one though the idea originated with Hobbes - if the moon were gifted with self-consciousness, he argued, it would think that it was responsible for its orbit, (whereas of course it has no choice).

Oh no, the moon wouldn't. If it had a retrospectively based sense of freedom like ours, it would know that it had never changed orbit in the past and would therefore be extremely unlikely to in the future.

But no one, to my knowledge, has pointed out the fallacy of that idea, (or the obvious fact that the moon and all other subjects of such images are inanimate and we are alive - but then determinists have a big problem distinguishing between dead matter and life).

[Tamler Sommers]

Mike, no philosopher that I know of fails to acknowledge that our actions are almost certainly influenced by retrospective knowledge of what we have done in the past. I'm sure Einstein (not a philosopher) was well aware of this too. The point of that kind of example is to observe that we're often unaware of the true causes of our action. Experiments from social psychology show that this is sometimes the case. As Eddy loves to point out, if this is always the case, if our deliberations and mental states NEVER cause our actions, if it's all epiphenomenal, THAT would be a big threat to free will.

But here's the key point: that's not the same question as 'is determinism true.' The truth of determinism is compatible with deliberations causing actions. And the falsity of determinism is compatible with our deliberations never causing actions. That's the idea doesn't seem to be getting across (and I'm getting a deja vu kind of feeling that this is exactly what happened a few months ago). You're right that that scientists have not proved the truth of determinism. The reason we're not acknowleging this fact is not that we're unaware of it (it's pretty obvious, even philosophers can grasp it) but rather that it's beside the point. I guarantee that once you understand this, you're going to stop being amazed by these discussions

[Mike Tintner]

Tamler,

I strongly dispute some of your remarks sociologically.

The idea that (to crudely paraphrase you) "everyone knows all about this.. it's not important, not amazing... the really important thingsis.." simply isn't true as far as the first part. You are of course entitled to your opinion about what you consider important or not.

The sociological reality though is that a great many scientists do indeed talk as if determinism is all but proven. Are you disputing that? And if you look back at our exchanges you will find that a number of philosophers here had a considerable problem understanding that there is NO evidence for determinism, although the man (whose name I forget) who had started the thread, having written a book on a related subject, did acknowledge this. And many philosophers also take the position that determinism is almost a done deal... hence you get philosophers like Smilansky worrying about "what are we going to do with the legal system, when we acknowledge determinism?" (whereas the reality is that if you had to argue determinism in court, your case would immediately be thrown out for lack of evidence).

So I think that sociologically I am entitled to my amazement. I move a great deal intellectually among scientists and I kid you not that I never cease to be amazed at their unquestioning assertion of the truth of determinism - and I was also truly (not just rhetorically) amazed that so few philosophers here understood the point about lack of evidence.

And while you and many philosophers (certainly not all) may not be concerned with the truth or falsity of determinism/ free will, clearly again that is the major concern of the great majority of people who think about these issues. It was the concern of the people reporting those experiments. Would you dispute that?

So if you think that the really important issue is whether this or that idea of determinism is compatible with this or that idea of causation etc. etc. and other matters essentially of categorisation rather than reality, well that's your right. But it's also fairly safe to say that those matters will never be of any concern to anyone else except philosophers - that no one else in the world cares about or even mentions compatibilism or incompatibilism, or ever will, isn't it?

P.S. One interesting point worth pursuing is your reply:
"no philosopher that I know of fails to acknowledge that our actions are almost certainly influenced by retrospective knowledge of what we have done in the past." Really? Or did I not communicate - my point is that we have retrospective, intuitive knowledge of how we have gone either way on decisions repeatedly and that is one basis of our sense of freedom. If you understood that, and still claim that no philosopher fails to acknowledge it - then you should have no problem providing one textual acknowledgement of it, perhaps from an encyclopaedia/dictionary article, but anywhere will do. I'd really like to know, rather than fault you. You see, I've never come across an acknowledgment anywhere in any form and I have read a lot of relevant philosophy.

[Tamler Sommers]

OK Mike last post from me on this topic.

(1) I did misunderstand your point. I don't know if philosophers talk about 'could-have-gone-either-way-ness' of past decisions as a basis for our sense of freedom. Actually I like that idea a lot, I really do. I've argued that the illusion of free will is, or was, adaptive for human beings but I've never been entirely satisfied with my explanation for why it's adaptive. I'm much happier, however, with my account of why a belief in moral responsibility might have evolved. So my idea was that since we don't believe that someone can be morally responsible unless they have free will, the illusion of free will would be adaptive by proxy. (You can see why I'm not entirely satisfied.) My emphasis though was on the need to see other people as having had the past ability to go either way so that we could hold them morally responsible in the present.

Your point could play a complementary role in that explanation. Presumably it's adaptive to use past experiences to influence future behavior. But once you pass a threshold of cognitive sophistication, the feelings of guilt and shame and dissatisfaction that motivate us to change our future behavior would be undermined (note: this is a descriptive claim, not a normative one) unless we thought we had a deep form of contra-causal free will. Still some pieces missing, and it may be putting the cart before the horse. I'll think more about that. Shaun Nichols has a paper (in Mind and Language I think, 2004) that addresses this issue.

(2) I'm done (forever) trying to convince you that determinism being false does nothing for free will. But note that I don't feel any more guilty for undetermined actions that I had no control over than for determined actions I had no control over. The key question is whether we had the right kind of control. (And I don't think we do, whether or not determinism is true.)

(3) I don't know enough about the sociology of scientistic rhetoric to evaluate your claim that they always assert the truth of determinism. My sociological comments are restricted to the rhetoric of philosophers.

(4) Regarding your remark that "it's also fairly safe to say that those matters [which covers everything that isn't restricted to fiding out whether physical determinism is true] will never be of any concern to anyone else except philosophers." Well, that's an empirical claim. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

[Tom Clark]

Eddy,

Getting back to your point about the connection between FW, MR and mental causation:

It seems difficult to find a behavior-controlling causal role for conscious processes related to their specifically phenomenal properties that isn't already being filled by their neural realizers. But that's OK because on a non-dualistic understanding of ourselves, referring to the causal powers of my conscious states is to refer, using ineliminable person-level language, to nothing over and above the powers of their neural realizers. Depending on our theory of consciousness, phenomenal properties are reducible to or explicable as some sort of behavior-controlling functional or representational goings-on that are neurally realized. So neural processes cause behavior, but we necessarily talk of them as mental states, given our cognitive limitations and our inescapable position as conscious subjects.

All this is fine unless we feel the need to establish some sort of moral responsibility that being neural mechanisms might be thought insufficient for. That, of course, is backwards-looking, retribution-entailing MR, and (unless I've misunderstood) it seems that you’re saying that conscious processes, construed non-dualistically, nevertheless have powers that neurons don't, and these powers make us backwards-looking MR. ("Do my mental states *cause* me to do what I do (or is it just the neural processes that cause behavior?)" - slide 15 of your presentation, original emphasis.) But it seems to me non-dualism entails an equivalence in causal powers, in which case to be backwards-looking MR implies dualism. And indeed I suspect that's what many people believe makes us deserving of retribution: that we are something over and above our brains which could have done otherwise in a contra-causal sense. Of course as you note, the question about retribution is quite separate from whether we can be morally responsible *at all*.

So (if it hasn't already been done) maybe research on FW/MR could profitably include questions about people's belief in a soul or categorically non-physical behavior-controlling mental agent, and see whether, in comparing worlds in which souls exist and don't exist, people judge that retribution is, respectively, admissible or non-admissible as an aim of criminal justice. Maybe that’s what the Ertan/Earth contrast was getting at and what your follow up questions on retribution vs. consequential goals of criminal justice will bring to light.

[Rob]

Not sure where else to post this bit from the NYT:

"By reordering the sexual timeline and placing desire after arousal, rather than vice versa, the new research fits into the pattern that neurobiologists have lately observed for other areas of life. Before we are conscious of wanting to do anything — wave at a friend, open a book — the brain regions needed to perform the activity are already ablaze. The notion that any of us is the Decider, the proactive plotter of our most lubricious desires, scientists say, may simply be a happy and perhaps necessary illusion."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/science/10desi.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=ecf21b9de06cab53&ex=1176350400&pagewanted=all

[charles Edwards]

Determinist scientists have no business using the personal pronouns. They have no adequate definition of what personal pronouns mean. They use them in a poetic way, but full of glosses and denial.
Those scientists have a very narrow definition of the past. Their definitions are always limited to very personal bits of their biased observations and opinions. For example they ignore themselves while tacitly assuming they have the power of cause.(They ask, "What should we do?) However, they will agree, the past always excludes what is meant by personal pronouns. (Or else they would have strong evidence of time travel).
Philosophers will tell you a person can only exist in the present. There is no other place for a person to exist. Scientists will agree.
The only way for a past to be caused at all is if it first undergoes influence of the present. The past is caused by the present. Or, do scientist claim the past exists in the present? All of it, or just the part that excludes them?
They will agree that no matter how much we wish it, no matter how much we try, no matter how many neurons are fired, no matter how much becoming we become, we cannot become the past.
Or is somebody arguing that we exist in the past?
What we do now makes the past. The past doesn't make what we do now. Or is somebody arguing that an effect can exist prior to the cause? Or that something non-existent (such as the past) influences what does exist (e.g. the present)? Or that something can be in the past before it occurs in the present?

[charles Edwards]

Will the brain regions be ablaze even for those people who do not know how to perform the task? Or do they have to undergo some sort of experience in present time in order to learn the task, then after learning to set their mind on fire, they then set their brain on fire? Do scientist make a distinction between mind and brain?
Given all that is said, will any of the determinist that use personal pronouns care to offer what in fact they mean? Will it just boil down to a tautology by fiat?