Why should we be guilty or responsible of our actions if free will is an illusion?

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bahman
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Why should we be guilty or responsible of our actions if free will is an illusion?

Post by bahman »

I have a new thread that I discussed that free will is an illusion. Here we discuss important consequences of absence of free will. The main questions are as following: Why we should be guilty of our action if free will is an illusion? What is the purpose of Heaven and Hell? How judiciary system could be justified?...
OuterLimits
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Re: Why should we be guilty or responsible of our actions if free will is an illusion?

Post by OuterLimits »

We will feel guilty or responsible, regardless of free will, illusion, or various justifications.
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Dunce
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Re: Why should we be guilty or responsible of our actions if free will is an illusion?

Post by Dunce »

An absence of free will would not a be a good reason for failing to hold people responsible for their actions unless their actions were never influenced by fear of punishment or a sense of guilt. If there really were a total absence of free will, those who ran the judiciary system would not be free to do anything other than judge in the way they do, regardless of any justifications they might use.
Skip
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Re: Why should we be guilty or responsible of our actions if free will is an illusion?

Post by Skip »

It's not a question of should we....? Without free will, we can't help feeling responsible, guilty, vengeful, judgmental, etc.
This is one of the self-reflective brain's central illusions: very complex, deeply ingrained and with its own load of unavoidable emotions and behaviours. There is little point in knowing that free will isn't real, since we act as it were.
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TSBU
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Re: Why should we be guilty or responsible of our actions if free will is an illusion?

Post by TSBU »

bahman wrote:I have a new thread that I discussed that free will is an illusion. Here we discuss important consequences of absence of free will. The main questions are as following: Why we should be guilty of our action if free will is an illusion? What is the purpose of Heaven and Hell? How judiciary system could be justified?...
Bahman, how old are you? You seem to be focused in that problem, at first I thought that you were posting the same over and over to make other people think that you are smart, but... maybe I was wrong, and you are just seeking for truth. So I'll answer to one of your posts about this.

"Free will" is not an illusion, it's self-evident that we can make ddecissions, and, of course, that decissions have consequences. That's why we think. And ethical decissions are not different than the rest of decissions, that is, we make them based in consequences. We can be wrong, we can be right, but we do what we do, cause that make us happy, and, in ethical terms, we do what we do because we are going to be treated by what we do too.

What is mistake, is the concept "free will" as something out of cause-consequence. You can chose, and, yes, your decission is going to be always "because the rest of the Universe", because of "fate", everything is what it is because of cause-consequence. But that won't change the fact that you still have to think. If you go to an exam thinking "If I'm going to pass... why should I study? And if I'm going to fail why should I study? You'll fail, and that wrong thought in your head, is going to be, like every thought in every head, something guided by causality.

What implies then, causality? It implies that you exist. Suppose that you decide to climb a tree. In a causal Universe, that is because you thought that you wanted an apple from that tree, you know that apples can be eaten because you learnt that when you were younger, you feeel hungry in that moment, you were formed in all your life to have the kind of mind that climbs trees to eat apples. How would that be in a non causal Universe? You are there, and... something happens. Without a why. You didn't chose, because you don't have any reason at all to do one thing or other, your thoughts, your feelings, all that things, doesn't exist, your not more than chaos. The process of thinking if something is wrong or right is causality itself.

Why do some people feel guilty? Because they asume responsability to do something, guilty is a sense of failure to a plan.

Of course, this world is completely full of lies, so some people make plans and put them in other peoples head, they enslave other people, so, you can feel guilty even when you don't know why. Heaven and hell doesn't exist out of the real world, and people who make ethical decissions only thinking in a fake heaven or hell as consequences of their actions, are stupid people (or, at least... very ignorant)... who, of course, make more bad decissions than intelligent people, including ethical decissions. What is the purpose of heaven and hell? controll over people. The same for the juducuary system. But both things over times lose their purpose, and both things have a part of intelligent people who where at the begining ignorant enough to believe some lies, but then they grew with them... now it's a mess. Like everything.... :roll:

If you ask "why should I be good?" You have your own answers... and you have some people who will treat you because of your actions, as a consequence.
Skip
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Re: Why should we be guilty or responsible of our actions if free will is an illusion?

Post by Skip »

It implies that you exist.
uhhh
Mortalsfool
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Re: Why should we be guilty or responsible of our actions if free will is an illusion?

Post by Mortalsfool »

Skip wrote:
It implies that you exist.
uhhh
Skip, if your comment above was all that you got from TBSU's reply, I have to question your ability to 'assimilate'; perhaps a second read? I'll have to further read your posts to determine if my first impression is wrong. I personally thought TBSU presented a very good well balanced view, considering it is in fact a very nebulous subject to represent; as witnessed by the fact that we have not yet pictured a common definition.

Since we've yet to develop a common answer to the question of "Free will", our discussions are like blind men arguing about colors.
MatejValuch
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Re: Why should we be guilty or responsible of our actions if free will is an illusion?

Post by MatejValuch »

Dunce wrote:An absence of free will would not a be a good reason for failing to hold people responsible for their actions unless their actions were never influenced by fear of punishment or a sense of guilt. If there really were a total absence of free will, those who ran the judiciary system would not be free to do anything other than judge in the way they do, regardless of any justifications they might use.
This guy got it right.
If there really is no free will (something I am not sure about but can't contradict either), than everything happens just as it has to happen, doesn't matter if we understand the much-complicated formulas that result in all the actions happening in the world right now. Judgement, and judiciary system, are just other actions that (following your hypothesis of no free will) can't happen differently as they do.
Walker
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Re: Why should we be guilty or responsible of our actions if free will is an illusion?

Post by Walker »

bahman wrote:I have a new thread that I discussed that free will is an illusion. Here we discuss important consequences of absence of free will. The main questions are as following: Why we should be guilty of our action if free will is an illusion? What is the purpose of Heaven and Hell? How judiciary system could be justified?...
When need is seen as the motive force,
and free will is see as an illusory interpretation of reality,
then being guilty is not a choice.
Then, being guilty is a need.
If someone needs to be guilty,
then human intelligence has the the capacity to make it so
in the context of changing situations.
The guilty action varies, the principle stays the same.
Scott Mayers
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Re: Why should we be guilty or responsible of our actions if free will is an illusion?

Post by Scott Mayers »

bahman wrote:I have a new thread that I discussed that free will is an illusion. Here we discuss important consequences of absence of free will. The main questions are as following: Why we should be guilty of our action if free will is an illusion? What is the purpose of Heaven and Hell? How judiciary system could be justified?...
PhilosophyNow's The Social Contract partly relates. The subtitle is "A licence to steal" because if the government serves only to preserve protection for property type things and not to be sure each person has access to food, clothes and shelter, that we have a reasonable justice to ignore the significance of THAT government when it doesn't represent your interests.

I related that to this because government contracts act to limit one's "freedom" to preserve things like property but if you lack this in a world all locked up in ownership, such an entity doesn't serve you and so you are justified to 'freely' ignore since you need these for natural survival. "Free will" is just such an illusion created by those who support the general conservative view of government limits. So because it actually LACKS sincere free will, you have any right to go against it anyways WITHOUT guilt.

I'm Nihilist logically and so already know that nature lacks any fairness to our purpose and we don't choose our reality external to nature itself. It is at least locally deterministic (given a many worlds possibility). So this seems a reasonable question. But I think the reason we have even any sense of values like morals or even emotions are due to accidental assignments by our present environment upon a window of development that merely locks in WHAT we will seek in a relatively indeterminate world. So the illusion of 'free will' actually serves our survival even if we are literally deterministic.

To me, we are still determinate with respect to Totality in the multiple worlds interpretation. All possibilities exist and so each 'option' would be taken where it has multiple versions. We just cannot 'see' those options from being in one contingent world. And it would actually create logical problems with respect to Totality if we could actually pick only one unique path because then it would make some possibilities untrue in reality even though logically possible.
Walker
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Re: Why should we be guilty or responsible of our actions if free will is an illusion?

Post by Walker »

Scott Mayers wrote:And it would actually create logical problems with respect to Totality if we could actually pick only one unique path because then it would make some possibilities untrue in reality even though logically possible.
Speaking of logic, it’s important to note that all possibilities are true in reality. What makes a particular possibility untrue in actuality is the improper combination of conditions, and unknown conditions.

For example, the possibility of human flight was always true in reality, and always will be true. However the actuality of human flight did not occur, and will not occur, until the proper combination of conditions is discovered in either written or mind memory, and then put into place.

By this reasoning, a round square or a married bachelor are possible. Understanding bound to the logical limitations of language cannot conceive of the proper combination of conditions to make it so, thus impossible is defined. However, the logic of infinite potentiality indicates that the proper combination for the known illogical does exist within infinite potentiality. If such combination of conditions known and unknown were ever discovered, the married bachelor could indeed exist in actuality, as could a round square. Perhaps another dimension is a required condition.
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Hobbes' Choice
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Re: Why should we be guilty or responsible of our actions if free will is an illusion?

Post by Hobbes' Choice »

bahman wrote:I have a new thread that I discussed that free will is an illusion. Here we discuss important consequences of absence of free will. The main questions are as following: Why we should be guilty of our action if free will is an illusion? What is the purpose of Heaven and Hell? How judiciary system could be justified?...
SImple.

When we hold people responsible for their actions it CAUSES others to think about theirs. When we punish people for crimes it can CAUSE them to consider not committing the same crime. Simple cause and affect.

On the other hand what is the point of punishment when a person with FREE WILL will do what the fuck he or she wants?
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HexHammer
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Re: Why should we be guilty or responsible of our actions if free will is an illusion?

Post by HexHammer »

Because the eggheads are retards, we have a small amount of free will.
Skip
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Re: Why should we be guilty or responsible of our actions if free will is an illusion?

Post by Skip »

Mortalsfool wrote: Skip, if your comment above was all that you got from TBSU's reply, I have to question your ability to 'assimilate'; perhaps a second read?
Yes. Got it. He made a song-and-dance of what I had already said succinctly: It doesn't matter that everything we do results from causative chains since the Big Bang; we perceive ourselves as deciding, so we can't help acting as if our will were free.
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bahman
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Re: Why should we be guilty or responsible of our actions if free will is an illusion?

Post by bahman »

TSBU wrote:
bahman wrote: I have a new thread that I discussed that free will is an illusion. Here we discuss important consequences of absence of free will. The main questions are as following: Why we should be guilty of our action if free will is an illusion? What is the purpose of Heaven and Hell? How judiciary system could be justified?...
Bahman, how old are you? You seem to be focused in that problem, at first I thought that you were posting the same over and over to make other people think that you are smart, but... maybe I was wrong, and you are just seeking for truth. So I'll answer to one of your posts about this.

"Free will" is not an illusion, it's self-evident that we can make ddecissions, and, of course, that decissions have consequences. That's why we think. And ethical decissions are not different than the rest of decissions, that is, we make them based in consequences. We can be wrong, we can be right, but we do what we do, cause that make us happy, and, in ethical terms, we do what we do because we are going to be treated by what we do too.

What is mistake, is the concept "free will" as something out of cause-consequence. You can chose, and, yes, your decission is going to be always "because the rest of the Universe", because of "fate", everything is what it is because of cause-consequence. But that won't change the fact that you still have to think. If you go to an exam thinking "If I'm going to pass... why should I study? And if I'm going to fail why should I study? You'll fail, and that wrong thought in your head, is going to be, like every thought in every head, something guided by causality.

What implies then, causality? It implies that you exist. Suppose that you decide to climb a tree. In a causal Universe, that is because you thought that you wanted an apple from that tree, you know that apples can be eaten because you learnt that when you were younger, you feeel hungry in that moment, you were formed in all your life to have the kind of mind that climbs trees to eat apples. How would that be in a non causal Universe? You are there, and... something happens. Without a why. You didn't chose, because you don't have any reason at all to do one thing or other, your thoughts, your feelings, all that things, doesn't exist, your not more than chaos. The process of thinking if something is wrong or right is causality itself.

Why do some people feel guilty? Because they asume responsability to do something, guilty is a sense of failure to a plan.

Of course, this world is completely full of lies, so some people make plans and put them in other peoples head, they enslave other people, so, you can feel guilty even when you don't know why. Heaven and hell doesn't exist out of the real world, and people who make ethical decissions only thinking in a fake heaven or hell as consequences of their actions, are stupid people (or, at least... very ignorant)... who, of course, make more bad decissions than intelligent people, including ethical decissions. What is the purpose of heaven and hell? controll over people. The same for the juducuary system. But both things over times lose their purpose, and both things have a part of intelligent people who where at the begining ignorant enough to believe some lies, but then they grew with them... now it's a mess. Like everything.... :roll:

If you ask "why should I be good?" You have your own answers... and you have some people who will treat you because of your actions, as a consequence.
Thank you very much for your long reply. I am 48 and I am really searching for truth. I learn that discussing things with people help me to understand things much better.

In what regards to this thread, I think we should agree first whether the argument provided in another thread is correct or not. What is your opinion about that?
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