Joseph Meyer on Nostr: I recently thought of my action of getting up and hiking again after taking a rest on ...

I recently thought of my action of getting up and hiking again after taking a rest on a bench, and I don't recall there being any intentionality just seconds after beginning to hike again. I don't know where the boundary is between freewill and determinism in human behavior. But I am convinced that Americans in general think we have more freewill than we do. My evidence for thinking this is the fact that the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, that we are one of only a handful of countries that still executes people with serious mental illnesses, and that an insanity defense in the U.S. is rarely successful. Those approaches to criminal behavior suggest a preference for punishing people for their actions and not putting much thought into volition and culpability. Am I not a murderer because I have chosen to live by higher moral standards, or because the idea of killing another has never occurred to me? I think it is the latter. I have never had to engage in an internal struggle against the urge to kill another. So I don't think I am morally superior for not killing. It is my understanding that a high percentage of soldiers engaged in battle will not shoot enemy combatants. Perhaps this is because of some constitutional difference. On a less serious matter, my gut reaction to politicians and voters who had views I found to be morally objectionable was disgust in the past. But I have recently begun to think maybe they just see the world differently because of the way their brains are wired.

I have wondered what the effect on society would be if God were proven to not exist. Some people might see no reason to behave with a fear of hell removed, but plenty of nonbelievers behave without that fear. On the other hand, belief in an absence of freewill would not necessarily lead to more empathetic responses to criminal behavior. I once listened to a YouTube video of a presentation by a well-known neuroscientist who used Phineas Gage as an example. There was an online discussion afterwards that was moderated by a graduate student. An audience member asked what society should do with dangerous persons like Gage and my expectation was the graduate student would say we need non-punitive and compassionate ways to protect innocent members of the public from dangerous persons. Instead, the graduate student said we should lock up such people and throw away the key.

One quibble with the article: Is it proven that "an early history of trauma can rewire a brain" as stated; or is it possible that persons with differently wired brains are more likely to perceive events as traumatic; or is it possible that traumatic environments are likely to be associated with inheritable conditions like schizophrenia where the trauma is an effect of symptoms rather than a cause? #KevinMitchell a neuroscientist and author of Innate: How The Wiring Of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are, discusses such questions.

#Neuroscience
#Brain
#FreeWill
#Behavior
#Morality
#Ethics
#Religion
#Crime

https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2023-10-17/stanford-scientist-robert-sapolskys-decades-of-study-led-him-to-conclude-we-dont-have-free-will-determined-book