I heard Shami Chakrabarti speak at Cambridge University recently, and she made a similar point. She argued that the idea of human rights comes from the human capacity for empathy – because we can imagine how we would feel from being harmed we refrain from harming others. This is of course the famous “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, which is a very sound moral maxim.

The result of this is a universal morality that prevents coercing others in any situation where you would feel coercion would be unjust if applied to you, not banning everything you don’t agree with.

How we decide which things we personally refuse to do (whether it be having pre-marital sex or smoking) but do not want to stop others from doing is of course a more open question, especially for those like me who are not religious.

I really don’t agree with this. I’m totally against assuming that things that are not true, are true. That brings us back to religion in double quick time.

I believe that there is the possibility of a universal morality, but it has nothing to do with free will and everything to do with consciousness. It is the conscious experience – specifically the capacity to experience pleasure and pain – that I believe ought to be the source of our moral intuitions.

Free will is not the same as consciousness, but they inevitably get muddled because the feeling that we have free will is experienced consciously.

But the Libet experiment would suggest this is merely an illusion. Pain, however, is not an illusion and is best minimised.

I have great difficulty with the concept of a genuinely random event.

Radioactive decay. It’s what is used to generate random one-time pads for really secure encryption software.

All the known physical processes are either determinative or random. None are under the control of an intelligent entity outside of the physics, whether human (which is what is meant by “free will” to a physicist) or otherwise.

Clearly the brain is chaotic, ie extremely sensitive to initial conditions such that moving an electron by a few picometres will have macroscopic effects within the brain, and equally clearly “mind” is an emergent phenonmenon of the brain, but that doesn’t mean that there is free will in the sense of something over and above physics.

If you don’t believe that human beings are really in control of their own decision making, that they’re no more ‘free’ than subject to the whims of a dice roll, then the concept of liberty becomes academic doesn’t it?

I think the problem is the idea of what is a human being. We’re just a heap of atoms and forces and we have the same free will as any other heap of atoms and forces – none.

But we behave like we do because we’re so unpredictable and because we have a “mind” and we should be treated as such. Free will is a lot like universal morality; it doesn’t exist, but you have to work out your resolutions on the assumption it does.

I don’t think free will as a pure physical/neural concept exists, at least without adding in the weirdness of the quantum world. For everything happening at time t, there must have been something at time t-1 to cause it, its just the variables involved are so numerous and complex that we have a spasm if we try to contemplate them.

Think of it like this: With enough access to your brain is there anything that you think I couldn’t make you do?* Even the low-level ‘spontaneous’ activity of the brain is caused by something. A massive accumulation of variables all came together to make Laurence type “lysjeb hhj iie s jkj laae iudffe”, it’s not actually random.

As a social concept, you can convince yourself free will exists, as in “99 people may say yes, but i’ll say no”, but it is not really a true free choice, and therefore, presumably not a rational thought either…

*sorry, that sounds monumentally creepy.

1) Read Trick or Treatment, then try to tell us that “much” of alternative medicine is effective (as opposed to being a placebo). The truth is that very little is worth spending money or time on.

2) Depends on how you define intervention; the statement is too short to understand Mr Hickey’s position. If intervention means setting out rules that apply to everyone, I agree. If it means favouring one person over another, I am dubious.

3) I don’t see why novelty is an automatic good, and I would like “moral tone” to be defined before I express an opinion. What I miss from Mr Hickey’s list is the ability of art to create a deep, emotional reaction to the viewer/listener (the art that moves me most is usually music). This is my measure of how good art is.

4) YES! I wholeheartedly agree.

5) Well, perhaps reading and writing should come first, but otherwise I am inclined to agree. Shame Mr Hickey didn’t apply the scientific method to 1)!

6) Yes. Why should I disagree with that?

7) See my post above.

I always thought free will as a philosophical question rather than a physical one, and I am clearly not qualified to comment. My preference, like Mill’s, is to put the whole argument on one side and concentrate on “Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.”

9) I don’t see hardline atheism as dangerous, unless its followers start blowing up mosques and churches. Though I am agnostic myself, I do agree (partially) with Mr Hickey in that I believe religous people can act rationally in the natural world even if they have irrational beliefs about the supernatural. (More to the point, who cares if people act irrationally so long as they don’t hurt anyone?) And I can also see many “religious people of goodwill” who are vital to combating the extremists who are highly dangerous. Two examples from Islam alone that pop into my head are Irshad Manji and Lebanon’s new Prime Minister, Saad Hariri (who I was fortunate enough to meet last Friday).

10) Why? Even medieval Catholics argued it was fair for lenders to receive compensation for the profit they could have made with the money had they kept it themselves (lucrum cessans to them, opportunity cost to us). How could I possibly agree with such a sweeping and unargued statement?

So, I agree (more or less) with three of the ten, and half agree with another.

Laurence,

Look, this is random: lysjeb hhj iie s jkj laae iudffe.

but that’s not random…