Originally posted by Surtur
Is this anything you think will ever be taken seriously? Not commenting on if it's correct or not. Just thinking about what it would mean for things like our legal system. If some guy goes and robs a liquor store, is he now not responsible for it? If he truly has no free will, is it justice to punish him?
That's not the point. The point is not to make people not guilty of the crimes they commit. It's still needed in a functioning society to encourage good behavior and discourage unwanted behavior.
It took me a while to really absorb Sam Harris' take on free will (although I have yet to read his book, but I've listened to a lot of his podcasts), but I think because he has done so much meditation and really delved into the function of the mind I think he has touched on something that is real. Try meditating for a few minutes if you're not familiar with it. Try to keep your mind on just one simple thing for as long and consistently as you can and observe how much your mind wonders. Your mind is not really under your conscious control.
And certainly (now that I am a father) looking at a developing child who is obviously not under conscious control of his/her actions. They are biological functions and synapses firing to develop the child's mind and motor functions. A developing child is not a being with any sort of free will. Now once we are adults we certainly have some sort of agency, but we don't control our genetic make-up, where we're born, what kind of nourishment we are given, etc. There are all these variables that are completely out of our control.
I think Sam often uses an example of a man (I can't remember who or what he did exactly), but he acted violently and completely out of his usual behavior and was aware that he was acting very out of his norm, and the autopsy later discovered that he had a large tumor growing in his brain. So there seems to be a biological component to almost everything we think and do.