jfred, My quarks have quarked! My jaw not on the floor. My reactions reacted. My atoms are Brownian. I'm back, determined as ever. My will free to be. I am, I say, sentient. Clickety - click, clickety-click...quoth Dog.
Our reality monitoring sentience is not random or simply self-determined. We scan our environment constantly, using internal scan models based on previous experience and DNA, creating a new improved model of the external world affecting us. Our consciousness leaps around, checking, thinking, comparing, investigating. Then after a period of puzzled quiescence, we act to modify our reality according to experiences and our DNA bonds. As Mathew has shown, this quiescence is of variable length and the subject of scientific investigation in the case of reaction times in monkeys [and people].
Our consciousness is not random or volitional. It simply goes to the next place on the program. Sometimes that train of thought or method of selection is difficult to follow, but it happens anyway. The successful of us have good DNA and programs running which match us nicely to reality and unlike most animals, modify that reality enormously, giving us long, happy, healthy, prosperous, reproductive lives. The unsuccessful? Well, they run into a bit of bad luck here and there. Their ponies get rustled, gelded, or ignored, their stocks decline, their children drowned, they get lost, shot, sick and otherwise cease to exist in the next generation.
If my entire life was determined prior to the Big Bang, or Great Escape, whichever better represents the "Beginning" it is of little concern. It is a very nice ride. Better than Disneyland. I might not be "responsible" for my actions, but that is of little interest to cliffs I might fall off, or well defended things I attack. Imposition of reality has a way of reprogramming people to change their behaviour to protect themselves. Of course not every sentient being responds well to reprogramming - just as in "A Clockwork Orange" which I guess you've seen. Even cats and crocodiles will accept a bit of training by reality, but they don't do as well as us.
And some of us don't do very well at all.
If we accept causal relationships instead of witchcraft, fantasy and mysticism, then tough luck for criminals even though they might not be "responsible" in the sense you meant. Too bad for them if they can't be rehabilitated into lovely ethical rationalists. They simply are unsuitable to be among us, just as we don't let crocodiles and lions roam free.
Sorry to laugh at your snickering collectivist crowd jfred, I know you can't help yourselves and I should be able to profit from your distorted sense of reality. For example you might think you can "will" a share price to go up, especially with "collective will". I'll be on the lookout for such an event!!
Gee that was a big clickety-click. Oh well, que sera sera. |
