Q&A: Soul, Topological Space, and Free Will
Soul, Topological Space, and Free Will
Question
Following your book The Science of Freedom, a number of questions came to mind.
- One of the claims is that determinism is not intuitive because it raises serious ethical problems. In my view, though, we actually judge in a deterministic way. A jury certainly would not convict a kleptomaniac, even if there were a 0.1% chance that he would overcome his compulsion. And once there is enough data about the influence of certain variables, there is no reason to assume that this would not enter into the jury’s considerations, exactly like the statistical significance of a kleptomaniac’s tendency to steal, or of a person with a cancerous tumor sitting on the decision-making and impulse-control area who feels an urge to rape. In my view, the deterministic division into a transcendent soul wandering around in a challenging topological space—or not, depending on the will of the Creator of the soul—is an unnecessary complication, and I don’t think you give enough weight to the above argument.
- Do you think the soul itself is neutral and identical in all human beings? If not, how does that fit with the libertarian conception?
Answer
A topological space? Will the next question be about souls in Hilbert space or in a vector space? Or maybe about a non-abelian rotation group of souls? 🙂
1. You’re mixing together two planes. When there is a situation in which, in our assessment, the person was not free, then of course we exempt him. But that itself proves that when it seems to us that he was free and decided on his own, that is the reason he bears responsibility for his actions. See my article here: https://mikyab.net/%d7%9b%d7%aa%d7%91%d7%99%d7%9d/%d7%9e%d7%90%d7%9e%d7%a8%d7%99%d7%9d/%d7%90%d7%95%d7%98%d7%95%d7%a0%d7%95%d7%9e%d7%99%d7%94-%d7%95%d7%a1%d7%9e%d7%9b%d7%95%d7%aa-%d7%91%d7%a4%d7%a1%d7%99%d7%a7%d7%aa-%d7%94%d7%9c%d7%9b%d7%94/%d7%9e%d7%93%d7%a2%d7%99-%d7%94%d7%9e%d7%95%d7%97-%d7%95%d7%94%d7%9e%d7%a9%d7%a4%d7%98-%d7%9e%d7%91%d7%98-%d7%a4%d7%99%d7%9c%d7%95%d7%a1%d7%95%d7%a4%d7%99-%d7%9e%d7%93%d7%a2%d7%99-%d7%a2%d7%9c-%d7%94
How much information we have is irrelevant. What matters is whether the person was free. If he is not free, then he is not responsible for his actions, even if I do not have detailed information about exactly how the influences on him operated. Why is that important?
Ah, you mean an outline or a topographic surface. 🙂
2. I don’t know. But I don’t see a connection to the question of freedom. Even if the soul has some kind of innate structure, it still has a choice of what to do with it. That is precisely my model of the topographic description.