The issues you describe apply to any grouping of people. Tribes have their own truths. Look at how popular those "we believe science is real" signs are.
You could remove religion and we'd still have the same issues. I don't think it's possible to solve them. The best solution is going to be a world where a long, happy life is guaranteed by forces outside man's control. This will likely alleviate a lot of the tribal issues we face as well.
The difference between religion and other groups is that it provides an impenetrable shield to those who wield it, and virtually anything can be deflected a-la
> God's ways are mysterious
fashion. Any differing positions appear as attacks against the person's religion, which - when it carries sufficient argumentative power - can shake the foundations of the person's world model. This, in turn, prevents them from accepting the differing position because such events induce fear and shut down mental faculties, effectively putting a person in a fight or flight mode.
Furthermore, it prevents people from maturing and accepting integral parts of the human condition, such as the permanence of death, it provides a false sense of security that renders people incapacitated from taking meaningful action (God will find a way if God wills it), and finally gives a false sense importance and grandiose to puny humans who live in utter ignorance of their own insignificance in the medium (NB humanity scale) and grand scheme of things.
To reach the solution that you point to, society needs to accept that free-will is an illusion, and that is inherently incompatible with Abrahamic religions.
> The difference between religion and other groups is that it provides an impenetrable shield to those who wield it, and virtually anything can be deflected
Yeah, other groups have this as well. I once had the temerity to observe that Bush did a lot to quell anti-Islamic sentiment by appealing to other people of faith in post-9/11 speeches. I recounted my own experience as a brown guy with a Muslim name living in the south in 2002-2003.
An acquaintance, a young white atheist lady, told me that I needed to “educate myself” about the “damage” that “Islamaphobia does to brown people in America.”
I didn’t even engage further because it was clear I was dealing with someone’s quasi-religious belief.
Everyone has belief systems and everyone’s belief systems necessarily include things taken as axiomatic.
Nah they're just racist. The thing is a white liberal can become a homosexual should they choose to have sex with someone of the same sex. They can even theoretically become trans.
No matter what a white man or woman does or how they feel about attraction or their gender.... He or she will never be brown. Sorry I'm not putting up with this intersectionality shit.
Sure. But if I, a straight man, slept with a man, then I would become a homosexual by definition. Or if I pursued becoming trans. Now it's unlikely I'd do this but theoretically it is part of the set of possible actions..
There is no action a white man or woman can take, not surgery they can pursue, that will make them brown.
If free will doesn't exist, what's the point in arguing with someone predetermined to believe in free will? They have no free will to change their mind!
That assumption lies in ignorance of how our brains work.
The gist is that we have some world model that arises out of the structure of the brain and the chemical state of it.
Your mind doesn’t change because you have free will. Your mind changes because you have collected a sufficient amount of experiences that alter the state and structure of the brain.
You don’t learn stuff because you “decided” I will learn this and that and I will store it in my brain somewhere. All your learning is actually involuntary because as you accumulate experiences, your synapses get positively or negatively reinforced and that causes the learning. You may choose to study something but you don’t choose which exact information gets stored and where. Instead, when trying to recall something your brain probes its world model and tries to find the circuit that triggers the correct response.
So why would anyone argue that free will doesn’t exist? Because it gives people the opportunity to prove their world model, see the inconsistencies, experience new trains of thought and rewrite their brain.
But no person who is not open to the idea will ever get to accept despite mountains of evidence because for most people, the idea of free will is so integral to their world model, that any challenge feels like a threat to their very foundation, which causes cognitive dissonance, and the shut down of executive functions that process information logically.
Our brains have two competing circuits, one that tries to break the mould and challenges everything, and one that tries to be grounded and conservative. Cognitive dissonance occurs when the former is pushing the latter around but the latter has trouble coming to terms with reality and falls in denial.
Let's try another question. How does not believing in free will give you an advantage in life? Studies seem to show that a "growth mindset" is superior to a "fixed mindset", and I would guess a belief in free will tends to correlate more with a "growth mindset".
A strong belief in free-will correlates with an internal locus of control, which enables a "growth mindset", an external locus of control does not enable a growth mindset because the human believes they react to things.
I do have to admit that for a good while, accepting absence was not good for both my mental well-being, or my actions, simply because I could not find meaning or reason to do anything when no choice is ever my own.
Absence of free will however, implies that there is no locus of control at all. Things happen as they will, regardless of what any human believes, and accepting that things just happen and going with the flow is something that many eastern religions advocate for.
The consequence of accepting the absence of free will is that the person can stop dwelling about the past, because they were never in control and could have never done otherwise. The person understands that any action they "take" is conditioned on their brain's current state (ie structural and chemical).
This means that nothing is fixed, the person itself is not fixed in place because the person is a manifestation of the brain's state, which is constantly modified and revised.
This assumption then, even if wrong, enables a much stronger growth mindset, one that doesn't dwell on the past, and doesn't get stuck on misfortunes, or on a false sense of optimism.
By accepting that we lack free will, we "can" then probe our world model to see what makes us happy, ie what utility functions our brain has, which then gives us a compulsion to do things that make us happy or reach goals. This is because we understand that what needs to be done is change our brain's structure such that when the time comes, it will be in the correct state to achieve whatever it wants to achieve, and understands that achieving goals and pushing forward makes the brain happy - even if only momentarily - due to dopamine.
On a larger scale, suddenly inmates are not the evils society makes them to be, but people who have a screwed up brain and that need help, rehabilitation and normalization of their brain and structures so that they too can experience a decent life, and the events that got them imprisoned can not unfold again. Obviously this does not mean that the inmates get thrown back in with the general population (pun not intended), and that is because they are still in a space of states that cause them to be dangerous to other humans.
Agreed, and to add on, incarceration then, is about protecting society from harmful people, not retribution. It makes no sense to say, were going to keep this person in jail for another 10 years because s/he really deserves it. Rather, we can't let them out because it seems likely they will harm other people.
Obviously if you are person who was harmed in some way by this person, it's hard to hear and follow this plan. But as a society, we have to think in a more calm and deliberate manner, and try to make dispassionate decisions.
Further, if in the future, we find a drug for psychopathy, such that we can just give it dangerous people in prisons, and they become rational, healthy people, at that point it makes no sense to keep incarcerating them. Holding the treatment as a further punishment also makes no sense.
There is a point to be made that incarceration does potentially effect other people's drive to do bad things. Certainly their brain can be dissuaded by them seeing huge prison penalties paid for similar crimes they might do. But i'm not sure the correlation is all that high, and i'm not sure it's ethical to use one person to dissuade another. But that is a point that a society would have to decide on.
A treatment for psychopathy could be possible through magic mushrooms as they seem to promote neuroneogenesis, and restructuring of the brain in depressed patients, so that is a very promising angle, and a lot of further research needs to be done on hallucinogenics because they seem to have profound effects on our perception of reality.
With psychopathy, one of the major problems is with the mirror neurons of the brain, their absence prevents the person from being empathetic, so very targeted treatment would be needed, but in the end, it is better than suffering and rotting in prison.
because your mental state is a culmination of some mix of your genes and external influences, both in history and through the world now. If you are around people who consistently present ideas to you, there is a more likelyhood that your brain will accept those beliefs as facts. This is why indoctrination works so well. So just because you don't have free will doesn't mean your position won't change, in fact, it's evidence that it will change.
I don’t see how running real-time experiments invalidates absence of free will and I’d like to discuss this further.
However, I would like to point out that a non deterministic system does not imply a system where the agents have free will. The scales at which QM apply are many orders of magnitude smaller than those of individual neurons and I don’t believe Penrose has reached a meaningful conclusion with his work. And any deterministic system can be simulated as far as we would like and at any point we want, even if it is chaotic, if the initial parameter are the same the outcome is always the same.
I would also like to argue that consciousness, being aware of one’s own actions or probing some world model does not imply free will. This occurs simply because your brain was in such a state to perform such actions. The act of self referencing can be achieved with things even more dumb, like natural numbers, and I can recommend Hofstadter’s work here, like Gödel Escher Bach.
> a long, happy life is guaranteed by forces outside man's control. This will likely alleviate a lot of the tribal issues we face as well.
I suspect it would make it worse. People without a purpose tend to invent tribes and social status to fight for. School kids and prisoners are great examples. Their purpose is basically to passively exist while their physical needs are provided for by the system. Another example is neighborhoods with high unemployment and lots of people living on social welfare.
You could remove religion and we'd still have the same issues. I don't think it's possible to solve them. The best solution is going to be a world where a long, happy life is guaranteed by forces outside man's control. This will likely alleviate a lot of the tribal issues we face as well.