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Determinism - Coggle Diagram
Determinism
Soft Determinism
contributed much to New Atheist thought in recent decades. In his book, The Selfish Gene he puts forward his view that we are delusional if we believe in absolute free will.
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Dennett worries that promulgating the idea that free will is an illusion undermines a sense of responsibility that is necessary in society.
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He also believes that education and upbringing have a profound effect on our lives. However, he argues that all have the ability to change.
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argues that human free will is actually younger than the human race. It evolved as a feature of human existence when the development of culture and language began to set humans apart from other species.
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Dennett believes we live in a deterministic universe but as we have evolved we have developed the ability to make free choices
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argues that it is possible to believe that humans are free but also in some ways determined. Posits that a belief in free will and determinism is compatible.
be described as a SD because even though we are a product of evolution and our cultural inheritance, he believes we can break free from the influence of these things.
Psychological
The ego- It's job is to acknowledge and deal with reality. It operates from the reality principle which works to satisfy the id's desires in the most reasonable and realistic way.
BF Skinner disagreed with Freud's assumption that the unconscious has such control over our mental process. Unlike Freud he believed that our actions are determined by 1. our genetic blueprint and 2. childhood experiences
The super-ego- emerging between 3 and 5 it is the moral compass of the personality up holding a sense of right and wrong.
his work emphasised how our behaviour is determined by the consequences of our previous behaviour. e.g. if you forget your homework and recieve a harsh punishment you will probably not repeat the behaviour again. if you submitted an amazing piece of homework and recieved praise from your teacher you will repeat the behaviour.
The ID- The earliest part of the to emerge. It is present at birth and runs on pure instinct desire and need.
Skinner showed how positive reinforcement worked by replacing a hungry rat in Skinner box. The box contained a lever on the side and as the rat moved about the box, it would accidentally knock the lever. Immediately it did so a food pellet would drop into a container next to the lever.
Sigmund Freud developed the idea of Psychic Determinism. Concept that mental process do not happen by chance but rather, they are caused by unconscious structures. He says there is no such thing as an accident. Even a 'slip of the tongue' can b explained.
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Pavlov began to ring a bell every time food was given to the dogs. Therefore, the dogs began to associate the noise of the bell with food. Eventually Pavlov rang the bell but produced no food. The dog still produced saliva They had been conditioned to produce the unconditional reflex whenever they heard the stimulus of the bell.
Philosophical
Developed a theory based on universal causation- the belief that all human actions and choices have a chain of past causes over which we have no control.
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Based around the idea that everything in the universal has prior cause, including our actions. This is called the Law of Universal Causation
Believed that 'free will is an illusion'- we may think we are free when making moral choices because we take time to pause and reflect on a choice about to be made. However he argues that the outcome is always inevitable and predetermined.
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He gave the analogy of the 'sleeping man' to explain this in his 'essay concerning human understanding.'
Determinism
from this viewpoint every 'choice' that we make is determined by whatever situation immediately preceded it.
This chain stretches backwards and forwards, effectively to infinity
posits that the laws of nature govern everything that happens and that our actions are, in fact, the result pf these scientific laws
believe the idea that we actually always have freedom of choice is just an illusion. If this is true then the concept of personal responsibility is meaningless, and likewise we cannot justly exercise blame and punishment for people's acts.
refers to the belief that 'all events, including moral choices are completely determined by pre-existing cause,'
In this case the idea that people should be held morally responsible for actions they carry out freely makes no sense
physical
If we consider the mind to be material activity in the brain then our moral decision making must also follow similar scientific of cause and effect.
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Scientist such as Galileo and Newton were beginning to understand the laws of nature and could predict the movement of planets by thinking about cause and effect.
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Biological
It can be argued that moral agents are determined physically by their genes e.g. the size of their nose, eye colour.
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Weismann called this formula 'determinates'. Later this genetic formula was discovered as DNA. The genetic code based on the person's hereditary material
Daniel Dennett called this idea 'genetic fixity' it sates that the inherited genes of parents inevitably determined the behavior of their children.
Charles Darwin and August Weismann initially developed the theory that every living organism which has evolved has a genetic formula.
The Bell Curve
They used data from IQ tests that showed the average IQ of Asian Americans was higher than that of White Americans, who is turn, had a higher average IQ than black Americans.
Argued that IQ in the USA was declining due to the fact that the more intelligent members of society were choosing to have less children.
J Herrnstein and Charles Murray argued that intelligence is substantially influenced by inherited and environmental factors.
They blamed large scale immigration for the declining IQ levels. The authors recommended the elimination of welfare policies that encourage women from poor backgrounds to have large families. They also recommended that immigration be limited in the USA
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Sam Harris
- claims that we are only aware of a tiny fraction of the information our brains process. He deems it entirely plausible that we may not be entirely conscious of our thoughts and actions.
- Harris believes humans cannot behave differently even if they wanted to. He says they couldn't because they are not in control of their behavior. A stream of causes reaching back into childhood and beyond, in his opinion, have determined their behavior.
He argues that the idea that the idea that we have freedom is based on two false assumptions: 1. We are the conscious source of our thought and actions. 2. That we could have behaved differently if we had wanted to.
He believes that the death penalty is wrong. In his opinion, no one on death row can be held responsible for their crimes because they are simply a combination of bad genes, bad parents and bad environment.
the Human Genome Project
Addiction: Scientists found that multiple genes can add up to make a moral agent more susceptible to addiction e.g. a certain gene can make a person feel sick when given a certain stimulus but another person without the gene might feel happy when exposed to the stimuli.
Homosexuality: in 2015 a study carried out by Dr Tuck Ngun on 47 pairs of identical twins found 9 small regions of the human genetic code played a key role in deciding whether a person is homosexual and heterosexual. Previous studies have found that when one identical twin is gay, there is a 20 percent likelihood that the other twin will be to. Additionally the chance of being gay increases by one-third for every older brother that a male has.
was an international scientific research project that attempted to map all the genes within the human genome. Some of the findings seem to support the idea of 'genetic fixity'
Hard determinism
The most extreme form of determinism. Argues that, as all our actions have prior causes, we are not free or responsible.
E.g. they believed that an individual cannot be blamed for being violent. Either this violence needs to be fixed or they need to be put into prison in order to protect society.