Yessss, tunes. This is slowly becoming a dump thread, but who says that's a bad thing...
You are not being punished for the physical act that belongs in the physical universe. We are not punishing the molecules that carried the electrochemical signals that cause "your" hand to punch someone in the face or the electromagnetic interactions that mean that the bones of the face broke on impact, nor the bones themselves nor evolution that.... blah blah blah.
The bit of you that is being punished lives in the same plane as the one where the non-physical "you" appreciates "guilt" and experiences "regret" and "shame". And I don't mean the biochemical interactions that accompany or shortly precede the actual experience of it, but the subjective experience itself. That part is able to appreciate the concept of "wrong" and be influenced when someone with a bigger stick attempts to inculcate a stronger or slightly different version of the concept in you.
We're actually pretty close on this, so far as I can tell anyways.
Moral responsibility is a condition of freedom of the will. Given the opportunity to perform a certain action, I can say I'm free only if the options of performing the action and not performing the action are both available. Under these conditions, it is reasonable for me to be punished for wrong-doing because I could have acted differently. That's key -- I could have acted differently -- not it
seems like I could have acted differently. As I mentioned earlier, determinism permits the latter but not the former.
Rejecting free will changes the language of punishment. No longer can the actor be punished for the improper execution of his will, rather the target is now the constitution of his being. You are this way, as a result you acted like this, by changing YOU and your conditions we will change how you act. It's different from fault. Even if the fault is gone, the chain of consequence must still be established. Bad must be punished because of the effects that punishment has further down the line.
Maybe it's a subtle difference, but I think it's probably important.
It's in reference to something that oceansize cited earlier.
I added it because to me, and this has no bearing on anyone else, philosophy and religion -- in the layman sense that we often employ -- are equally circular due to our inherent subjectivity. As close as we can come to accuracy, we are always filtering the world through tinted glasses. And as much as we try to divide the intuitive from the empirical, mirroring examples seem to always arise.
My question about the importance of illusion betrays the nihilistic viewpoint, as amerikana has chimed in, EVERYTHING is an illusion. Everything can be reduced away from its meaning to its core nature. Even determinism is an illusion, because we can always argue that there is more to reality than we can perceive.
No good?
Pretty good thinking, especially if you came to those conclusions independently. You'd probably be interested in Agrippa's trilemma (which was introduced to me by another poster here) and the epistemological nihilism that tends to result from that.
A lot of our reasoning does have to be circular, it's true. If we were unabashedly strict about our principles we'd never get further than the knowledge of our own existence. This is the kind of sophistry from which the Western intellectual canon emerged in the first place. I don't mean that pejoratively either, the Sophists literally were skeptics in all the ways we're talking about. But (I imagine) their thinking became dangerous when it started to become overly permissive.
Starting from a set of imperfect axioms is a reasonable compromise given this reality. Plant your feet as well as you can and move forward from there. Piece together the picture of reality. All illusions are not equal.
I feel like I'm getting too abstract here because of the music and because I'm sleepy. I'll leave it at that for now.
