Post by Admin on Mar 2, 2022 5:15:37 GMT
Chapter 28 - The Godless Wicked are Cursed
The godless wicked are supposedly destined for the following fates:
1. no hope after death
2. ignored by God in time of need
3. children will die by the sword, hunger, and the plague
4. will lose all his possessions - no legacy
5. terrorized by floods and tornados
*Moral Desert*
Moral desert, the idea that you should be held morally accountable for your actions and deserve reward or punishment for them, is an idea foundational to Judeo-Christian theology. Growing up Mormon, moral desert was a no brainer, since the religious doctrine made very clear the inherent free will (free agency) given to us by God to choose good from evil. Yet, after leaving the church I came across a whole ideology of "no free will". It blew my mind that something I had considered a no brainer my whole life was actually something worthy of skepticism. There is a profound argument to be made that moral desert is only justifiable if free will exists. If free will doesn't exist, then we can't be held morally responsible before God.
*Job Moral Desert*
The entire book of Job is a discussion on moral desert. Did Job do something that was worthy of punishment? He claims he didn't. But he never doubts that free will exists. He seems plenty willing to hold those who actually perform wicked deeds accountable for punishment.
*Free Will Thought Experiment*
The typical religious idea of free will is the idea that we are a spirit inside a body, merely pulling the levers of our brain to perform actions with our body. The material of our body isn't the cause of our decisions, but rather our spirit is the cause of our decisions. If this is truly the case, then perhaps we would 1) be able to find levers in the brain that are being pulled by a supernatural force, 2) be able to measure this supernatural force by its impact on our brains, 3) be able to detect the energy of this spirit leave when we die, 4) be able to see a top-down decision making function that starts with our spirit and ends with our biology. Even if all of this was proven to be true, there would be a second order level of analysis that would need to be resolved before we could accept the idea of free will. That is - what type of mechanism is the spirit using to make decisions? Is our spirit absorbing information and running a cost-benefit calculation in order to make decisions? If our spirit makes decisions based on algorithms that process information against value-systems, did our spirit have the freedom to choose 1) the algorithm, 2) the information absorbed, and 3) the value-system? If your spirit did choose those things, did your spirit have the freedom to not have chosen those things? If the spirit is choosing based on which option gives them a good feeling, did they choose which feeling to have? If the spirit is a receiver (rather than creator) of their feelings, then they become a slave that is forced to make choices that are in alignment with feelings that are out of their control. If you keep asking the question "why" in relation to why decisions are made, you eventually run out of answers for where the freedom actually is.
*Deterministic Argument for No Free Will*
If free will is the ability to have chosen differently, a deterministic view of the chemistry of our brains would say that the cascade of cause and effect chemical interactions destines your brain to have certain states which lead to certain decisions. If you went back in time to change your decision, you would be unable to because your brain contains all the chemical potentials for the same brain state to produce the same decision. You would need to inject a free will variable into the past to change the trajectory of the decision, yet there is no evidence of such a free will variable.
*Philosophic Argument for No Free Will*
If there is a choice to be made, there must be variables at play for one thing to be chosen over another. If option A contains X units of favorability, and option B contains Y units of favorability, a choice is able to be made as to favor A over B. Without comparable units of favorability, no choice is able to be made. It doesn't matter if you are a brain or a spirit, both choice producing systems require favorability variables in order to make the choice possible. But then, one must ask, where did the favorability measurements come from? If you didn't choose the favorability measurements then you don't have free will. If you did choose the favourability measurements, then the same question gets pushed back in an infinite regress which becomes absurd quickly. Upon what favorability variable did you choose your favorability variable? Eventually it inevitably gets pushed back to the environment which bestowed upon you the variables that controlled your decision, hence "no free will".
*Science of No Free Will*
Neuroscience seems to have found the opposite of religious free will to be the case in reality. There are no levers in the brain for the spirit to tug on. Damage to the brain has a severe impact on behavior, personality, and consciousness, indicating that the brain is the source of our decisions, not a spirit. A supernatural source has not been measured puppeteering brains, rather our environments have been found to be puppeteering our brains. Environmental stimuli triggers physiological reactions in the body that send chemicals to the brain that activate different cortexes for decision making. Visual stimuli of threats can start as photons in the environment. These photons enter the brain, get interpreted, and then produce adrenaline which activates the fight or flight response. Consequently, it has become obvious within neuroscience that we don't have a top-down decision making structure, but rather a bottom-up decision making structure. The environment affects our chemistry which affects our biology which affects our physiology which affects our psychology. The information gets processed in our brain, and then flows back down the chain back to the environment. Free will experiments have been performed to show that when we think we have consciously made a decision, our signals in the unconscious portions of our brain had already made the decision before our mind had. By reading the electric signature of our body, scientists can predict our "free will" decisions before we make them. This shows that the true source of the decision is not our conscious mind but rather our biology. Benjamin Libet's experiment was able to predict people flicking their wrist a half a second before they consciously chose to [17]. Itzhak Fried found correlated brain activity 2 seconds before people consciously chose to perform actions [18]. Chun Siong Soon was able to predict mathematical decisions before people were consciously aware of making the choice [19]. Matsuhashi found that people become aware of their decisions after the decisions are already taking place in their body, meaning their conscious minds are too slow to be the originators of movements. While there is a fair amount of criticism of these scientific studies, the trend seems to be towards a bottom-up model of behavioral causation [20].
*Quantum No Free Will*
Sometimes quantum randomness is appealed to for the sake of providing wiggle room for free will to exist within that spooky randomness. The main problem with this approach is the fact that randomness is not the same as freedom. When a dice is rolled, no one has the power to control what number it will land on. It seems incorrect to assume that quantum randomness implies freedom. That said, lets look deeper at how randomness could play a role. If electrons have free will, they would only have free will within the scope of the uncertainty principle, as measured by physics. My current understanding is that the uncertainty principle gives wiggle room at about the size of the electron wavelength, which for atoms is about the width of the atom. The problem with the panpsychist free will argument (that all matter is conscious with free will) is that brains don't operate at the level of the atom (.1 nm), they operate at the level of the neuron nucleus (3,000 - 18,000 nm), if averaged at 10,500 nm it would be a 105,000 times larger than an atom [21]. If you wanted to claim free will at the level of the synapse, then you have 20 nm of wiggle room which is still 200 times larger than an atom [22]. If you want free will at the level of the neurotransmitter, that is 5 nm, still 50 times larger than an atom [23]. I would guess that an equation for freedom would look something like the wiggle room of the election divided by the size of the functional scope. If the electron wavelength distance of wiggle room is divided over different functional scopes you get 1/50 is freedom at the level of the neurotransmitter, 1/200 is freedom at the level of the synapse, and 1/105,000 is freedom at the level of the neuron. An accurate measure of freedom would probably have to calculate the level of interactions between multiple free electrons, but the more electrons needed to cooperate, the harder it would be as only so many electrons are within an atomic distance from each other. So perhaps at a local point you could get closer to 2/50, 2/200, 2/105,000 if you allowed next-door electrons to participate. For surface-level freedom, you might be able to get all of the electrons on a surface to act in unison, so you might have a greater amount of freedom, perhaps calculated by the number of atoms on the surface, divided by the total number of atoms within the functional scope. These types of freedoms would be limited to the power of the electron. If the functional scope requires a larger structure (such as an atom, molecule, or protein) for activation as opposed to an electron for activation, the measure of electron freedom loses relevance rapidly. So, all in all, it doesn't seem like quantum randomness has a large enough amount of wiggle room to provide meaningful freedom at the level of neuron function.
*Tumor Induced Criminality*
Charles Whitman was a normal guy until a tumor developed near his amygdala (which controls fight or flight response). He transformed into someone who was struggling with obsessive compulsions and eventually when on a killing spree until he was killed by the police. In a letter, he begged people to perform an autopsy on him because he knew something was wrong with his brain [24]. Another case of brain tumor induced criminality was in a case of a 40 year old married man. He was a normal husband and father until he started developing greater sexual urges towards taboos, including children. He was guilty of child pornography and child sexual abuse, in addition to a myriad of other sexually deviant behavior. After reporting headaches, a brain scan was done that found an orbitofrontal tumor. When the tumor was removed, his paedophilic urges disappeared. A year later, the tumor came back, and so did the urges [25].
*Punishment Under No Free Will*
If there is no free will then there is no moral desert. For how can one be held responsible if they are just a victim of their biological programming? Perhaps, even if there is no moral desert, punishment can still be ethically applied. A utilitarian perspective might look at the idea of preventing future harm - punishments can be justified if they are helpful to the collective. Punishments could be seen as a psychological tool for negatively reinforcing bad behavior - creating a deterrent against future crimes. An evolutionary perspective might see punishments as a type of evolutionary tit for tat justice. An indirect effect of punishments like jail time and other state punishments is the damage to a criminal's reproductive ability. These punishments could possibly reduce the likelihood that genes with these behaviors propagate into the future. Caruso has proposed a type of "public health-quarantine" perspective on punishment, viewing criminals as victims of their environment and biology. Under the "public health-quarantine" perspective, criminals are treated like those infected with a disease. They may be separated from the rest of the population as to protect others, but no punishments in excess of separation are warranted [24].
*Locus of Control*
Locus of control is a valence of believe about an individual's control over their life. Those with an internal locus of control believe that they have the power to control their destiny. Those with an external locus of control believe that the environment controls their destiny. These attitudes seem connected to attitudes about free will, yet the scientific literature seems to show that they are not linked very tightly psychologically [26]. Between attitudes on free will and locus of control, some studies show a positive correlation, others a negative correlation, and others no correlation [27]. Practically speaking, it makes sense that someone can believe they control their destiny, yet also not believe in free will. The distinction here is perhaps the idea that an individual's will exists, even if it is not totally free. You can use your will to control your destiny.
*Growth vs Fixed Mindset*
There is another set of related concepts - the idea of a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset. With the growth mindset, you believe that you can continually improve, level up, and make things better. With a fixed mindset, you believe that you will always be the same way and that you will never be better than you are currently.
*Psychological Impacts of Free will*
There seems to be growing evidence of how different beliefs affect you. People naturally have a high level of belief in free will. Tests have shown that trying to increase people's free will has no effect (since they already believe in it), yet trying to decrease their belief in free will will have an effect on their behaviors. Vohs and Schooler found that children exposed to material that tells them there is "no free will" have increased levels at which they cheat on specific tasks. Baumeister, Masicampo, and DeWall found that hurting people's belief in free will can lead to an increase in aggressive or harmful behaviors (measured by making others consume unpleasant hot sauce). They also found that harming the belief in free will causes people to become less helpful (measured by not letting someone borrow their phone). In another study belief in free will was correlated with willingness to volunteer to help others in need. Stillman and Baumeister found that harming belief in free will caused people to be less likely to volunteer to help in recycling. This effect was even larger in those with psychopathic tendencies (those who lack empathy). Alquist and Baumeister found that disbelief in free will was correlated to conformity, and belief in free will correlated to more novel behavior (measured by whether or not their judgement of a score for participants followed the judgment of the prior judges or not). Stillman found that belief in free will was correlated to job performance, positive impact on the workforce, and job attendance. Another study of Stillman's found that a belief in free will caused greater confidence in a successful future. Even after controlling for intelligence, Big Five personality traits, and locus of control, free will still remained a significant factor. Rigoni, Ku¨hn, Sartori, and Brass found that belief in free will was correlated with a participant's willingness to take initiative on tasks. [27]. Crescioni found that a belief in free will was correlated with a more meaningful life, higher life satisfaction, higher self-confidence in one's abilities, greater religiosity, and gratitude. Alquist found that reducing the belief in free will caused people to be less creative in generating fewer possible choice paths for themselves. Stillman and Baumeister found that belief in free will correlated to being able to generate higher quality learnings from past mistakes. Crescioni further found that belief in free will led to the creation of more goals, goals that were further into the future, and goals of a higher quality. Free will belief has been correlated to extroversion, agreeableness, and right-wing authoritarianism. Stillman also found a belief in free will to be correlated to three Big Five traits, namely conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience. There was no correlation with intelligence. Brewer & Baumeister found that belief in free will was connected to greater self-control and a greater desire for self-control. Shariff, Karremans, Greene, Schooler, and Vohs found that belief in free will led to less forgiveness for offenders, and harsher prison sentences. Crescioni, Baumeister, Ent, Ainsworth, and Lambert found that beliefs in free will were correlated with people's ability to transcend conflict and forgive their partners in relationships. Brewer & Baumeister found that belief in free will increased perspectives on 3rd person accountability, whereas disbelief in free will led to more forgiveness for 3rd persons. Belief in free will was negatively correlated with opinion about one's sense of humor, attractiveness, and empathy [27].
*Psychological Impacts of Locus of Control*
People with an internal locus of control have been found to make more money [28]. People with an external locus of control [28].
*Psychological Impacts of Mindset*
Researchers performed an experiment to test the affect of growth mindset messaging vs fixed mindset messaging on children. Some children were praised on test performance using fixed mindset words like "You must be smart", others were praised with growth mindset words like "You must have worked very hard". Children who were given growth mindset messaging were more likely to be optimistic about taking a harder test and more honest about the results. Children who were given fixed mindset messaging were more displeased with having to take a more difficult test and were more likely to lie about the results of the more difficult test [29]. This study seems to show an increase in anxiety about results when the results are connected to a child's fixed attributes (like intelligence), and how connecting the results to a growable attribute (like effort) gave children less anxiety and more motivation.
*Synthesis*
I think with these concepts, the Hegelian idea of a dialectical synthesis is very helpful. Leftists have a bias for an external locus of control, thinking that the environment place the largest role in our individual destinies, and therefore gives them motivation to use the government to make the environment more fair. Right-wingers have a bias for an internal locus of control, believing that they are personally responsible for their behaviors which guide their destinies [29]. I think that in this instance it is easy to make the case that for most people, reality is a good mixture of both internal and external factors. It could vary on a case by case basis. If we want to have the best policy, we need to have an accurate understanding of reality. Either extreme can take us away from reality. Too much bias on internal locus of control can lead us to a strict meritocracy that rewards the lucky, and punishes the unlucky. Too much bias for external locus of control can lead us to a communistic state that punishes merit. I think the optimal synthesis is a mixture of safety nets for leveling the playing field when luck plays a role, and capitalistic rewards for when merit is a desirable thing to promote.
*Divine Punishment*
One thing is certain, if there is no free will, then the entire theology of moral desert is false. There can be no post-death judgement if we are fundamentally not truly free and therefore unable to be held accountable for our choices. Hell or other types of divine punishments would be inherently unjust.
NEXT: Chapter 28.5 - Love of wisdom
The godless wicked are supposedly destined for the following fates:
1. no hope after death
2. ignored by God in time of need
3. children will die by the sword, hunger, and the plague
4. will lose all his possessions - no legacy
5. terrorized by floods and tornados
*Moral Desert*
Moral desert, the idea that you should be held morally accountable for your actions and deserve reward or punishment for them, is an idea foundational to Judeo-Christian theology. Growing up Mormon, moral desert was a no brainer, since the religious doctrine made very clear the inherent free will (free agency) given to us by God to choose good from evil. Yet, after leaving the church I came across a whole ideology of "no free will". It blew my mind that something I had considered a no brainer my whole life was actually something worthy of skepticism. There is a profound argument to be made that moral desert is only justifiable if free will exists. If free will doesn't exist, then we can't be held morally responsible before God.
*Job Moral Desert*
The entire book of Job is a discussion on moral desert. Did Job do something that was worthy of punishment? He claims he didn't. But he never doubts that free will exists. He seems plenty willing to hold those who actually perform wicked deeds accountable for punishment.
*Free Will Thought Experiment*
The typical religious idea of free will is the idea that we are a spirit inside a body, merely pulling the levers of our brain to perform actions with our body. The material of our body isn't the cause of our decisions, but rather our spirit is the cause of our decisions. If this is truly the case, then perhaps we would 1) be able to find levers in the brain that are being pulled by a supernatural force, 2) be able to measure this supernatural force by its impact on our brains, 3) be able to detect the energy of this spirit leave when we die, 4) be able to see a top-down decision making function that starts with our spirit and ends with our biology. Even if all of this was proven to be true, there would be a second order level of analysis that would need to be resolved before we could accept the idea of free will. That is - what type of mechanism is the spirit using to make decisions? Is our spirit absorbing information and running a cost-benefit calculation in order to make decisions? If our spirit makes decisions based on algorithms that process information against value-systems, did our spirit have the freedom to choose 1) the algorithm, 2) the information absorbed, and 3) the value-system? If your spirit did choose those things, did your spirit have the freedom to not have chosen those things? If the spirit is choosing based on which option gives them a good feeling, did they choose which feeling to have? If the spirit is a receiver (rather than creator) of their feelings, then they become a slave that is forced to make choices that are in alignment with feelings that are out of their control. If you keep asking the question "why" in relation to why decisions are made, you eventually run out of answers for where the freedom actually is.
*Deterministic Argument for No Free Will*
If free will is the ability to have chosen differently, a deterministic view of the chemistry of our brains would say that the cascade of cause and effect chemical interactions destines your brain to have certain states which lead to certain decisions. If you went back in time to change your decision, you would be unable to because your brain contains all the chemical potentials for the same brain state to produce the same decision. You would need to inject a free will variable into the past to change the trajectory of the decision, yet there is no evidence of such a free will variable.
*Philosophic Argument for No Free Will*
If there is a choice to be made, there must be variables at play for one thing to be chosen over another. If option A contains X units of favorability, and option B contains Y units of favorability, a choice is able to be made as to favor A over B. Without comparable units of favorability, no choice is able to be made. It doesn't matter if you are a brain or a spirit, both choice producing systems require favorability variables in order to make the choice possible. But then, one must ask, where did the favorability measurements come from? If you didn't choose the favorability measurements then you don't have free will. If you did choose the favourability measurements, then the same question gets pushed back in an infinite regress which becomes absurd quickly. Upon what favorability variable did you choose your favorability variable? Eventually it inevitably gets pushed back to the environment which bestowed upon you the variables that controlled your decision, hence "no free will".
*Science of No Free Will*
Neuroscience seems to have found the opposite of religious free will to be the case in reality. There are no levers in the brain for the spirit to tug on. Damage to the brain has a severe impact on behavior, personality, and consciousness, indicating that the brain is the source of our decisions, not a spirit. A supernatural source has not been measured puppeteering brains, rather our environments have been found to be puppeteering our brains. Environmental stimuli triggers physiological reactions in the body that send chemicals to the brain that activate different cortexes for decision making. Visual stimuli of threats can start as photons in the environment. These photons enter the brain, get interpreted, and then produce adrenaline which activates the fight or flight response. Consequently, it has become obvious within neuroscience that we don't have a top-down decision making structure, but rather a bottom-up decision making structure. The environment affects our chemistry which affects our biology which affects our physiology which affects our psychology. The information gets processed in our brain, and then flows back down the chain back to the environment. Free will experiments have been performed to show that when we think we have consciously made a decision, our signals in the unconscious portions of our brain had already made the decision before our mind had. By reading the electric signature of our body, scientists can predict our "free will" decisions before we make them. This shows that the true source of the decision is not our conscious mind but rather our biology. Benjamin Libet's experiment was able to predict people flicking their wrist a half a second before they consciously chose to [17]. Itzhak Fried found correlated brain activity 2 seconds before people consciously chose to perform actions [18]. Chun Siong Soon was able to predict mathematical decisions before people were consciously aware of making the choice [19]. Matsuhashi found that people become aware of their decisions after the decisions are already taking place in their body, meaning their conscious minds are too slow to be the originators of movements. While there is a fair amount of criticism of these scientific studies, the trend seems to be towards a bottom-up model of behavioral causation [20].
*Quantum No Free Will*
Sometimes quantum randomness is appealed to for the sake of providing wiggle room for free will to exist within that spooky randomness. The main problem with this approach is the fact that randomness is not the same as freedom. When a dice is rolled, no one has the power to control what number it will land on. It seems incorrect to assume that quantum randomness implies freedom. That said, lets look deeper at how randomness could play a role. If electrons have free will, they would only have free will within the scope of the uncertainty principle, as measured by physics. My current understanding is that the uncertainty principle gives wiggle room at about the size of the electron wavelength, which for atoms is about the width of the atom. The problem with the panpsychist free will argument (that all matter is conscious with free will) is that brains don't operate at the level of the atom (.1 nm), they operate at the level of the neuron nucleus (3,000 - 18,000 nm), if averaged at 10,500 nm it would be a 105,000 times larger than an atom [21]. If you wanted to claim free will at the level of the synapse, then you have 20 nm of wiggle room which is still 200 times larger than an atom [22]. If you want free will at the level of the neurotransmitter, that is 5 nm, still 50 times larger than an atom [23]. I would guess that an equation for freedom would look something like the wiggle room of the election divided by the size of the functional scope. If the electron wavelength distance of wiggle room is divided over different functional scopes you get 1/50 is freedom at the level of the neurotransmitter, 1/200 is freedom at the level of the synapse, and 1/105,000 is freedom at the level of the neuron. An accurate measure of freedom would probably have to calculate the level of interactions between multiple free electrons, but the more electrons needed to cooperate, the harder it would be as only so many electrons are within an atomic distance from each other. So perhaps at a local point you could get closer to 2/50, 2/200, 2/105,000 if you allowed next-door electrons to participate. For surface-level freedom, you might be able to get all of the electrons on a surface to act in unison, so you might have a greater amount of freedom, perhaps calculated by the number of atoms on the surface, divided by the total number of atoms within the functional scope. These types of freedoms would be limited to the power of the electron. If the functional scope requires a larger structure (such as an atom, molecule, or protein) for activation as opposed to an electron for activation, the measure of electron freedom loses relevance rapidly. So, all in all, it doesn't seem like quantum randomness has a large enough amount of wiggle room to provide meaningful freedom at the level of neuron function.
*Tumor Induced Criminality*
Charles Whitman was a normal guy until a tumor developed near his amygdala (which controls fight or flight response). He transformed into someone who was struggling with obsessive compulsions and eventually when on a killing spree until he was killed by the police. In a letter, he begged people to perform an autopsy on him because he knew something was wrong with his brain [24]. Another case of brain tumor induced criminality was in a case of a 40 year old married man. He was a normal husband and father until he started developing greater sexual urges towards taboos, including children. He was guilty of child pornography and child sexual abuse, in addition to a myriad of other sexually deviant behavior. After reporting headaches, a brain scan was done that found an orbitofrontal tumor. When the tumor was removed, his paedophilic urges disappeared. A year later, the tumor came back, and so did the urges [25].
*Punishment Under No Free Will*
If there is no free will then there is no moral desert. For how can one be held responsible if they are just a victim of their biological programming? Perhaps, even if there is no moral desert, punishment can still be ethically applied. A utilitarian perspective might look at the idea of preventing future harm - punishments can be justified if they are helpful to the collective. Punishments could be seen as a psychological tool for negatively reinforcing bad behavior - creating a deterrent against future crimes. An evolutionary perspective might see punishments as a type of evolutionary tit for tat justice. An indirect effect of punishments like jail time and other state punishments is the damage to a criminal's reproductive ability. These punishments could possibly reduce the likelihood that genes with these behaviors propagate into the future. Caruso has proposed a type of "public health-quarantine" perspective on punishment, viewing criminals as victims of their environment and biology. Under the "public health-quarantine" perspective, criminals are treated like those infected with a disease. They may be separated from the rest of the population as to protect others, but no punishments in excess of separation are warranted [24].
*Locus of Control*
Locus of control is a valence of believe about an individual's control over their life. Those with an internal locus of control believe that they have the power to control their destiny. Those with an external locus of control believe that the environment controls their destiny. These attitudes seem connected to attitudes about free will, yet the scientific literature seems to show that they are not linked very tightly psychologically [26]. Between attitudes on free will and locus of control, some studies show a positive correlation, others a negative correlation, and others no correlation [27]. Practically speaking, it makes sense that someone can believe they control their destiny, yet also not believe in free will. The distinction here is perhaps the idea that an individual's will exists, even if it is not totally free. You can use your will to control your destiny.
*Growth vs Fixed Mindset*
There is another set of related concepts - the idea of a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset. With the growth mindset, you believe that you can continually improve, level up, and make things better. With a fixed mindset, you believe that you will always be the same way and that you will never be better than you are currently.
*Psychological Impacts of Free will*
There seems to be growing evidence of how different beliefs affect you. People naturally have a high level of belief in free will. Tests have shown that trying to increase people's free will has no effect (since they already believe in it), yet trying to decrease their belief in free will will have an effect on their behaviors. Vohs and Schooler found that children exposed to material that tells them there is "no free will" have increased levels at which they cheat on specific tasks. Baumeister, Masicampo, and DeWall found that hurting people's belief in free will can lead to an increase in aggressive or harmful behaviors (measured by making others consume unpleasant hot sauce). They also found that harming the belief in free will causes people to become less helpful (measured by not letting someone borrow their phone). In another study belief in free will was correlated with willingness to volunteer to help others in need. Stillman and Baumeister found that harming belief in free will caused people to be less likely to volunteer to help in recycling. This effect was even larger in those with psychopathic tendencies (those who lack empathy). Alquist and Baumeister found that disbelief in free will was correlated to conformity, and belief in free will correlated to more novel behavior (measured by whether or not their judgement of a score for participants followed the judgment of the prior judges or not). Stillman found that belief in free will was correlated to job performance, positive impact on the workforce, and job attendance. Another study of Stillman's found that a belief in free will caused greater confidence in a successful future. Even after controlling for intelligence, Big Five personality traits, and locus of control, free will still remained a significant factor. Rigoni, Ku¨hn, Sartori, and Brass found that belief in free will was correlated with a participant's willingness to take initiative on tasks. [27]. Crescioni found that a belief in free will was correlated with a more meaningful life, higher life satisfaction, higher self-confidence in one's abilities, greater religiosity, and gratitude. Alquist found that reducing the belief in free will caused people to be less creative in generating fewer possible choice paths for themselves. Stillman and Baumeister found that belief in free will correlated to being able to generate higher quality learnings from past mistakes. Crescioni further found that belief in free will led to the creation of more goals, goals that were further into the future, and goals of a higher quality. Free will belief has been correlated to extroversion, agreeableness, and right-wing authoritarianism. Stillman also found a belief in free will to be correlated to three Big Five traits, namely conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience. There was no correlation with intelligence. Brewer & Baumeister found that belief in free will was connected to greater self-control and a greater desire for self-control. Shariff, Karremans, Greene, Schooler, and Vohs found that belief in free will led to less forgiveness for offenders, and harsher prison sentences. Crescioni, Baumeister, Ent, Ainsworth, and Lambert found that beliefs in free will were correlated with people's ability to transcend conflict and forgive their partners in relationships. Brewer & Baumeister found that belief in free will increased perspectives on 3rd person accountability, whereas disbelief in free will led to more forgiveness for 3rd persons. Belief in free will was negatively correlated with opinion about one's sense of humor, attractiveness, and empathy [27].
*Psychological Impacts of Locus of Control*
People with an internal locus of control have been found to make more money [28]. People with an external locus of control [28].
*Psychological Impacts of Mindset*
Researchers performed an experiment to test the affect of growth mindset messaging vs fixed mindset messaging on children. Some children were praised on test performance using fixed mindset words like "You must be smart", others were praised with growth mindset words like "You must have worked very hard". Children who were given growth mindset messaging were more likely to be optimistic about taking a harder test and more honest about the results. Children who were given fixed mindset messaging were more displeased with having to take a more difficult test and were more likely to lie about the results of the more difficult test [29]. This study seems to show an increase in anxiety about results when the results are connected to a child's fixed attributes (like intelligence), and how connecting the results to a growable attribute (like effort) gave children less anxiety and more motivation.
*Synthesis*
I think with these concepts, the Hegelian idea of a dialectical synthesis is very helpful. Leftists have a bias for an external locus of control, thinking that the environment place the largest role in our individual destinies, and therefore gives them motivation to use the government to make the environment more fair. Right-wingers have a bias for an internal locus of control, believing that they are personally responsible for their behaviors which guide their destinies [29]. I think that in this instance it is easy to make the case that for most people, reality is a good mixture of both internal and external factors. It could vary on a case by case basis. If we want to have the best policy, we need to have an accurate understanding of reality. Either extreme can take us away from reality. Too much bias on internal locus of control can lead us to a strict meritocracy that rewards the lucky, and punishes the unlucky. Too much bias for external locus of control can lead us to a communistic state that punishes merit. I think the optimal synthesis is a mixture of safety nets for leveling the playing field when luck plays a role, and capitalistic rewards for when merit is a desirable thing to promote.
*Divine Punishment*
One thing is certain, if there is no free will, then the entire theology of moral desert is false. There can be no post-death judgement if we are fundamentally not truly free and therefore unable to be held accountable for our choices. Hell or other types of divine punishments would be inherently unjust.
NEXT: Chapter 28.5 - Love of wisdom
