Philosophy: on Freewill. (No Death).

[Tom_Violence]

I suppose there is no way to argue with that.

However, if the changing of the incentives does produce a change in the results (via a physical change in neurochemistry or what have you), then I think it is reasonably safe to keep the justice system in place, determinism or no. Whew! Of course, now comes the argument that it was the change in neurochemistry in individuals in society caused by the acts of offenders that led to the laws that changed the incentives that changed the.........BLAH,BLAH,BLAH. So, I declare, if the criminals can't help being criminals because they were predestined to do it, then I can't help punishing them because I am predestined to do that. So there!

I think this philosophy is self-limiting in practice, though. If it were applied and people were suddenly not to be held accountable for their actions, anarchy would ensue. Everyone could do whatever they wanted to anyone else and not only do they have a built in justification, they have completely eliminated the need for justification itself. People just will not put up with that kind of environment. They will band together to enforce some kind of order and take punitive measures to do it, thus reestablishing society and a justice system.

Well the thing about a theory like Determinism is that it is in no way prescriptive - you can't use it as a 'reason' for doing something. You can try and say to people "here are reasons why morality isn't quite as 'real' as you might think it is" (and it is very possible to do this without collapsing into relativism, as it depends on what your definitions of 'real' are), but after you've said that people are likely to either disbelieve your claims, or perhaps just carry on as normal as the way of doing things that we have, which may often be referred to as 'morality', works quite nicely and we wouldn't want to lose it due to the aforementioned chaos you pointed out.

Well, I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I definitely have free will. See, the world is just a projection of my mind, so anything that "happens" to me is just the result of my own subconcious, and not because of any outside factors.

I shall hereby refer to you as Solipsistic Cat!

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Chaos theory just deals with the so-called "butterfly effect." Very small events can cause huge, seemingly spontaneous changes in the long run, but there's still a cause.

Absolutely true. Determinism and Chaos Theory are completely compatible. So much so, in fact, that you could say that one relies on the other.