Here at the Church of the Churchless we examine issues related to current events that are almost universally ignored by others. Some would say that’s because I write about stuff that is so far out-there, so metaphysical, so divorced from everyday reality, nobody cares about it except people who similarly have their heads in the clouds instead of grounded in practicality.
Not surprisingly, I have a different take.
Ever since Charlie Kirk, a well-known right-wing political activist here in the United States, was apparently killed by Tyler Robinson, who has been arrested, I’ve heard many commentators on news outlets speak of the importance of learning Robinson’s motive for assassinating Kirk with a high-powered rifle from his perch on a college rooftop some 120 yards away.
Today Spencer Cox, the Governor of Utah, where the killing took place, spoke about the radicalization of Robinson, who grew up in a Republican family but reportedly developed other political leanings fairly recently after he immersed himself in the Internet’s “gamer” culture that attracts young men. (Robinson is 22 years old.)
The underlying assumption of motive seekers, after notable murders or other crimes that attract widespread public attention, is that we humans do what we do because we’re consciously motivated to perform that act. By “consciously,” I mean that the reason we do something is known to us and can be communicated to others.
In crime shows on television this is reflected in a detective asking someone who has been arrested, “So, why did you kill Theolonius McGillicuty? Come clean about this and maybe you won’t get the death penalty.” Again, this assumes that the person being interrogated not only committed murder, but understands exactly what led him or her to perform that act.
This is highly debatable. In fact, I’ll go farther than that and say, this is so unlikely as to be preposterous. (“Choice blindness” is one reason.”)
I say this because after lengthy study of countless (almost) books about neuroscience, physics, and the nature of selfhood, I’m convinced that these statements are almost certainly true:
(1) Determinism, cause and effect, rules reality in every regard except when it comes to quantum probabilities that have no effect on we humans.
(2) Nonetheless, because the goings-on of the human brain are so complex, it rarely is possible to accurately predict a person’s future behavior, or explain past behavior.
(3) This means that free will is an illusion. It is a commonly held illusion due to (2): almost always we aren’t able to predict what we will think, feel, or do in the next minute, hour, day, or whenever, nor are we able to predict what others will think, feel, or do.
(4) This uncertainly leads to a belief in free will; because what ends up being willed is so difficult to predict, we assume it must be freely willed.
I’ve just started reading a book by Samir Varma, The Science of Free Will: How Determinism Affects Everything from the Future of AI to Traffic to God to Bees. Varma, who has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, argues that there are two types of free will. He writes:
I will start by bridging the gap between the two warring parties: those who say that free will exists, and those who say it does not. I will argue that the parties are, in some sense, talking about different things. Those who do not believe in free will are talking about “Free Will in Theory” (FWIT), and those who do are talking about “Free Will in Practice” (FWIP).
I believe both parties are correct. We both have free will, and simultaneously, we do not. Is this a paradox? The answer is no. In reality, we do not have free will in theory but we do have free will in practice. In fact, I believe and will argue something a little bit more extreme: we have exactly no FWIT but have perfect FWIP. In effect, we can and should hold both views simultaneously because they apply to different levels of explanation.
To the extent that you can predict someone’s behavior exactly and always that person cannot, by definition, have free will either in theory or in practice. Therefore, for someone to have free will, their behavior must be, to some extent, unpredictable. To the extent that you cannot predict someone’s behavior (including being able to predict your own behavior), that person has free will. The more predictable someone is, the less free will they have.
Now, it’s important to understand what Varma is saying here. There’s no such thing as free will. But it appears that free will exists, because we rarely can accurately predict either our own, or someone else’s, behavior. (If you need convincing that the origins of human behavior are amazingly complex, traversing vast spans of time and space, read Robert Sapolsky’s book, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will.)
So when people talk about learning the motive behind Tyler Robinson’s killing of Charlie Kirk, they’re unknowingly speaking about Free Will in Practice (FWIP). At some point Robinson himself may explain why he shot Kirk in the neck. For sure, others will conjure up stories that attempt to explain why Robinson killed Kirk.
Trump believes it was those radical left-wing terrorists, which seemingly includes just about every liberal Democrat, so I guess Trump thinks I was partly responsible for Kirk’s death. Governor Cox lays the blame on social media, which he calls a “cancer” destroying our culture. Bigots consider that being transgender causes someone to become a murderer (Robinson was in a relationship with someone undergoing a gender transition.)
Since it almost always isn’t possible to tell what actually determined a person’s behavior, we make up tales, fantasies really, about why we do things and why other people do things. We may think, “I give to the poor because I’m a good person,” or “That guy acted the way he did because he’s a jerk.” Neither of those explanations comes close to the Free Will in Theory (FWIT) truth — which is that we possess exactly zero free will.
But since it is impossible to know the truth of what makes us, or anyone else, behave in a certain way, those stories we tell about human behavior are believed. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so does the human mind abhor not having an opinion about why people do what they do.
The honest approach is to say, “No one knows why.” Because not-knowing is so unappealing, the honest route isn’t taken by most of us. Thus there will continue to be calls to learn the motive behind Robinson’s killing of Kirk, even though whatever answer is arrived at by the justice system or citizens at large, that answer will be wrong.
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I believe that the issue of free will is confused with choice. It appears that we have free will because we have choice, but being able to choose is not free will but limited to the data that we are programmed with via our cultures and genetic natures. It is from this limited information that our choices emerge.
I always think it’s relavant to remember that the issue of free will has its roots in Augustian theodicy. Augustine, to solve the problem of God being held morally responsible for the fall of Adam and Eve as he (God) was the creator of everything, including evil, he introduced (or rather popularised) the idea of free will, benevolently giving man the choice – meaning that God is not responsible for evil and also not for man sinning.
But of course, since then (and probably long before Augustine), philosophers, theologians and generally the human quest to be certain, will continue to ponder free will. If there is an answer to people’s good or bad motives, then I suspect it is to be found in the complexes of the self-illusion along with how the human mind is assembled from a lifetime of gathering information – all of which determines our individual choices.
I’ve always enjoyed this quote from Albert Einstein:
“Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said: Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will (Man can do what he will but he cannot will what he wills).”
“The motive of Charlie Kirk’s killer will never be known, because free will is an illusion”
……………I find myself disagreeing completely with this. Once again.
This line of thinking ends up trashing mens rea altogether. …And, if that wholescale trashing of the very basis of mens rea isn’t argumentum ad absurdum enough to show that this reasoning doesn’t work, well then let’s simply ask: What on earth does “free will” have to do with what is/are the proximate cause/s of why we’re doing something? Again: What on earth does whether or not we might have acted differently, have to do with what is/are the proximate cause/s of why we’re doing something?
Why do you buy that particular brand of cereal?
The proximate causes of that would be something like this:
(a) You like the taste of that brand and flavor of cereals; and/or
(b) You think these particular cereals are more healthy (or at least, less unhealthy) than other brands; and/or
(c) You enjoy cereals for breakfast; and/or
(d) You find it convenient to quickly rustle up a cereal-laden breakfast plate; and/or
(e) You find cereals, and particularly these cereals, affordable — or at least, not unaffordable — for regular daily consumption; and/or
(f) The supermarket you go to stocks these cereals; and/or
(g) The supermarket you go to gives you steep discounts on this brand of cereals; and/or
(h) It’s kind of a habit, eating those particular cereals
(e) That’s the supermarket that’s nearest your home; and/or
(f) That supermarket has convenient parking and polite friendly staff and is generally well stocked with most things you need; and/or
(g) That supermarket is near to your workplace or your favorite restaurant or your gym or your swimming pool, which means you can pick up stuff returning home
…etc, etc, etc …Something like that…
None of that means that you could have acted differently than you did, and refrained from picking up that box of cereals at the supermarket. But nor does it mean that there’s no cause, no reason, no mens rea informing your choosing to pick up that box of cereals.
Likewise, sure, there’s no way the shooter could have acted differently, because he has no free will, because no one does. But nor does that mean that there isn’t proximate causes that explain offer a reasonable explanation for why he did what he did.
In this instance, similar to the box of cereals thing, we could chart out a hypothetical listing of proximate causes for why the shooter did what he did (while emphasizing that, while informed partly by news reports, but this is essentially a hypothetical, and essentially made in order to rebut your philosophical position; and is not meant as a claim about the particular shooter, no more than was the cereal example meant as a claim of your actual food and shopping habits):
(a) He’s American; and/or
(b) America has very lax gun laws; and/or
(c) This guy handled guns and owned guns in the normal course (as he very likely would not have had, with saner gun laws like most other countries have); and/or
(d) He was a Republican and used to be a Trump supporter; and/or
(e) He got radicalized into an extreme right-wing antisemitic incel culture, via which lenses he saw Kirk as a threat
…etc, etc, etc …Something like that…
Regardless of what those particulars actually are, those particulars are the reasons why he did what he did. We don’t know yet exactly what those reasons are; and maybe we never will: but on the other hand, maybe we will, and indeed we should try our damnedest best to correctly ascertain those reasons, whatever they are.
And no, none of that means that he could have acted differently than he did. No, he doesn’t have free will. And yet, these proximates reasons are enough for us to judge him as evil, and/or cowardly; and/or virtious; and/or courageous; and/or misguided and/or misled but essentially good; and/or vile and vicious and psychopathic; and/or mentally unsound. And/or whatever other, whatever else.
———-
“We may think, “I give to the poor because I’m a good person,” or “That guy acted the way he did because he’s a jerk.” Neither of those explanations comes close to the Free Will in Theory (FWIT) truth — which is that we possess exactly zero free will.”
……………The same as above, and the same as I’ve argued in the past, that Sapolskyesque POV is, pardon me, simply incoherent. If you give to the poor; and if your proximate causes for giving are because you’re moved by the plight of someone in need, and that you wish to help that person: well then you’re good.
No, you couldn’t have been different, nor done differently, because you have no free will. But that does not change what you did, and the proximate causes that impelled you to do what you did — and the entirety of which (what you did, and the proximate causes [going back some way, as in examples above] that got you to do what you did) define whether you’re a good person, an evil person, or something in between.
Again, your having free will or not is completely entirely a different discussion than whether you’re a good person or evil person. This conflation of the two — which, like I showed, more than once back during the Sapolsky discussions — comes from implicitly assuming, for no good reason, that being good or bad is predicated on having free will. Which unstated undefended assumption is …well, it makes no sense, at all.
———-
This objection apart, that I’ve tried to discuss in the two sections above: this Samir Varma guy, haven’t heard of him. Seems interesting, what he’s started saying here about free will. If you find the rest of his book worth discussing, then I’ll look forward to exploring Varma’s views along with you, and maybe learning something from him/you.
Quick response to your thoughtful comment. I agree that it is informative to learn someone’s explanation for why they did something. But it is a neuroscientific fact that the reasons people give for an action often aren’t accurate. Meaning, the brain fabricates a reason, in somewhat the same way AI models can “hallucinate” made-up responses when asked a question.
This is seen most clearly in split brain patients, where one side of the brain lacks the information the other side of the brain possesses, yet the patient will give a spurious reason for doing some action even though that reason is impossible to be true. This shows that we are story-telling creatures who fabricate reasons for why we do something even though those reasons don’t reflect what is really going on in the brain.
There’s good reason to hold that our conscious intentions aren’t really the source of our will. Rather, they are signals that arise from unconscious regions of the brain after an intention has been settled on by the unconscious. As such, our consciously held reasons for doing something are not only incomplete, they can be completely wrong, as in the case of split brain patients, or in the case of “prompts” or subliminal cues that guide our actions without our knowledge.
Here’s a link that discusses this “choice blindness.”
https://everydaypsych.com/choice-blindness/
You make some reasonable points, but I disagree that we possess the ability to accurately know the real reason why we do something. There’s lots of neuroscientific research that argues otherwise, most notably in split-brain patients where one side of the brain is unable to know what the other side knows, yet fabricates an answer to “Why did you do this?” in somewhat the same way as AI models fabricate answers, otherwise known as hallucinating.
Here’s an article about “choice blindnesss” that casts light on this.
https://everydaypsych.com/choice-blindness/
“I disagree that we possess the ability to accurately know the real reason why we do something”
Well, I’d agree to the above, as long as we recognize that the word “accurately” is doing exceptionally heavy lifting there.
Thanks for your reply, Brian, and for linking to the Choice Blindness article one more time. I’d only read your post itself yesterday, hadn’t clicked the links. I did that this time, re-read all of main article, as well as your response, as well as the EverydayPsych.com article. And I did that with as open an mind as I could, so that I wouldn’t rush to (mentally) defending my own earlier view, as one is so often wont to do.
So here’s what the article points towards. It suggests, yes, that our understanding of the real reasons for our choices are often far less accurate than we imagine — which, when you think about it, is true enough. But what that article suggests is:
(a) That the reasons for the choices we make are more complex, more multi-variate, than we imagine. How the buyers chose one of the four ties in the study indicates that their choice is tie is predicated not only on the tie itself, but also on its placement relative to other ties and other objects. Importantly, that does not indicate that their choice was random — but that choice was predicated on placement, which indicates the presence of a hitherto unknown choice variable.
(b) It further indicates that our first impulse is to simply defend our choices and opinions and actions, knee-jerk as it were. (Be it what tie we chose, or which variety of jam, or which photograph.)
(c) What #a and #b suggests is, at one level, that sellers (however narrowly or broadly we define “sellers”) might do well to study consumer choices more closely, and base their own product offerings accordingly. To an extent that’s already done, in shopping mall design for instance.
(d) More importantly, what #a and #b indicate that we all should try to be better aware of our impulses and motivations and choices, and better aware of the fact that these are often more complex than we imagine, and further that we should be aware of our inbuilt impulse to unthinkingly defend our biases, and further that we should try to adjust for such. (For instance, when I started reading your response to me, Brian, my first impulse — my automatic reflex, that I caught myself at — was to start formulating counter-arguments even as I started reading your response, with reading your response and my mind forming its own response happening simultaneously. Whereupon — on catching myself doing that — I consciously decided to let go my past opinion, and read your comment and link, as well as re-read your main article, all with an open mind — and only then, only after having fully read/re-read both with an open mind, get to evaluating it and responding to it.)
———-
In short, to revisit your concluding from the article by saying, “I disagree that we possess the ability to accurately know the real reason why we do something”: These studies indicate that the reasons for our choices are more complex and multi-variate than we commonly imagine. To that extent, it may truly not be possible to perfectly “accurately” map our motivations. However, there’s nothing here that suggests that we might not do that to a satisfactory enough degree of accuracy.
(This comment of mine has gotten quite long, so I’ll just conclude it here. I do want to discuss what you said to me about split brain patients, and about AI; but I’ll do that in another, separate comment.)
What stood out to me in your thoughtful comments was this statement of yours:
————————-
In short, to revisit your concluding from the article by saying, “I disagree that we possess the ability to accurately know the real reason why we do something”: These studies indicate that the reasons for our choices are more complex and multi-variate than we commonly imagine. To that extent, it may truly not be possible to perfectly “accurately” map our motivations. However, there’s nothing here that suggests that we might not do that to a satisfactory enough degree of accuracy.
————————-
My response is: given that the real reasons for why we do something are hidden away in the unconscious recesses of the brain, how is it possible to know when the reasons we are conscious of are a “satisfactory enough degree of accuracy.”
This is akin to the familiar tip of the iceberg argument. There’s more going on behind the scenes than what is evident on the surface. But with an iceberg, it is possible to peek beneath the surface of the ocean and tell how large the hidden part of the iceberg is. With the unconscious, this isn’t possible, because it isn’t detectable.
So I have no idea how it is possible to say something like “My conscious motive to do this is 3/4 of my complete motive to do this that includes conscious and unconscious motive.” How do we determine the denominator of the equation, the 4, when all we know is the numerator? And not even the 3 part of the equation, really, because there’s no way for us to assign a valid number to EITHER part of the equation.
All we can do is describe the conscious motive and hope that it is accurate, because it too could be a fabrication that pops up from hidden recesses of the brain. This is unlikely in simple actions, such as choosing strawberry over vanilla ice cream. I do that because I like the taste. But even here, it could be that unconsciously I don’t want to appear boring and bland to the clerk in the ice cream store, so I choose a more interesting flavor than vanilla.
My point is that if we can’t know what lies beneath the surface of something, it isn’t possible to tell how much of that something is open to view and how much is hidden. With icebergs, I suppose knowledge of how ice floats in salt water could lead to a good guess about how much of an iceberg is below the water when a certain amount is showing above the surface. But likely this has to do also with the shape of the iceberg, which is unknown from just a surface inspection.
With the unconscious, I’m not aware of any means of estimating how much of a motive is hidden and how much, if any, is consciously visible.
Hm, fair point! Thinking over it, I agree 100%: unless we know what the entire basket of motivations is — and it is potentially infinite — then there is no way to objectively decide if what we do know is “satisfactory”.
But yet, while agreeing with that focused argument of yours taken standalone, but I still don’t see that it leads back to the larger point you were making. Having realized that what we do know about a person’s motivations is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg: what follows from that? You seem to suggest — suggest implicitly in general, and explicitly so in the case of Kirk’s assailant — that we therefore put up our hands and say we’ve no clue why and can never possibly know why. And once again, I disagree completely, and suggest that we go by what we do know.
Circling back to the cereals: You (or I) incorporate it in our shopping after considering that we like it, others in our family like it, it is easily available from where we are, and it isn’t overly unhealthy or overly expensive. Those reasons might well be the tip of the iceberg, and maybe if we dig deeper we might find a whole chain of other reasons, and beneath that yet more: but that doesn’t paralyze us into sitting there not buying anything not eating anything. We go by what we know of our movitations, and basis that settle on a reasonable course of action: which is, buy the stuff (or not, as the case may be).
Likewise the shooter as well, surely? (Unless it is a case of his being mentally unsound, and therefore there being literally no way to reasonably figure out an actionable-in-the-normal-course method in the madness?)
What our understanding and appreciation of the iceberg thing will do, should do, is impress us with how little we do know, so that we remain always open to changing our minds given new developments and new understanding, and also that we realize that we can always dig deeper and find out more. But that still leaves us with going by what we do know, rather than by what we do not.
With two qualifications:
One: circling back to my “satisfactory”, and your “not adequate”: We don’t blanket-label what we do know as either my “satisfactory” or your “not adequate”: but instead go with essentially subjective measures of what level is satisfactory, and decide if that bar has been met.
Two: We realize that that bar is a case-to-case thing. A far lower bar may suffice, in terms of how much of our motivations are necessary to consider, in order to inform our cereal purchase, than it might to deal with a murder case.
And an addendum to #Two above: Therefore, how dig we deep is also a case-to-case thing. We needn’t involve psychologists and forensic pathologists and neurologists and detectives and whatever else to inform our cereal purchase; but we probably will need to involve a subset of something like that to help inform our understanding about the murder case.
Again, while I appreciate fully the focused argument and correction you make: but I don’t see that it translates into deciding that we can never, in principle, know what the man’s motivations were. It leaves us with going by what, like I said, is subjectively “satisfactory”; rather then deciding that no matter what we have is, like you suggested, “not adequate”, just because nothing can objectively be known to be adequate. Except, sure, we keep our eyes open, always, to the fact that our measure for this is essentially subjective — with everything that that understanding and appreciation might entail, in terms of being open-minded, in terms of not being rigid, in terms of humility about what we know, in terms of remaining open to new understanding. But, with that important qualification, it still leaves us essentially where we’d been all along — with looking for motives to establish mens rea (or not).
———-
Sorry, yet another long-winded disagreement, on this specific you raised! As well as the two other divergences over the two points of yours I’d discussed in my other comment, about the split-brain thing, and the AI thing.
I’ll back off now. I guess we’ll just agree to disagree on this one, then?
Disagreement notwithstanding, loved the discussion, thanks Brian!
Further to my comment above:
“ I disagree that we possess the ability to accurately know the real reason why we do something. There’s lots of neuroscientific research that argues otherwise, most notably in split-brain patients where one side of the brain is unable to know what the other side knows, yet fabricates an answer to “Why did you do this?” ”
……………Sure. We’ve discussed this here before. Including when exploring Shamil Chandaria’s work. The brain models the reality we perceive, including the reality of ourselves. And that model does not map one-on-one with reality. Instead, it incorporates approximations and hallucinations. Agreed 100%.
But the whole point of the model is that it presents to us an approximation of reality that is good enough to get by. To that extent, the model does present to us a sufficiently accurate mapping of both outer reality as well as of ourselves — the model would not be of any use if it were not able to do that.
True, it is not perfectly accurate. But to say that is not the same thing as to say that it is necessarily completely inaccurate, and always completely accurate — which is what you are, in effect, suggesting here, Brian.
The split-brain patients? That hallucination is extravagant, and dysfunctional, precisely because it represents an atypical, diseased, amputated situation. Under those dire circumstances that inaccurate hallucination is what the brain produces. In normal people, in most people, in people that are mentally not unsound, the brain still hallucinates, the brain still produces inaccuracies, but those hallucinations generally approximate reality, and the inaccuracies are generally not off the chart. We’ve discussed all this before.
I’ll refer you again to my charting of the (hypothetical) mapping of your reasons for your (hypothetical) cereal purchase. That mapping does provide an accurate enough mapping, even if it is not perfectly accurate. And that accuracy can be increased even further by engaging psychologists, as well as by engaging consumer behavior experts. It is already fairly accurate, and its accuracy can be increased further: is what seems to me to be the takeaway from these three studies.
None of this suggests that it is impossible to know why we do what we do. It only suggests that those why’s are more complex and more multivariate than we commonly imagine.
(And none of this has anything to do with free will, at all. This discussion is squarely about choice.)
———-
“in somewhat the same way as AI models fabricate answers, otherwise known as hallucinating”
……………Brian, I’m sorry, but this AI argument emphatically does not make for the point you’re trying to put forward. In fact, it argues the exact opposite thing.
Maybe you remember, I’d made this exact same AI argument — that I’m going to make again now, more briefly now than I remember I’d made it then — back during the Sapolski discussions, back when AI chatbots weren’t quite as advanced and not quite the rage they are now.
AI is obviously not possessed of (philosophical) free will. Obviously, that hardly needs belaboring: it’s our own creation, after all, and we know exactly how we created it and exactly how it works. And yet, AI is potentially possessed of choice. Only potentially so far, because so far AI has not progressed quite that far yet. But the way things are going, it could be a matter of a decade or two or three, or who knows maybe even less, when AI has evolved enough, and become complex enough, to be possessed of choice in the same way that us humans are.
At such time, and depending on the initial control parameters of the AI program, and also depending on simple happenstance as far as its further evolution, it is entirely plausible that some AI ends up making choices that we might label as Hitleresque, Bibi-esque, evil; some that are Gandhi-esque, Mandela-esque, virtuous and noble; and others that are in between these two extremes. That could apply to simply more advanced AI chatbots doling out general advice and guidance; or maybe AI actually directing the affairs of a business organization, or the conduct of a war, or even civic administration and governance.
Sure, AI hallucinates. So far those hallucinations make them unreliable for anything of a remotely sensitive nature. It is quite likely that one day, maybe one day soon, the logic systems within AI become sophisticated enough that they evolve to true critical thinking, of the order that us humans are capable of. …Heh, at such time we should have no compunction in abiding by AI inputs in our online search, and our objections that we expressed in the thread preceding might, at that time, become obsolete!
I don’t know if I’ve been able to argue this coherently enough: but, it seems to me, AI (as in potentially more complex AI in future, maybe the near future) offers the perfect example of entities that are obviously bereft of free will, and yet possessed of choice.
It seems reasonable that us humans answer to that same description. We have no (philosophical) free will, but our sheer complexity does imbue us with choice. With reasons for what we do. So that it is, pardon me, but it is silly to suggest that your/my cereal purchase decisions are some insoluble mystery! Sure, there’s many hidden variables there that we may not be aware of. Sure, our current mapping of our reasons demonstrably offers scope for improvement, absolutely. But that is not to say that our mapping of our reasons for why we buy that particular brand and flavor of cereal cannot satisfice.
Likewise Charlie Kirk’s assailant as well, surely?
(We needn’t bother about sant64’s transparent trolling. And I agree, there’s a very real possibility of a partisan law enforcement actually colluding in fabricating a narrative that their orange master favors. …But, I’m sorry, to suggest that we can never, in principle, know this man’s motivations, that POV I continue to find incoherent. Regardless of whether he turns out to be an alt-right gamer antisemite nutjob, as seems likely; or indeed a left-leaning radical; or simply an apolitical nutcase with easy access to guns: but I don’t see why we cannot reasonably expect to get to the bottom of why he did what he did. Not with complete accuracy, never: but accurate enough to establish mens rea — or not, if he turns out to be mentally incapable).
His motive was to kill Charlie Kirk.
He bought the rifle, he bought the ammo, he took aim, and he pulled the trigger.
The killer even left a note behind: “I have the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I’m going to take it.”
Is your argument that the killer didn’t know his actions would result in the death of a human being?
I suppose the question of unknown motive could reasonably be posed in a truly random killing, i.e., if the gunman took aim at a delivery driver with whom he had no association.
But given the disgust that progressives have espoused these past 10 years, their equating conservatives with Nazis, for any and all conservative political opinions, this shrugging of the shoulders at the cold-blooded murder of a very visible conservative activist is a bit much.
“Gosh, we just don’t know what his motive was.” Oh dear, as if you didn’t.
Intimately.
You’re wrong. If you’d been paying as much attention to this case as I have, you’d know that investigators have been searching for a motive ever since Kirk was killed. You don’t seem to understand the word “motive.” Obviously the killer wanted to murder Kirk. The motive question is why?
The Governor of Utah has said that information about a motive will be presented at tomorrow’s initial legal hearing. My point is that whatever the motive is claimed to be, this won’t be the complete truth, because that truth is buried deep within the unconscious recesses of the killer’s brain, just as everyone’s motives are in everything but the simplest actions.
The killer wrote “Hey fascist, catch” on one of the bullets. And you still want to argue that we can’t know the killer’s motives?
You’ve repeatedly called conservatives fascists and Nazis. Countless thousands of like-minded progressives have done the same. And you still want to argue that we can’t know the killer’s motive?
When Trump narrowly avoided being killed by a bullet to the head, you casually dismissed it. So did countless thousands of other like-minded progressives. And you still want to argue that we can’t know the motive of the killer of Charlie Kirk?
Stop pretending you don’t know the killer’s motive. You’ve repeatedly intimated that everyone on the other side of the political aisle from you are fascists and Nazis. You’ve expressed zero remorse for Charlie Kirk’s death, other than pity for his wife and children. You’ve said nothing about being disgusted by the gross act of violence that attempted to assassinate a presidential candidate and which did assassinate a conservative activist.
Instead, you’ve offered the grotesque response of “Gosh, there’s no free will, so we can’t say what the killer’s motive was.”
And if that wasn’t enough, after making a grand speech about how we all need to get along, and how open minded you are to contrary political opinions, you make a list of Charlie Kirk’s political views — views which are quite culturally mainstream, and in fact are shared by the majority of voters in his country, hence the progressives defeat in the last election — that Kirk was a “disgusting” person. All quite in line with your MO to cast everyone who doesn’t agree with you as a fascist or Nazi.
The guy hasn’t even been dead for a week, but you couldn’t help yourself. And why? Because you not only know the motive of Charlie Kirk’s killer very well, you share his motive. The only difference between you and him is that he had the courage to act on his beliefs, while you’re content to dun everyone who doesn’t think as you think as a fascist and Nazi.
@Sant 64,……the only reasonable defensibly answer that any of these Progressives will give you, is,…..WHAT ABOUT,……blah, blah blah. ?
“What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?” James 4:1
Matthew 26:52
“‘Put your sword back in its place,’ Jesus said to him, ‘for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.’”
Don’t be fooled. Charlie was toxic to many Christians.
https://baptistnews.com/article/heres-the-real-context-for-understanding-charlie-kirk/
“His goal was not the advance of democratic deliberation but the shutting down of it by scapegoating and oversimplifying complex issues.”
https://theconversation.com/can-charlie-kirk-really-be-considered-a-martyr-a-christianity-historian-explains-265283
“who is Charlie Kirk a martyr for? Clearly, the answer to this is Christian nationalists, MAGA supporters and the broader American right.”
https://goodfaithmedia.org/charlie-kirks-christianity-was-caesars-not-christs/
“Too often, churches in America have traded their prophetic voice for proximity to power. They have baptized Caesar in the name of Christ, serving empire rather than resisting it.”
https://johnpavlovitz.com/2025/09/13/the-shameful-christian-idolatry-and-fraudulent-martyrdom-of-charlie-kirk/
“Jesus’ central command was to love. How exactly did Kirk love immigrants and people of color and women and Trans teens and Muslims and Democrats and atheists?”