Compatibilism: What's that About?

[bilby]

At this point I'm still trying to figure out who's a chatbot, and who isn't.

I have met DBT IRL, so if he’s a chatbot, he’s an extraordinarily advanced model that drinks beer.

 

[DBT]

'when ordering salad is determined, it is not possible to order steak.'

This is demonstrably false.

Don't be so silly, for the hundredth time, it's entailed in the given definition: no deviation, no randomness, no alternatives, which means that nothing can happen to alter the development of the future states of the system, just as you define it to be;

Jarhyn - A deterministic system is a system in which no randomness is involved in the development of future states of the system.

There is no way around this: there can be no alternate actions within a deterministic system.

It is entailed in your own definition.

You have no case to argue.

Your Goose was cooked at the beginning.

No, DBT, a deterministic system is not a system with no choice.

Wrong.

Choice, by definition, entails selecting between two or more realizable options.

Choice
1. an act of choosing between two or more possibilities

Determinism, according to the given definition - all events proceeding without deviation, no alternate actions - does not permit two or more realizable options to choose from.

Without realizable alternate options, where lies the choice?

Nowhere.

No alternative equates to no choice.

Freedom - the ability to choose or do otherwise - does not exist within a deterministic system, which makes the notion of free will incompatible with determinism.

Straightforward, undeniable, no way around it. Carefully worded definitions commonly used by compatibilists do not prove the proposition.

 

[DBT]

It's a matter of entailment- 'when ordering salad is determined, it is not possible to order steak.'

The possibility of ordering the steak was causally necessary from any prior point in time, just like ordering the salad was causally necessary from any prior point in time.

Without possibility of deviation, therefore alternate actions, the system deterministically transitioning from prior to current state, ordering the steak is not possible if salad is determined. Given the terms, it cannot happen.

Steak was never a possibility.

Determinism entails that it always would be true that we could have ordered steak instead of the salad at that time and place, and that we would order the salad instead of the steak at that time and place.

That's not how determinism works. If two or more possibilities are realizable, it is not a deterministic system.

It is a probabilistic system.

And if it was possible to choose between two or more probabilities, we would be arguing over Libertarian free will, not compatibilism.

It happened. Therefore, given determinism, it must have happened, just so and in no other way, without deviation.

Which of course eliminates - ''the possibility of ordering the steak was causally necessary from any prior point in time...''

 

[Jarhyn]

'when ordering salad is determined, it is not possible to order steak.'

This is demonstrably false.

Don't be so silly, for the hundredth time, it's entailed in the given definition: no deviation, no randomness, no alternatives, which means that nothing can happen to alter the development of the future states of the system, just as you define it to be;

Jarhyn - A deterministic system is a system in which no randomness is involved in the development of future states of the system.

There is no way around this: there can be no alternate actions within a deterministic system.

It is entailed in your own definition.

You have no case to argue.

Your Goose was cooked at the beginning.

No, DBT, a deterministic system is not a system with no choice.

Wrong.

Choice, by definition, entails selecting between two or more realizable options.

Choice
1. an act of choosing between two or more possibilities

Determinism, according to the given definition - all events proceeding without deviation, no alternate actions - does not permit two or more realizable options to choose from.

Without realizable alternate options, where lies the choice?

Nowhere.

No alternative equates to no choice.

Freedom - the ability to choose or do otherwise - does not exist within a deterministic system, which makes the notion of free will incompatible with determinism.

Straightforward, undeniable, no way around it. Carefully worded definitions commonly used by compatibilists do not prove the proposition.

And again you fail to read that word "possibilities" and then fill it in with the compatibilist definition, and so FAIL to speak anything meaningful at all about it.

Let's look at the system where Jim goes to the store to buy Corn Nuts.

Jim does not, when he leaves the house, have any concept of which snack he will buy. He will go to the store to buy corn nuts.

Before Jim leaves for the store, Alex asks him "hey Jim, what snack will you buy at the store" and Jim says "I don't fuckin know man, imma see what they have". But Jim WILL go to the store and buy corn nuts.

Now, Jim walks down the street, to the store, and then stands in front of their Aisle full of snacks.

Me, being the god of this universe, I can say "hey, can I change the charge of a few neurons in Jim's head such that the neurons I change are in a specific region of his brain, the part currently evaluating the data generated by looking at the snack selection, such that the buys something that isn't "corn nuts", but instead "Pistachios".

This answers a question: IF his mind were such that his decision in that moment was Pistachios, he COULD in fact buy them. I run this corrupted universe forward and yes, money changes hands there, and he walks out of the store with Pistachios.

I then stop that universe and delete it because I corrupted it.

Then Jim himself in the reality he lives in does much the same thing. He evaluates a model a little less robust than the one I'm working with, but still good enough. Instead of a single universe he models a large number of abstracts. He comes to the conclusion of this process in which he understands he doesn't want to work as hard as he would have to on Pistachios. He in fact skips past the part I viewed directly to the point at which he is at home.

He skips to this part directly because he doesn't need it proven out that he CAN buy the Pistachios. He doesn't need to see God copy and corrupt the universe to understand that IF the universe was anything like the one God copied and modified and observed, he would eventually find himself at home with a bag of Pistachios and doing more work than he really wanted to.

So, he doesn't do that.

Then, he does that same exercise with Corn Nuts, and he discovers "I like how that one seems to turn out".

And of course Jim orders the corn nuts.

Jim made a choice, the same way any choice is made.

Note the exercise in question, the idea of how the choice was made: by considering imaginary universes, and finding a set of universes which contained the actual universe. Jim's will to buy Corn Nuts was free, as he made the choice to buy corn nuts.

The fact that Jim was never going to buy the Pistachios does not eliminate it as "a possibility" because it was "a possibility of the set of universes that Jim may reach unopposed by anything outside of Jim himself."

 

[pood]

At this point I'm still trying to figure out who's a chatbot, and who isn't.

I have met DBT IRL, so if he’s a chatbot, he’s an extraordinarily advanced model that drinks beer.

It’s funny, though, because under DBT’s hard determinism, we really are all extraordinarily advanced models of chatbots, aren’t we? We have no “choice” over what we say. It was all pre-scripted at the big bang.

Yet it’s this “extraordinarily advanced model” bit that is so puzzling. I’m going to assume chatbots are not conscious, and yet we are. What for? What possible selective advantage does consciousness, particularly higher-order consciousness, have in a pre-scripted world?

It seems clear to me what the advantage of consciousness is — it maximizes choices. It moves organisms away from blind instinct and enables them to evaluate, weigh, measure, and choose, to better their chances of survival and reproductive success.

Yet it is just this thing called choice that hard determinism denies, rendering the evolution of consciousness in such a world wholly inexplicable.

 

[pood]

But even a chatbot “chooses” what to say based on evaluation of inputs. We may wish to hesistate to say “choose” in the fullest sense of the world, because of its presumed lack of consciousness, but it’s still a choice after a fashion.

 

[Jarhyn]

But even a chatbot “chooses” what to say based on evaluation of inputs. We may wish to hesistate to say “choose” in the fullest sense of the world, because of its presumed lack of consciousness, but it’s still a choice after a fashion.

Which is my point about the dwarf. The "after a fashion" is not necessary. It is choice,  exactly a choice.

It is not a choice made by a person, so it lacks a lot of the things we normally see come along with the choice. It messes with your heuristic because all these unnecessary, insufficient things that you lump so consistently with the choices you see are absent. You see "but it didn't come with an immediate imagination of the universe" or "it didn't come with an apparent menu", or "it wasn't made by a person! How can that possibly 'count'."

But indeed for simple "choice" that's all just "usually" there for the choices that are "easy" to discern as such.

A marble coming out of a bag because a rock fell accidentally on the bag is still an operation of choice function.

It's an argument from incredulity to say how one cannot imagine how some thing satisfied a definition.

The only thing that invalidates a definition is if it is nonsense and cannot be made to fit in any way that is not thus.

Once that "scale" has fallen away from one's eyes, one may see a whole universe of choices being made, some apparently QM level random choice, some choices using uncorrelated selection mechanisms (they feed in chaos, such as environment kinetic chaos in a dice roll), some choice involve considerations of neurons about dietary choices.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Without possibility of deviation, therefore alternate actions, the system deterministically transitioning from prior to current state, ordering the steak is not possible if salad is determined.

Without deviation, the possibility of ordering the steak was inevitable.

Given the terms, it cannot happen.

The terms of determinism are that things will happen in precisely one inevitable way, without deviation. The one inevitable way will include the possibility of ordering the steak as well as the actuality of ordering the salad. The possibility of ordering the steak is a mental event that was guaranteed to happen from the Big Bang forward.

Steak was never a possibility.

Steak was always going to be a possibility at that time and place.

If two or more possibilities are realizable, it is not a deterministic system.

You're still not getting it. The steak was possible and it was realizable. The -ible and the -able have precisely the same meaning: something that may or may not happen, depending upon the circumstances. Neither the -ible nor the -able requires anything to actually happen in reality.

It is a probabilistic system.

Oh please. I thought we were talking about determinism. Within a deterministic system, some events cannot be reliably predicted. That's why we have the notions of "random" and "chaotic", and a tool called statistical probability to help us get a general estimate of what is most likely to happen. But we may reasonably presume that even these events are reliably caused though not reliably predicted. So, determinism holds despite our inability to reliably predict events.

And if it was possible to choose between two or more probabilities, we would be arguing over Libertarian free will, not compatibilism.

Stop, before I puke!

Look, the simple fact is that determinism logically implies that all events will be reliably caused by prior events, due to our reasonable assumption that every event must be caused by something, and that something must also be caused by something, etc.

The causal chain is infinitely long, so no one has time for that. Our legitimate interest is in the most meaningful and relevant causes of a given event. A meaningful cause efficiently explains why the event happened. A relevant cause is something that we might do something about, either to make a desirable event happen more often, or to make an undesirable event happen less often.

So, when a thief robs a liquor store, we do not blame it on the Big Bang, because there is nothing we can do about the Big Bang to make things better. But there are many things we can do about the thief to discourage him from robbing stores and, if he cannot be discouraged, we can secure him in a cell where there are no stores to rob. But any talk about the Big Bang would be useless babbling.

Fortunately, determinism doesn't actually change anything, so any talk about determinism is usually useless babbling as well.

 

[pood]

'when ordering salad is determined, it is not possible to order steak.'

This is demonstrably false.

Don't be so silly, for the hundredth time, it's entailed in the given definition: no deviation, no randomness, no alternatives, which means that nothing can happen to alter the development of the future states of the system, just as you define it to be;

Jarhyn - A deterministic system is a system in which no randomness is involved in the development of future states of the system.

There is no way around this: there can be no alternate actions within a deterministic system.

It is entailed in your own definition.

You have no case to argue.

Your Goose was cooked at the beginning.

No, DBT, a deterministic system is not a system with no choice.

Wrong.

Choice, by definition, entails selecting between two or more realizable options.

Choice
1. an act of choosing between two or more possibilities

Determinism, according to the given definition - all events proceeding without deviation, no alternate actions - does not permit two or more realizable options to choose from.

Without realizable alternate options, where lies the choice?

Nowhere.

No alternative equates to no choice.

Freedom - the ability to choose or do otherwise - does not exist within a deterministic system, which makes the notion of free will incompatible with determinism.

Straightforward, undeniable, no way around it. Carefully worded definitions commonly used by compatibilists do not prove the proposition.

And again you fail to read that word "possibilities" and then fill it in with the compatibilist definition, and so FAIL to speak anything meaningful at all about it.

Let's look at the system where Jim goes to the store to buy Corn Nuts.

Jim does not, when he leaves the house, have any concept of which snack he will buy. He will go to the store to buy corn nuts.

Before Jim leaves for the store, Alex asks him "hey Jim, what snack will you buy at the store" and Jim says "I don't fuckin know man, imma see what they have". But Jim WILL go to the store and buy corn nuts.

Now, Jim walks down the street, to the store, and then stands in front of their Aisle full of snacks.

Me, being the god of this universe, I can say "hey, can I change the charge of a few neurons in Jim's head such that the neurons I change are in a specific region of his brain, the part currently evaluating the data generated by looking at the snack selection, such that the buys something that isn't "corn nuts", but instead "Pistachios".

This answers a question: IF his mind were such that his decision in that moment was Pistachios, he COULD in fact buy them. I run this corrupted universe forward and yes, money changes hands there, and he walks out of the store with Pistachios.

I then stop that universe and delete it because I corrupted it.

Then Jim himself in the reality he lives in does much the same thing. He evaluates a model a little less robust than the one I'm working with, but still good enough. Instead of a single universe he models a large number of abstracts. He comes to the conclusion of this process in which he understands he doesn't want to work as hard as he would have to on Pistachios. He in fact skips past the part I viewed directly to the point at which he is at home.

He skips to this part directly because he doesn't need it proven out that he CAN buy the Pistachios. He doesn't need to see God copy and corrupt the universe to understand that IF the universe was anything like the one God copied and modified and observed, he would eventually find himself at home with a bag of Pistachios and doing more work than he really wanted to.

So, he doesn't do that.

Then, he does that same exercise with Corn Nuts, and he discovers "I like how that one seems to turn out".

And of course Jim orders the corn nuts.

Jim made a choice, the same way any choice is made.

Note the exercise in question, the idea of how the choice was made: by considering imaginary universes, and finding a set of universes which contained the actual universe. Jim's will to buy Corn Nuts was free, as he made the choice to buy corn nuts.

The fact that Jim was never going to buy the Pistachios does not eliminate it as "a possibility" because it was "a possibility of the set of universes that Jim may reach unopposed by anything outside of Jim himself."

This is modeling the world in the possible worlds heuristic of modal logic, and is exactly the point I have repeatedly made against DBT’s necessitation argument.

Necessary truth is confined to logic. When we consider Jim and his corn huts, we find that there are logically possible worlds at which Jim orders pistachios instead of corn nuts. There is no logically possible world at which Jim orders a four-sided triangle.

To say that it is possible for Jim to order pistachios in a deterministic world is to say that it is always within his power to order pistachios, but it’s also true that he can only order one thing at a given time, and given antecedents x, y, and z in the actual world, he will (but not must!) order corn nuts. The world where he orders pistachios is called a possible non-actual world. Since this possible non-actual world exists (though it is not actual) it is clear that contra DBT, Jim’s choice of corn nuts is not necessary or necessitated, and thus the claim of hard determinism is refuted.

 

[Jarhyn]

'when ordering salad is determined, it is not possible to order steak.'

This is demonstrably false.

Don't be so silly, for the hundredth time, it's entailed in the given definition: no deviation, no randomness, no alternatives, which means that nothing can happen to alter the development of the future states of the system, just as you define it to be;

Jarhyn - A deterministic system is a system in which no randomness is involved in the development of future states of the system.

There is no way around this: there can be no alternate actions within a deterministic system.

It is entailed in your own definition.

You have no case to argue.

Your Goose was cooked at the beginning.

No, DBT, a deterministic system is not a system with no choice.

Wrong.

Choice, by definition, entails selecting between two or more realizable options.

Choice
1. an act of choosing between two or more possibilities

Determinism, according to the given definition - all events proceeding without deviation, no alternate actions - does not permit two or more realizable options to choose from.

Without realizable alternate options, where lies the choice?

Nowhere.

No alternative equates to no choice.

Freedom - the ability to choose or do otherwise - does not exist within a deterministic system, which makes the notion of free will incompatible with determinism.

Straightforward, undeniable, no way around it. Carefully worded definitions commonly used by compatibilists do not prove the proposition.

And again you fail to read that word "possibilities" and then fill it in with the compatibilist definition, and so FAIL to speak anything meaningful at all about it.

Let's look at the system where Jim goes to the store to buy Corn Nuts.

Jim does not, when he leaves the house, have any concept of which snack he will buy. He will go to the store to buy corn nuts.

Before Jim leaves for the store, Alex asks him "hey Jim, what snack will you buy at the store" and Jim says "I don't fuckin know man, imma see what they have". But Jim WILL go to the store and buy corn nuts.

Now, Jim walks down the street, to the store, and then stands in front of their Aisle full of snacks.

Me, being the god of this universe, I can say "hey, can I change the charge of a few neurons in Jim's head such that the neurons I change are in a specific region of his brain, the part currently evaluating the data generated by looking at the snack selection, such that the buys something that isn't "corn nuts", but instead "Pistachios".

This answers a question: IF his mind were such that his decision in that moment was Pistachios, he COULD in fact buy them. I run this corrupted universe forward and yes, money changes hands there, and he walks out of the store with Pistachios.

I then stop that universe and delete it because I corrupted it.

Then Jim himself in the reality he lives in does much the same thing. He evaluates a model a little less robust than the one I'm working with, but still good enough. Instead of a single universe he models a large number of abstracts. He comes to the conclusion of this process in which he understands he doesn't want to work as hard as he would have to on Pistachios. He in fact skips past the part I viewed directly to the point at which he is at home.

He skips to this part directly because he doesn't need it proven out that he CAN buy the Pistachios. He doesn't need to see God copy and corrupt the universe to understand that IF the universe was anything like the one God copied and modified and observed, he would eventually find himself at home with a bag of Pistachios and doing more work than he really wanted to.

So, he doesn't do that.

Then, he does that same exercise with Corn Nuts, and he discovers "I like how that one seems to turn out".

And of course Jim orders the corn nuts.

Jim made a choice, the same way any choice is made.

Note the exercise in question, the idea of how the choice was made: by considering imaginary universes, and finding a set of universes which contained the actual universe. Jim's will to buy Corn Nuts was free, as he made the choice to buy corn nuts.

The fact that Jim was never going to buy the Pistachios does not eliminate it as "a possibility" because it was "a possibility of the set of universes that Jim may reach unopposed by anything outside of Jim himself."

This is modeling the world in the possible worlds heuristic of modal logic, and is exactly the point I have repeatedly made against DBT’s necessitation argument.

Necessary truth is confined to logic. When we consider Jim and his corn huts, we find that there are logically possible worlds at which Jim orders pistachios instead of corn nuts. There is no logically possible world at which Jim orders a four-sided triangle.

To say that it is possible for Jim to order pistachios in a deterministic world is to say that it is always within his power to order pistachios, but it’s also true that he can only order one thing at a given time, and given antecedents x, y, and z in the actual world, he will (but not must!) order corn nuts. The world where he orders pistachios is called a possible non-actual world. Since this possible non-actual world exists (though it is not actual) it is clear that contra DBT, Jim’s choice of corn nuts is not necessary or necessitated, and thus the claim of hard determinism is refuted.

No, Jim could have ordered both, assuming he wasn't a broke ass mother fucker. He could have brought home the lot, and a bucket (assuming they had buckets for sale, but they did in the home cleaning aisle.)

But moreover he didn't, much for the same reason Marvin chose the salad, even if that choice was revoked at gunpoint.

 

[pood]

Yes, of course, he could have bought out the whole store. Better to say this: Jim can either order pistachos, or not order pistachios. He cannot BOTH order pistachios, and NOT order pistachios, at the same time. That would be a violation of the Law of Non-contradiction. The relevant bit is that because it is within his power to either order or not order pistachios, Jim has free will in a deterministic universe.

 

[Jarhyn]

Yes, of course, he could have bought out the whole store. Better to say this: Jim can either order pistachos, or not order pistachios. He cannot BOTH order pistachios, and NOT order pistachios, at the same time. That would be a violation of the Law of Non-contradiction. The relevant bit is that because it is within his power to either order or not order pistachios, Jim has free will in a deterministic universe.

110%.
A+.

 

[Jarhyn]

This exercise with Jim, the Pistachios, and 'God' is very much like the exercise with Urist, the Door, and 'God'.

It is an actual experiment that you can do at home. In fact in a game of Dwarf Fortress you can stand in a shop and watch someone else do exactly this exercise, read their mind, forcibly change their mind, and see what happens.

You can observe that the only thing preventing Urist from slaughtering a room full of people is the existence of a locked door, and so also observe that his will is NOT free.

This is what leads me to this line of thought. Who knew God could be so fucking useful?

 

[ramoss]

At this point I'm still trying to figure out who's a chatbot, and who isn't.

I have met DBT IRL, so if he’s a chatbot, he’s an extraordinarily advanced model that drinks beer.

It’s funny, though, because under DBT’s hard determinism, we really are all extraordinarily advanced models of chatbots, aren’t we? We have no “choice” over what we say. It was all pre-scripted at the big bang.

Yet it’s this “extraordinarily advanced model” bit that is so puzzling. I’m going to assume chatbots are not conscious, and yet we are. What for? What possible selective advantage does consciousness, particularly higher-order consciousness, have in a pre-scripted world?

It seems clear to me what the advantage of consciousness is — it maximizes choices. It moves organisms away from blind instinct and enables them to evaluate, weigh, measure, and choose, to better their chances of survival and reproductive success.

Yet it is just this thing called choice that hard determinism denies, rendering the evolution of consciousness in such a world wholly inexplicable.

You have no choice but to make that claim. However,we have the illusion of choice.

 

[Jarhyn]

At this point I'm still trying to figure out who's a chatbot, and who isn't.

I have met DBT IRL, so if he’s a chatbot, he’s an extraordinarily advanced model that drinks beer.

It’s funny, though, because under DBT’s hard determinism, we really are all extraordinarily advanced models of chatbots, aren’t we? We have no “choice” over what we say. It was all pre-scripted at the big bang.

Yet it’s this “extraordinarily advanced model” bit that is so puzzling. I’m going to assume chatbots are not conscious, and yet we are. What for? What possible selective advantage does consciousness, particularly higher-order consciousness, have in a pre-scripted world?

It seems clear to me what the advantage of consciousness is — it maximizes choices. It moves organisms away from blind instinct and enables them to evaluate, weigh, measure, and choose, to better their chances of survival and reproductive success.

Yet it is just this thing called choice that hard determinism denies, rendering the evolution of consciousness in such a world wholly inexplicable.

You have no choice but to make that claim. However,we have the illusion of choice.

Ay, yet another person arguing a straw man.

You define choice differently than we do. If you wish to tell one of us "you have no choice of the form you propose" you have to actually speak to that definition of choice, not your own.

You can't substitute what we keep pointing out is your nonsensical definition, you have to actually reach a nonsense from OUR definition.

To say he has no choice is to say that there are ZERO logical universes in which the result he seeks followed from ANY premise of immediate conditions, or to say that the series of actions which took in a number of initial objects and returned exactly one never actually happened.

Neither of those things are true, so you are just farting in your own mouth.

 

[DBT]

At this point I'm still trying to figure out who's a chatbot, and who isn't.

I have met DBT IRL, so if he’s a chatbot, he’s an extraordinarily advanced model that drinks beer.

It’s funny, though, because under DBT’s hard determinism, we really are all extraordinarily advanced models of chatbots, aren’t we? We have no “choice” over what we say. It was all pre-scripted at the big bang.

Yet it’s this “extraordinarily advanced model” bit that is so puzzling. I’m going to assume chatbots are not conscious, and yet we are. What for? What possible selective advantage does consciousness, particularly higher-order consciousness, have in a pre-scripted world?

It seems clear to me what the advantage of consciousness is — it maximizes choices. It moves organisms away from blind instinct and enables them to evaluate, weigh, measure, and choose, to better their chances of survival and reproductive success.

Yet it is just this thing called choice that hard determinism denies, rendering the evolution of consciousness in such a world wholly inexplicable.

The really funny thing is the insistence that it's ''DBT's hard determinism,' when the definition I use is precisely the same as given by the compatibilists on this forum....which I quote time and time again.

The only difference being is the question of whether free will is compatible with that very same definition of determinism.

The answer, for the given reasons, being: no, it is not.

 

[Jarhyn]

At this point I'm still trying to figure out who's a chatbot, and who isn't.

I have met DBT IRL, so if he’s a chatbot, he’s an extraordinarily advanced model that drinks beer.

It’s funny, though, because under DBT’s hard determinism, we really are all extraordinarily advanced models of chatbots, aren’t we? We have no “choice” over what we say. It was all pre-scripted at the big bang.

Yet it’s this “extraordinarily advanced model” bit that is so puzzling. I’m going to assume chatbots are not conscious, and yet we are. What for? What possible selective advantage does consciousness, particularly higher-order consciousness, have in a pre-scripted world?

It seems clear to me what the advantage of consciousness is — it maximizes choices. It moves organisms away from blind instinct and enables them to evaluate, weigh, measure, and choose, to better their chances of survival and reproductive success.

Yet it is just this thing called choice that hard determinism denies, rendering the evolution of consciousness in such a world wholly inexplicable.

The really funny thing is the insistence that it's ''DBT's hard determinism,' when the definition I use is precisely the same as given by the compatibilists on this forum....which I quote time and time again.

The only difference being is the question of whether free will is compatible with that very same definition of determinism.

The answer, for the given reasons, being: no, it is not.

No, it's not. You keep asserting this but when you redefine choice as nonsensically pants-on-fire dishonestly as you do, then you are not actually using the same definition.

It's the same series of letters, but not the same fundamental words.

 

[DBT]

'when ordering salad is determined, it is not possible to order steak.'

This is demonstrably false.

Don't be so silly, for the hundredth time, it's entailed in the given definition: no deviation, no randomness, no alternatives, which means that nothing can happen to alter the development of the future states of the system, just as you define it to be;

Jarhyn - A deterministic system is a system in which no randomness is involved in the development of future states of the system.

There is no way around this: there can be no alternate actions within a deterministic system.

It is entailed in your own definition.

You have no case to argue.

Your Goose was cooked at the beginning.

No, DBT, a deterministic system is not a system with no choice.

Wrong.

Choice, by definition, entails selecting between two or more realizable options.

Choice
1. an act of choosing between two or more possibilities

Determinism, according to the given definition - all events proceeding without deviation, no alternate actions - does not permit two or more realizable options to choose from.

Without realizable alternate options, where lies the choice?

Nowhere.

No alternative equates to no choice.

Freedom - the ability to choose or do otherwise - does not exist within a deterministic system, which makes the notion of free will incompatible with determinism.

Straightforward, undeniable, no way around it. Carefully worded definitions commonly used by compatibilists do not prove the proposition.

And again you fail to read that word "possibilities" and then fill it in with the compatibilist definition, and so FAIL to speak anything meaningful at all about it.

Anad again you fail to understand the implications that determinism has for freedom of choice and freedom of will;

1) Determinism, by definition, does not permit alternative action or choice.

2) No alternative action or choice, negates freedom of choice.

3) Absence of choice (no possible alternate actions) negates freedom of will

4) Will does not, and cannot, make a difference to what are determined outcomes.

5) Free will is incompatible with determinism.

You have no counter argument.

 

[DBT]

Without possibility of deviation, therefore alternate actions, the system deterministically transitioning from prior to current state, ordering the steak is not possible if salad is determined.

Without deviation, the possibility of ordering the steak was inevitable.

Only if ordering steak is determined. Impossible if the system evolves from its prior state to the moment where salad is necessarily ordered. No deviation, no possible alternatives.

Given the terms, it cannot happen.

The terms of determinism are that things will happen in precisely one inevitable way, without deviation. The one inevitable way will include the possibility of ordering the steak as well as the actuality of ordering the salad. The possibility of ordering the steak is a mental event that was guaranteed to happen from the Big Bang forward.

If things must happen ''precisely one inevitable way, without deviation,'' this excludes all possibility of thing going differently.

In other words there is no possibility of ordering the steak if salad if ordering to the salad is determined.

This is entailed in the stipulation; 'precisely one inevitable way, without deviation.''

Steak was never a possibility.

Steak was always going to be a possibility at that time and place.

''Precisely one inevitable way, without deviation'' emphatically excludes it.

If two or more possibilities are realizable, it is not a deterministic system.

You're still not getting it. The steak was possible and it was realizable. The -ible and the -able have precisely the same meaning: something that may or may not happen, depending upon the circumstances. Neither the -ible nor the -able requires anything to actually happen in reality.

I get it only too well. I understand the implications of ''precisely one inevitable way, without deviation.''

It is a probabilistic system.

Oh please. I thought we were talking about determinism. Within a deterministic system, some events cannot be reliably predicted. That's why we have the notions of "random" and "chaotic", and a tool called statistical probability to help us get a general estimate of what is most likely to happen. But we may reasonably presume that even these events are reliably caused though not reliably predicted. So, determinism holds despite our inability to reliably predict events.

I am talking about determinism....it is remarks such as ''the steak was possible and it was realizable. The -ible and the -able have precisely the same meaning: something that may or may not happen, depending upon the circumstances'' - that imply probability, not determinism.

''Depending on the circumstances'' is another.

Determinism entails that the circumstances must be precisely as determined - ''precisely one inevitable way, without deviation.''

And if it was possible to choose between two or more probabilities, we would be arguing over Libertarian free will, not compatibilism.

Stop, before I puke!

That's just the implication of remarks such as ''the steak was possible and it was realizable. The -ible and the -able have precisely the same meaning: something that may or may not happen, depending upon the circumstances''

Again, the circumstances are fixed by antecedents, no deviation, meaning that nothing else is possible.

Look, the simple fact is that determinism logically implies that all events will be reliably caused by prior events, due to our reasonable assumption that every event must be caused by something, and that something must also be caused by something, etc.

Each cause an effect and each effect a cause as the system evolves without deviation or the possibility of freely selecting an alternate option, which means the possibility of doing something different.

Which contradicts ''precisely one inevitable way, without deviation.''

The causal chain is infinitely long, so no one has time for that. Our legitimate interest is in the most meaningful and relevant causes of a given event. A meaningful cause efficiently explains why the event happened. A relevant cause is something that we might do something about, either to make a desirable event happen more often, or to make an undesirable event happen less often.

So, when a thief robs a liquor store, we do not blame it on the Big Bang, because there is nothing we can do about the Big Bang to make things better. But there are many things we can do about the thief to discourage him from robbing stores and, if he cannot be discouraged, we can secure him in a cell where there are no stores to rob. But any talk about the Big Bang would be useless babbling.

Fortunately, determinism doesn't actually change anything, so any talk about determinism is usually useless babbling as well.

We don't blame it on the Big Bang, however, determinism is defined as the conditions at time t and how things go ever after being fixed by natural law - ''precisely one inevitable way, without deviation,'' with all its implications.

 

[pood]

At this point I'm still trying to figure out who's a chatbot, and who isn't.

I have met DBT IRL, so if he’s a chatbot, he’s an extraordinarily advanced model that drinks beer.

It’s funny, though, because under DBT’s hard determinism, we really are all extraordinarily advanced models of chatbots, aren’t we? We have no “choice” over what we say. It was all pre-scripted at the big bang.

Yet it’s this “extraordinarily advanced model” bit that is so puzzling. I’m going to assume chatbots are not conscious, and yet we are. What for? What possible selective advantage does consciousness, particularly higher-order consciousness, have in a pre-scripted world?

It seems clear to me what the advantage of consciousness is — it maximizes choices. It moves organisms away from blind instinct and enables them to evaluate, weigh, measure, and choose, to better their chances of survival and reproductive success.

Yet it is just this thing called choice that hard determinism denies, rendering the evolution of consciousness in such a world wholly inexplicable.

The really funny thing is the insistence that it's ''DBT's hard determinism,' when the definition I use is precisely the same as given by the compatibilists on this forum....which I quote time and time again.

The only difference being is the question of whether free will is compatible with that very same definition of determinism.

The answer, for the given reasons, being: no, it is not.

And yet, you didn’t address the point I made in the bit from me that you quoted. I’ve posed this question in the past, too, and I don’t think I’ve ever really received an answer.

The diference between standard causal determinism and your hard determinism is that causal determinism takes no stand on free will, while hard determninism argues it is incompitible with free will. So you are a hard determinist, QED.