Demystifying Determinism

[DBT]

I have made no extraordinary claims. ...

But you're doing it right now. For example:

There is no choosing in determinism.

You've seen the people in the restaurant, choosing from the menu what they will order for dinner. To claim that choosing is not happening when it is happening right there in front of us is an extraordinary claim!

The point is that none of this is of our choosing, regulative control, ...

If the customers are not controlling what they are choosing then point to the object that is controlling their choice. There is no other object in the physical universe that is doing the choosing for them. It really is them.

The waiter, observing reality objectively, sees the customers making choices from the menu and telling him what they will have for dinner. You cannot convince the waiter that these people did not order what they ordered without extraordinary evidence. Philosophic sophistry will not cut it.

... or that our will has the freedom to make a difference. If will has no agency, will not being able to make a difference to what are determined outcomes, will has no freedom and there is no reason to define 'will' as 'free will.'

There is no such thing as a "free floating will". People choose what they will do. What they choose to do causes effects in the world around them. Will the chef be fixing us a Salad, or will the chef be cooking us a Steak? It is up to us, and only us, to decide.

That which chooses what will happen next exercises control. In the restaurant, the agency that controls what the chef will be doing is the customer who chooses what they will order for dinner.

Determinism asserts that all of these events, unfold necessarily, exactly as we observed them. Every choice will have a history of reliable causes reaching back as far as anyone cares to imagine. But the meaningful and relevant causes of these choices exist locally within each diner in the restaurant. None of the diner's prior causes can participate in this choice without first becoming an integral part of who and what the diner is. It is only the diners themselves that have any causal agency at this point in time.

These are the indisputable empirical facts. And the incompatibilist has nothing other than philosophic sophistry to dispute them.

It is simply 'will' - an urge or prompt to act (inner necessity)- inevitably followed by action (as determined).

It is not always as simple as choosing a dinner. Consider our carpenter, who chooses to build herself a home. There will be hundreds of decisions as she chooses the location, the materials, the flooring, the fixtures, the subcontractors, etc. Each of these choices will control something about the house she is building and what she and the other workers will be doing.

There is no other object in the physical universe that will make these choices for her. Her own choices will control what she will do. And that remains the case in a fully deterministic universe, because it will be causally necessary, from any prior point in time, that she herself will be making exactly those choices.

Our Carpenter doesn't exist or operate in a vacuum. There are countless elements at work shaping the thoughts and action of our Carpenter. It's called Life and the World. And if the world is deterministic, the actions of the Carpenter are determined by the conditions and events in both the world and his immediate environment.

The problem with that theory is that "Life and the World" have no interest in whether the woman builds a house or not. She is the one who decided to build the house, because she has the skills and the motivation to build it. After she learned carpentry, and she worked to save up the money, and she imagined building a home for herself, and she worked out the design, and she decided it was a real possibility, and it was she that decided "I will build my house now, rather than waiting any longer". Her deliberately chosen will, to build that house for herself, motivated and directed her subsequent thoughts and actions as she carried out her intent to build it.

It was her own freely chosen intent that sustained her efforts, from driving the first nail to moving in.

The notion that "Life and the World" possessed the necessary intent, rather than her, is superstitious nonsense. It does not comply with the empirical facts of what was actually determined to happen.

All of this is exactly my point with my example of the architect having to make literally hundreds if not thousands of choices to build the best building possible, and each choice had to be correct in order to bring off the end product. Who designed the building? The architect, of course. DBT thinks the big bang designed it, as if the big bang were sentient, knowledgeable about architeture, and took an interest in a structure being erected more than 10 billion years in the future. I characterized my example as a reductio proving the absurdity of hard determinism, and your carpenter example is the same kind of reductio. Hard determinism is obviously false; more, it is absurd.

You still don't realize that, given determinism as it is defined by compatibilists, each and every incremental step in the process of the evolution of the system is fixed, that there are no alternatives?

That, according to the given definition, there can be no alternate actions?

Nobody is arguing that we can't think, plan and act, just that the thoughts and actions that happen, happen necessarily.


''Determinism, in philosophy and science, the thesis that all events in the universe, including human decisions and actions, are causally inevitable. Determinism entails that, in a situation in which a person makes a certain decision or performs a certain action, it is impossible that he or she could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did.''

 

[The AntiChris]

Defining God as Love doesn't mean that God is Love

It does to those who subscribe to that definition.

You still haven't got your head round the fact that we give words their meanings (definitions). Words themselves have no intrinsic meaning - meaning is derived exclusively from the use we make of them.

It doesn't matter what they subscribe to. Some subscribe to Flat Earth Cosmology based on their interpretation of the bible, and they have verses to support what they subscribe to. It is written. People believed it. Does that mean the earth is flat? Obviously not.

Just as defining free will as actions performed without force, coercion, etc, really has nothing to do with free will. Not only does it have nothing to do with free will, it has nothing to do with the function of will.

Just to clarify, you're saying that words, such as 'free will', have intrinsic meaning regardless of how those words are commonly used?

If this is what you're saying, then you really should provide evidence in support of what is an extraordinary claim.

 

[DBT]

Hard determinism is a futile and doomed error of reductionism. It's basically like the childish assertion that you don't exist, because you are just atoms.

If you try to define a hard and permanent border that separates "me" from "everything else", you discover that this endeavour is impossible at the atomic scale; The atoms that are "me" change from instant to instant, and over a lifetime, very few specific atoms remain a part of "me". But all material objects are made of atoms, and dualism is wrong, so what is "me"?

The answer is, of course, that "me" is a dynamic pattern of atomic interactions, that is hugely complex, but easily identifiable across the timeline we call "my lifetime". Amongst those patterns are such sub-patterns as "thinking", "choosing", and "posting on web boards"; But any attempt to grasp these human scale phenomena at the atomic scale is utterly futile.

Scale is a critical concept that's frequently overlooked. It's possible to completely understand a system at large scales, without having any concept whatsoever about the underlying small scale structures. That's why it wasn't impossible for humanity to develop metallurgy thousands of years before we had chemistry, and to develop chemistry centuries before we had quantum mechanics.

To declare that choosing is impossible because humans are part of an entirely deterministic universe is to claim that facts at one scale are inseparably important to behaviour at another scale; And the entire history of science and technology is a clearly observable series of demonstrations that that claim is false.

Atoms don't choose, but people do.

Atoms also don't think, breathe, eat, sleep or fart; Yet almost nobody is daft enough to claim that, because humans are nothing other than an arrangement of atoms, they therefore cannot think, breathe, eat, sleep, or fart.

Accepting ad argumentum that atoms (or other substructures that make up a human body, such as neurons, for example) behave in a completely deterministic way, tells us nothing whatsoever about whether humans can make choices - and to expect that it should, or even might, do so is to completely fail to notice the very obvious fact that the properties of reality are completely different at different scales.

If this were not the case, we couldn't have discovered anything at all about reality without first achieving a complete understanding of quantum physics (something which we still haven't managed to attain).

Hard determinism simply refers to the incompatibility of the notion of free will and determinism. Otherwise, the definition of determinism is essentially the same. It's just that one point of difference.

And of course, the notion of 'free will' is not compatible with a system that entails all action as it transitions from past to present and future states without deviation, randomness or choosing options.

 

[DBT]

Defining God as Love doesn't mean that God is Love

It does to those who subscribe to that definition.

You still haven't got your head round the fact that we give words their meanings (definitions). Words themselves have no intrinsic meaning - meaning is derived exclusively from the use we make of them.

It doesn't matter what they subscribe to. Some subscribe to Flat Earth Cosmology based on their interpretation of the bible, and they have verses to support what they subscribe to. It is written. People believed it. Does that mean the earth is flat? Obviously not.

Just as defining free will as actions performed without force, coercion, etc, really has nothing to do with free will. Not only does it have nothing to do with free will, it has nothing to do with the function of will.

Just to clarify, you're saying that words, such as 'free will', have intrinsic meaning regardless of how those words are commonly used?

If this is what you're saying, then you really should provide evidence in support of what is an extraordinary claim.

Of course they do, the word freedom has a definition, as does 'will' in terms of brain function and the process of cognition. You can't just slap labels without regard to the terms and references. Will is not a motor action, it is a prompt or urge, Free means the ability to do otherwise. It can mean acting freely, but if the action is determined, therefore has no alternatives, it is certainly not freely willed. Schopenhauer's action distinction, etc.

 

[DBT]

I have made no extraordinary claims. ...

But you're doing it right now. For example:

Nope. Not so.

There is no choosing in determinism.

You've seen the people in the restaurant, choosing from the menu what they will order for dinner. To claim that choosing is not happening when it is happening right there in front of us is an extraordinary claim!

This has been addressed numerous times.

The order that each and every customer takes is fixed, it is an action performed necessarily, with no alternate actions possible in any given instance in time, each and every customer according to their own state and proclivities in any given instance in time, where all the options must be taken according to the state and condition of the system and its inhabitants.

This is not according to an ''extraordinary claim'' that I make.

It is according to your own definition of determinism.

Which I shouldn't have to quote again. Yet it appears that it is being contradicted. Outcomes that are fixed by antecedents, including the process of thought (neural information processing) that inevitably leads to that outcome, cannot be defined as being freely willed. It is a process of entailment, not free will.

 

[The AntiChris]

Defining God as Love doesn't mean that God is Love

It does to those who subscribe to that definition.

You still haven't got your head round the fact that we give words their meanings (definitions). Words themselves have no intrinsic meaning - meaning is derived exclusively from the use we make of them.

It doesn't matter what they subscribe to. Some subscribe to Flat Earth Cosmology based on their interpretation of the bible, and they have verses to support what they subscribe to. It is written. People believed it. Does that mean the earth is flat? Obviously not.

Just as defining free will as actions performed without force, coercion, etc, really has nothing to do with free will. Not only does it have nothing to do with free will, it has nothing to do with the function of will.

Just to clarify, you're saying that words, such as 'free will', have intrinsic meaning regardless of how those words are commonly used?

If this is what you're saying, then you really should provide evidence in support of what is an extraordinary claim.

Of course they do, the word freedom has a definition...

Where do you think definitions come from?

Seriously, how do you think compilers of dictionaries obtain the definitions they publish?

 

[bilby]

Hard determinism is a futile and doomed error of reductionism. It's basically like the childish assertion that you don't exist, because you are just atoms.

If you try to define a hard and permanent border that separates "me" from "everything else", you discover that this endeavour is impossible at the atomic scale; The atoms that are "me" change from instant to instant, and over a lifetime, very few specific atoms remain a part of "me". But all material objects are made of atoms, and dualism is wrong, so what is "me"?

The answer is, of course, that "me" is a dynamic pattern of atomic interactions, that is hugely complex, but easily identifiable across the timeline we call "my lifetime". Amongst those patterns are such sub-patterns as "thinking", "choosing", and "posting on web boards"; But any attempt to grasp these human scale phenomena at the atomic scale is utterly futile.

Scale is a critical concept that's frequently overlooked. It's possible to completely understand a system at large scales, without having any concept whatsoever about the underlying small scale structures. That's why it wasn't impossible for humanity to develop metallurgy thousands of years before we had chemistry, and to develop chemistry centuries before we had quantum mechanics.

To declare that choosing is impossible because humans are part of an entirely deterministic universe is to claim that facts at one scale are inseparably important to behaviour at another scale; And the entire history of science and technology is a clearly observable series of demonstrations that that claim is false.

Atoms don't choose, but people do.

Atoms also don't think, breathe, eat, sleep or fart; Yet almost nobody is daft enough to claim that, because humans are nothing other than an arrangement of atoms, they therefore cannot think, breathe, eat, sleep, or fart.

Accepting ad argumentum that atoms (or other substructures that make up a human body, such as neurons, for example) behave in a completely deterministic way, tells us nothing whatsoever about whether humans can make choices - and to expect that it should, or even might, do so is to completely fail to notice the very obvious fact that the properties of reality are completely different at different scales.

If this were not the case, we couldn't have discovered anything at all about reality without first achieving a complete understanding of quantum physics (something which we still haven't managed to attain).

Hard determinism simply refers to the incompatibility of the notion of free will and determinism. Otherwise, the definition of determinism is essentially the same. It's just that one point of difference.

Yes.

And of course, the notion of 'free will' is not compatible with a system that entails all action as it transitions from past to present and future states without deviation, randomness or choosing options.

Sure it is. Free will is a characteristic of complex systems - they choose options all the time (as we observe), and in a deterministic universe, they couldn't do anything else, because the act of choosing, like every other act, is an unavoidable consequence of prior states.

Deviation and randomness are completely irrelevant, and are in no way associated with choice, by the way.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

You've seen the people in the restaurant, choosing from the menu what they will order for dinner. To claim that choosing is not happening when it is happening right there in front of us is an extraordinary claim!

The order that each and every customer takes is fixed, it is an action performed necessarily, ...

In the restaurant, it is fixed that choosing will necessarily be performed. Without choosing, there is no dinner order. The diner simply stares at the menu and hands it back to the waiter. With choosing, the many possibilities on the menu are reduced to a single dinner order, and everything works just as it always has.

The claim that choosing is not happening, or that choosing is not consistent with deterministic causal necessity, is obviously false.

... with no alternate actions possible in any given instance in time, each and every customer according to their own state and proclivities in any given instance in time,

The restaurant menu obviously presents the chooser with many alternate possibilities. The fact that the customer will inevitably choose one dinner over the others does not contradict the fact that the customer could have ordered anything (or even everything) on that menu.

So, the claim that no alternate actions were possible, if obviously false.

... where all the options must be taken according to the state and condition of the system and its inhabitants.

You keep inserting "the system" as if it were an agent exercising control. This is a superstitious notion.

The only agents exercising control are the individual diners. They each choose for themselves what they will order. There is no "system" that will make this choice for them.

... Outcomes that are fixed by antecedents, including the process of thought (neural information processing) that inevitably leads to that outcome, cannot be defined as being freely willed. ...

If by "freely willed" you mean that each diner chose for themselves what they would order while free of coercion and undue influence, then we must logically conclude that all of the antecedent events inevitably led to each of them making that choice of their own free will.

There is no contradiction between antecedent causality and operational free will.

It is a process of entailment, not free will.

That remains a false dichotomy. We do not have to choose between entailment and free will. It will either be entailed that we will be free of coercion and undue influence, OR, it will be entailed that we will not be free of coercion and undue influence. Deterministic entailment equally applies to both events.

Either way, whether we are free to choose for ourselves or not free to choose for ourselves, it will be entailed by deterministic causal necessity.

And that is precisely why causal determinism never changes anything. Everything always operates through reliable causal mechanisms, even choosing and free will. The war between a deterministic reality and free will is an illusion.

 

[DBT]

Defining God as Love doesn't mean that God is Love

It does to those who subscribe to that definition.

You still haven't got your head round the fact that we give words their meanings (definitions). Words themselves have no intrinsic meaning - meaning is derived exclusively from the use we make of them.

It doesn't matter what they subscribe to. Some subscribe to Flat Earth Cosmology based on their interpretation of the bible, and they have verses to support what they subscribe to. It is written. People believed it. Does that mean the earth is flat? Obviously not.

Just as defining free will as actions performed without force, coercion, etc, really has nothing to do with free will. Not only does it have nothing to do with free will, it has nothing to do with the function of will.

Just to clarify, you're saying that words, such as 'free will', have intrinsic meaning regardless of how those words are commonly used?

If this is what you're saying, then you really should provide evidence in support of what is an extraordinary claim.

Of course they do, the word freedom has a definition...

Where do you think definitions come from?

Seriously, how do you think compilers of dictionaries obtain the definitions they publish?

Dictionaries simply reflect word use. Dictionaries do not necessarily represent scientific research or philosophical inquiry. Word usage alone does not prove that something is real. People talk about 'God' and 'Angels,' etc, and these words are in the dictionary, but do these things, God, Angels, etc, necessarily exist because they are listed in our dictionary? I think not.

 

[DBT]

Hard determinism is a futile and doomed error of reductionism. It's basically like the childish assertion that you don't exist, because you are just atoms.

If you try to define a hard and permanent border that separates "me" from "everything else", you discover that this endeavour is impossible at the atomic scale; The atoms that are "me" change from instant to instant, and over a lifetime, very few specific atoms remain a part of "me". But all material objects are made of atoms, and dualism is wrong, so what is "me"?

The answer is, of course, that "me" is a dynamic pattern of atomic interactions, that is hugely complex, but easily identifiable across the timeline we call "my lifetime". Amongst those patterns are such sub-patterns as "thinking", "choosing", and "posting on web boards"; But any attempt to grasp these human scale phenomena at the atomic scale is utterly futile.

Scale is a critical concept that's frequently overlooked. It's possible to completely understand a system at large scales, without having any concept whatsoever about the underlying small scale structures. That's why it wasn't impossible for humanity to develop metallurgy thousands of years before we had chemistry, and to develop chemistry centuries before we had quantum mechanics.

To declare that choosing is impossible because humans are part of an entirely deterministic universe is to claim that facts at one scale are inseparably important to behaviour at another scale; And the entire history of science and technology is a clearly observable series of demonstrations that that claim is false.

Atoms don't choose, but people do.

Atoms also don't think, breathe, eat, sleep or fart; Yet almost nobody is daft enough to claim that, because humans are nothing other than an arrangement of atoms, they therefore cannot think, breathe, eat, sleep, or fart.

Accepting ad argumentum that atoms (or other substructures that make up a human body, such as neurons, for example) behave in a completely deterministic way, tells us nothing whatsoever about whether humans can make choices - and to expect that it should, or even might, do so is to completely fail to notice the very obvious fact that the properties of reality are completely different at different scales.

If this were not the case, we couldn't have discovered anything at all about reality without first achieving a complete understanding of quantum physics (something which we still haven't managed to attain).

Hard determinism simply refers to the incompatibility of the notion of free will and determinism. Otherwise, the definition of determinism is essentially the same. It's just that one point of difference.

Yes.

And of course, the notion of 'free will' is not compatible with a system that entails all action as it transitions from past to present and future states without deviation, randomness or choosing options.

Sure it is. Free will is a characteristic of complex systems - they choose options all the time (as we observe), and in a deterministic universe, they couldn't do anything else, because the act of choosing, like every other act, is an unavoidable consequence of prior states.

Deviation and randomness are completely irrelevant, and are in no way associated with choice, by the way.

No option is chosen. Based on the compatibilist definition of determinism, all actions are entailed. Given the terms, there are no possible alternate actions.....so, given that choice requires the possibility of taking any one of a number of options at any given time, and determinism as it is defined by compatibilists does not permit alternate action, there is only one possible action at any given time, therefore without possible alternatives, no choice.

Consequently, without choice, the decision-making process in determinism - as it is defined by compatibilists - is one of entailment, not choice.

Which is why compatibilists define free will as an action performed without coercion or force.

Which in turn fails for all the reasons that have been given numerous times.

 

[DBT]

You've seen the people in the restaurant, choosing from the menu what they will order for dinner. To claim that choosing is not happening when it is happening right there in front of us is an extraordinary claim!

The order that each and every customer takes is fixed, it is an action performed necessarily, ...

In the restaurant, it is fixed that choosing will necessarily be performed. Without choosing, there is no dinner order. The diner simply stares at the menu and hands it back to the waiter. With choosing, the many possibilities on the menu are reduced to a single dinner order, and everything works just as it always has.

The claim that choosing is not happening, or that choosing is not consistent with deterministic causal necessity, is obviously false.

It's false to describe what is a process of entailment a matter of choosing. Because in determinism the decision making process can have but one outcome, no alternatives, decision making is a matter of entailment, not choice.

A fixed outcome is not a choice.

... with no alternate actions possible in any given instance in time, each and every customer according to their own state and proclivities in any given instance in time,

The restaurant menu obviously presents the chooser with many alternate possibilities. The fact that the customer will inevitably choose one dinner over the others does not contradict the fact that the customer could have ordered anything (or even everything) on that menu.

So, the claim that no alternate actions were possible, if obviously false.

What is being presented and what must necessarily happen are two different things. What is being presented is meant to cater for different people, different tastes, different proclivities.

None of the participants has access to the necessary information to predict who will do what. Certainly not the management, unless they have a customer who essentially has the same order every time.

... where all the options must be taken according to the state and condition of the system and its inhabitants.

You keep inserting "the system" as if it were an agent exercising control. This is a superstitious notion.

That's not what I am saying. The 'system' is the world and our environment, of which we are an inseparable part of. It is our genes, environment, culture, society, nation, language, education, social circumstances, life experiences, etcetera, that shapes us and makes us who we are and how we think

I have said this countless times.

If by "freely willed" you mean that each diner chose for themselves what they would order while free of coercion and undue influence, then we must logically conclude that all of the antecedent events inevitably led to each of them making that choice of their own free will.

There is no contradiction between antecedent causality and operational free will.

There is much more to it than simply 'choosing for themselves.' For one, as pointed out above, there are no possible alternate actions.

That is not me saying so, but according to your own definition of determinism.

Nor is compatibilist free will defined as 'freedom of choice.'

It is a process of entailment, not free will.

That remains a false dichotomy. We do not have to choose between entailment and free will. It will either be entailed that we will be free of coercion and undue influence, OR, it will be entailed that we will not be free of coercion and undue influence. Deterministic entailment equally applies to both events.

Either way, whether we are free to choose for ourselves or not free to choose for ourselves, it will be entailed by deterministic causal necessity.

And that is precisely why causal determinism never changes anything. Everything always operates through reliable causal mechanisms, even choosing and free will. The war between a deterministic reality and free will is an illusion.

Nothing is being freely willed.

The system - the world, the events in the local environment - evolves without deviation from prior to present and future states.

First this, then that, no alternatives.

Determinism: given the state of the world at any moment in time, there is only one way it can be at the next moment.

What Does Deterministic System Mean?
''A deterministic system is a system in which a given initial state or condition will always produce the same results. There is no randomness or variation in the ways that inputs get delivered as outputs.''

''Each state of the universe and its events are the necessary result of its prior state and prior events. ("Events" change the state of things.)'' - Marvin Edwards.

 

[The AntiChris]

Defining God as Love doesn't mean that God is Love

It does to those who subscribe to that definition.

You still haven't got your head round the fact that we give words their meanings (definitions). Words themselves have no intrinsic meaning - meaning is derived exclusively from the use we make of them.

It doesn't matter what they subscribe to. Some subscribe to Flat Earth Cosmology based on their interpretation of the bible, and they have verses to support what they subscribe to. It is written. People believed it. Does that mean the earth is flat? Obviously not.

Just as defining free will as actions performed without force, coercion, etc, really has nothing to do with free will. Not only does it have nothing to do with free will, it has nothing to do with the function of will.

Just to clarify, you're saying that words, such as 'free will', have intrinsic meaning regardless of how those words are commonly used?

If this is what you're saying, then you really should provide evidence in support of what is an extraordinary claim.

Of course they do, the word freedom has a definition...

Where do you think definitions come from?

Seriously, how do you think compilers of dictionaries obtain the definitions they publish?

Dictionaries simply reflect word use.

So, you accept that definitions are statements of meaning based on word use.

Earlier I asked you a question:

Just to clarify, you're saying that words, such as 'free will', have intrinsic meaning regardless of how those words are commonly used?

Of course they do, the word freedom has a definition...

So, it seems that you believe words have intrinsic meaning regardless of how those words are commonly used and, at the same time you believe the meanings of words are represented by their definitions (statements of common usage).

These two views are contradictory. They can't both be true. You can believe both but that would just mean that you are confused.

Can you please clarify?

This is important because you frequently accuse compatibilists of misusing words. I'd like to know how you arrive at what you believe to be correct word use.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

It's false to describe what is a process of entailment a matter of choosing.

If it is entailed that it will be a matter of choosing then it is false to say it is not choosing.

Because in determinism the decision making process can have but one outcome, no alternatives, decision making is a matter of entailment, not choice.

Choosing is entailed whenever we encounter multiple options and must decide between them what we will do. A simple example would be the restaurant menu, where we encounter multiple possible dinners, and must select from them what we will order for dinner.

These events, in which choosing is entailed, will always present us with two or more alternatives, and it will be necessary that we choose between them.

The fact that we will select only one option never implies that we could not have selected any of the other options. Insisting that what we "can" do is only what we "will" do creates "the paradox of choosing between a single possibility". Let me know if you'd like me to explain this again.

A fixed outcome is not a choice.

If the outcome is fixed by choosing it, then the fixed outcome is certainly a choice.

What is being presented and what must necessarily happen are two different things. What is being presented is meant to cater for different people, different tastes, different proclivities.

Yes. That is the nature of choosing: we are presented with multiple items, any or all of which can be chosen, and it is necessary that we select the one thing that we will have from among the many things that we can select. And different people, with the same options, will make different selections.

This happens in the restaurant, the grocery store, the Christmas catalog, and each morning when we select from the closet what we will wear to school or to work.

None of the participants has access to the necessary information to predict who will do what. ...

But they will shortly have all the information they need to make such a prediction. By the end of the choosing operation, they will know exactly which item they were always going to select.

... The 'system' is the world and our environment, of which we are an inseparable part of.

But "the world and our environment" will not choose what we will have for dinner. The "world and our environment" insist that we must make that choice ourselves.

It is our genes, environment, culture, society, nation, language, education, social circumstances, life experiences, etcetera, that shapes us and makes us who we are and how we think ...

But it is only we, ourselves, that will decide what we will order for dinner. And it is only ourselves that will be held responsible for paying the dinner bill.

No prior cause of us can participate in our decision making without first becoming an integral part of who and what we are. It is truly us, and no one else, that now performs the choosing that controls the choice.

There is much more to it than simply 'choosing for themselves.'

All that free will requires is that the person is choosing for themselves what they will do while free of coercion and undue influence. It is really that simple.

For one, as pointed out above, there are no possible alternate actions.

There is a literal menu of possibilities to choose from in the restaurant. Each diner will typically consider several of these before making up their mind and placing their order.

That is not me saying so, but according to your own definition of determinism.

Not at all. My definition of determinism leads me to conclude that the restaurant menu, listing all of the real possibilities, was causally necessary from any prior point in time. Determinism, rather than making these possibilities impossible, makes them inevitable.

Nor is compatibilist free will defined as 'freedom of choice.'

I don't claim to speak for all compatibilists. But I do speak for my own compatibilism. A choice we make for ourselves while free of coercion and undue influence is all that is required of free will. These are the freedoms "worth having" in regard to free will.

We do not have to choose between entailment and free will. It will either be entailed that we will be free of coercion and undue influence, OR, it will be entailed that we will not be free of coercion and undue influence. Deterministic entailment equally applies to both events.

Either way, whether we are free to choose for ourselves or not free to choose for ourselves, it will be entailed by deterministic causal necessity.

And that is precisely why causal determinism never changes anything. Everything always operates through reliable causal mechanisms, even choosing and free will. The war between a deterministic reality and free will is an illusion.

Nothing is being freely willed.

Only when using the incompatibilist definition of free will, which typically requires "freedom from causal necessity" or "freedom from our own brains" or some other impossible (and thus irrational) freedom.

The system - the world, the events in the local environment - evolves without deviation from prior to present and future states.

Indeed. And one of the things that will necessarily happen, is that people will be seated in a restaurant, choosing for themselves from a menu of the many things that they can order, the single thing that they will order.

First this, then that, no alternatives.

Yes. And there will be no alternative to the menu of alternatives we will encounter in the restaurant, and from which we must choose what we will order for dinner.

Determinism: given the state of the world at any moment in time, there is only one way it can be at the next moment.

Determinism: given the state of the world at any moment in time, there is only one way it will be at the next moment.

Obviously, we cannot conflate how things "can" be with how things "will" be. So, please choose the correct word next time.

What Does Deterministic System Mean?
''A deterministic system is a system in which a given initial state or condition will always produce the same results. There is no randomness or variation in the ways that inputs get delivered as outputs.''

Correct. There is no randomness or variation in a deterministic view. The restaurant menu, with its multiple possibilities, the multiple things that we can order, will show up exactly as it does. And the steps in our mental consideration of these options, our goals and reasons that determine our choice, will also happen exactly as they do, without any randomness or variation. Determinism does not change how any of this happens. We will each decide for ourselves what we will order for dinner, and, the waiter will give us each the bill for the dinner we ordered.

 

[DBT]

Defining God as Love doesn't mean that God is Love

It does to those who subscribe to that definition.

You still haven't got your head round the fact that we give words their meanings (definitions). Words themselves have no intrinsic meaning - meaning is derived exclusively from the use we make of them.

It doesn't matter what they subscribe to. Some subscribe to Flat Earth Cosmology based on their interpretation of the bible, and they have verses to support what they subscribe to. It is written. People believed it. Does that mean the earth is flat? Obviously not.

Just as defining free will as actions performed without force, coercion, etc, really has nothing to do with free will. Not only does it have nothing to do with free will, it has nothing to do with the function of will.

Just to clarify, you're saying that words, such as 'free will', have intrinsic meaning regardless of how those words are commonly used?

If this is what you're saying, then you really should provide evidence in support of what is an extraordinary claim.

Of course they do, the word freedom has a definition...

Where do you think definitions come from?

Seriously, how do you think compilers of dictionaries obtain the definitions they publish?

Dictionaries simply reflect word use.

So, you accept that definitions are statements of meaning based on word use.

'Meaning' is the catch. What does the word refer to is the question. Meaning alone does not prove the reality of whatever the word refers to, ie, God, gods, angels, demons....all these words have meaning, but are these things real in the sense that God, gods, angels or demons exist? No, they are not necessarily real because the words are used and have meaning.

'Meaning' is not enough.

Earlier I asked you a question:

Just to clarify, you're saying that words, such as 'free will', have intrinsic meaning regardless of how those words are commonly used?

Of course they do, the word freedom has a definition...

So, it seems that you believe words have intrinsic meaning regardless of how those words are commonly used and, at the same time you believe the meanings of words are represented by their definitions (statements of common usage).

These two views are contradictory. They can't both be true. You can believe both but that would just mean that you are confused.

You missed the point. Which is that words are just symbols, language, used to convey information in the form of references to objects, events, ideas, concepts, etc. Which doesn't mean that because words have meanings that what they refer exists; God, gods, angels, demons, etcetera.

Can you please clarify?

This is important because you frequently accuse compatibilists of misusing words. I'd like to know how you arrive at what you believe to be correct word use.

I don't accuse, I point out that word meaning and carefully selected terms and definitions alone do not necessarily prove the proposition.....that if the premises are flawed, the conclusion is flawed regardless of following from the premises.

By ignoring inner necessitation, compatibilism is based on flawed premises... 'a quagmire of evasion' as expressed by William James.

 

[DBT]

It's false to describe what is a process of entailment a matter of choosing.

If it is entailed that it will be a matter of choosing then it is false to say it is not choosing.

Because in determinism the decision making process can have but one outcome, no alternatives, decision making is a matter of entailment, not choice.

Choosing is entailed whenever we encounter multiple options and must decide between them what we will do. A simple example would be the restaurant menu, where we encounter multiple possible dinners, and must select from them what we will order for dinner.

These events, in which choosing is entailed, will always present us with two or more alternatives, and it will be necessary that we choose between them.

The fact that we will select only one option never implies that we could not have selected any of the other options. Insisting that what we "can" do is only what we "will" do creates "the paradox of choosing between a single possibility". Let me know if you'd like me to explain this again.

There are no possible alternatives at any point during the evolution of the system. Your own definition of determinism stipulates this.

What happens, must happen. Nobody picks and chooses, ''well, maybe this, maybe that.'' There can only be one outcome at any point in time, and that outcome is entailed, not chosen.

A fixed outcome is not a choice.

If the outcome is fixed by choosing it, then the fixed outcome is certainly a choice.

But it is not fixed by choosing. Every action is entailed long before it comes to the cognitive process of thought and deliberation, which also has no deviation and thereby leads to the inevitable conclusion: the determined action.

Imposing the word 'choosing' doesn't make it a matter of choice. Choice requires the possibility of actually choosing an alternative.

But of course, determinism has no alternatives. Not because I say, but according to your own definition.

''A deterministic system is a system in which a given initial state or condition will always produce the same results. There is no randomness or variation in the ways that inputs get delivered as outputs.''

Correct. There is no randomness or variation in a deterministic view. The restaurant menu, with its multiple possibilities, the multiple things that we can order, will show up exactly as it does. And the steps in our mental consideration of these options, our goals and reasons that determine our choice, will also happen exactly as they do, without any randomness or variation. Determinism does not change how any of this happens. We will each decide for ourselves what we will order for dinner, and, the waiter will give us each the bill for the dinner we ordered.

What is ordered must be ordered. There are alternatives, no choosing otherwise, no doing otherwise exists, that is the point. Without that, it is not a matter of choosing.

''Determinism entails that, in a situation in which a person makes a certain decision or performs a certain action, it is impossible that he or she could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did.''

BTW, I'm flying out in the morning, to Melbourne for eight days, back on the 30th, I'm not sure how much I can post during that time.

Is that a sigh of relief?

 

[The AntiChris]

So, it seems that you believe words have intrinsic meaning regardless of how those words are commonly used and, at the same time you believe the meanings of words are represented by their definitions (statements of common usage).

These two views are contradictory. They can't both be true. You can believe both but that would just mean that you are confused.

You missed the point. Which is that words are just symbols, language, used to convey information in the form of references to objects, events, ideas, concepts, etc. Which doesn't mean that because words have meanings that what they refer exists; God, gods, angels, demons, etcetera.

No, I haven't missed your point. If you recall I already agreed with the point you're making in post #1247 ("If you define God as a supernatural entity, then many reasonable people would agree God doesn't exist").

But if you want to level this criticism at the compatibilist definition of free will then the onus on you is to show that the referent of the definition is nonexistent.

The basic definition of compatibilist free will is: Acting while free of coercion and other forms of undue influence.

For your argument to hold, you have to be claiming that no one ever acts without coercion or undue influence. Is this what you're claiming?

Or, are you adding 'coercion' and 'undue influence' to 'free', 'freedom' 'choose' and 'choice' as words that have no meaning in a deterministic universe?

 

[Jarhyn]

First off, the definition DBT applies to randomness is not apt. Steve actually covered that at some point insofar as that randomness is a term referring to the inability to derive a function through statistical tests on it's output.

Second, deviation, real deviation where someone chooses steak and not salad, but also chooses salad but not steak (and the universe splits in to at the moment of to reject the contradiction from being observable) is nonsensical, unobservable, and an untestable hypothesis, and furthermore is unnecessary. All we have ever seen or contemplated, there is just the one life, the one "play-through" as it were.

There is, after all, a real world we return to when we wake from our simulations inside ourselves. Even these dreams are in their own way real, real enforced relationships between data whose manipulation acts relatively to objects outside. But still... one must dream of deviations for us to make choice of these dreams as to which to realize.

I may not know which dinner I want. It may take some mental exercise to figure it out, put together some choices, and actually choose.

Sometimes it takes putting together a list, enumerating that list upon a rock's face, and letting the rock's form of fixed choice of "how it settles following being provided a moment of force across a surface" be what ends up rendering the decision. In this case alternatives are usually regions of stable potential relative to the center of mass of the material.

This is a different kind of choice function.

I wonder if DBT would dispute that the dice does not have sides? Sides here are alternatives. Alternatives continue to exist, to have existed, because they were made as a potential, not necessarily an actual.

The rock may not have carved itself into a dice, but the shape of the dice as it is, as it continues to be, is essentially to the choices made by it.

If the dice makes "bad" choices, fails to represent a flat distribution across a large number of rolls, the dice may be regulated: cut the dice down or build the dice up somehow to produce flat faces and an evenly distributed mass.

Alternatively, it may be favored by another sort of metaphorical "dice" that tends to make "bad" choices.

The thing is, this second "dice" that makes "bad" choices has available to it the means to sculpt its own selection surface as it were. Metaphorically shave it's faces down.

Responsibility is about seeing that dice roll in a way where all the dice get to participate in all the rolls, as it were.

In this gross oversimplification the "dice" in question are given leave to shape themselves as they see fit, metaphorical arms that may shoot out to cut down or add material as is available.

Self regulation is possible.

It's possible to describe all sorts of systems which self-modify.

So, it seems that you believe words have intrinsic meaning regardless of how those words are commonly used and, at the same time you believe the meanings of words are represented by their definitions (statements of common usage).

These two views are contradictory. They can't both be true. You can believe both but that would just mean that you are confused.

You missed the point. Which is that words are just symbols, language, used to convey information in the form of references to objects, events, ideas, concepts, etc. Which doesn't mean that because words have meanings that what they refer exists; God, gods, angels, demons, etcetera.

No, I haven't missed your point. If you recall I already agreed with the point you're making in post #1247 ("If you define God as a supernatural entity, then many reasonable people would agree God doesn't exist").

But if you want to level this criticism at the compatibilist definition of free will then the onus on you is to show that the referent of the definition is nonexistent.

The basic definition of compatibilist free will is: Acting while free of coercion and other forms of undue influence.

For your argument to hold, you have to be claiming that no one ever acts without coercion or undue influence. Is this what you're claiming?

Or, are you adding 'coercion' and 'undue influence' to 'free', 'freedom' 'choose' and 'choice' as words that have no meaning in a deterministic universe?

He would have to add "here" and "there" to the list of words without meaning then.

Substantively, the idea of "undue influence" is a discussion, spatially, of "did the influence come from here (inside the brain), at the time of the decision, or did it come from there (outside the brain)?"

if when he orders the salad one can observe the immediate chain of decisionmaking in "order salad I've got a gun", the influence came from "there", not "here".

And wherever the decision came from and the nature of it determines who gets the bill, even if the bill is "police, drop the gun!" and payed in blood.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

There are no possible alternatives at any point during the evolution of the system. Your own definition of determinism stipulates this.

There is the menu. Determinism says the menu was causally necessary. Do you disagree?

What happens, must happen. Nobody picks and chooses, ''well, maybe this, maybe that.''

There are the people, picking and choosing what they will order for dinner, thinking to themselves, things like, "Well, maybe the Steak, but wait, I had the bacon and eggs for breakfast and a double cheeseburger for lunch. Hmm. Maybe the Salad instead".

Determinism says that picking and choosing was causally necessary. Do you disagree?

There can only be one outcome at any point in time, and that outcome is entailed, not chosen.

Determinism says that choosing is entailed. Do you disagree?

But it is not fixed by choosing.

Then how do you account for the dinner order? The causal mechanism clearly requires a selection from many items on the menu. Without choosing, there is no explanation as to how the state of the brain gets from (a) uncertainty as to what we will order to (b) certainty as to what we will order.

Every action is entailed long before it comes to the cognitive process of thought and deliberation, which also has no deviation and thereby leads to the inevitable conclusion: the determined action.

No, that will not do. That is like answering the question, "why did the child die" with "every action is entailed long before it happens", while pretending that she never caught Covid-19 and there was nothing we could have done to prevent it. You see, had her parents chosen to vaccinate their child, she would have lived.

Science embraces the notion of deterministic causation because it insists that every event is reliably caused by some specific mechanism. If we can discover the mechanism, then we gain some control over the event. Many diseases, such as Covid-19, are caused by a virus. The human immune system can be primed to successfully fight that virus by vaccination. Knowing the causal mechanisms enables us to control the disease.

All of the utility of the notion of causal determinism comes from knowing the specific causes of specific events. The general fact, that every event is reliably caused by something, is a matter of faith, that motivates us to look for the specific causes.

So, no, that will not do. Saying that people "do not choose what they will do because everything is entailed" ignores the specific causes, the real causes that we need to deal with. For example, for public health and safety, we need children to be vaccinated against contagious viruses that cause serious illness and death, things like Polio, Measles, and Covid-19.

In the restaurant, we will be choosing what we will have for dinner, just like in the doctor's office we will be choosing whether to have our child vaccinated against dangerous diseases.

Choosing is a real function, performed by real people.

Imposing the word 'choosing' doesn't make it a matter of choice.

You think that we are simply "imposing the word" 'choosing'? Don't be stupid. Everyone, including you, knows what choosing is. You've posted the dictionary definition yourself many times.

Choice requires the possibility of actually choosing an alternative.

And you've seen the menu. And you've seen people choosing from the alternatives listed there. They obviously have the ability to choose from the menu whatever they want, because each of them is successfully doing it.

But of course, determinism has no alternatives. Not because I say, but according to your own definition.

That, my friend, is sophistry, "specious but fallacious reasoning; employment of arguments which are intentionally deceptive." (OED).

 

[DBT]

So, it seems that you believe words have intrinsic meaning regardless of how those words are commonly used and, at the same time you believe the meanings of words are represented by their definitions (statements of common usage).

These two views are contradictory. They can't both be true. You can believe both but that would just mean that you are confused.

You missed the point. Which is that words are just symbols, language, used to convey information in the form of references to objects, events, ideas, concepts, etc. Which doesn't mean that because words have meanings that what they refer exists; God, gods, angels, demons, etcetera.

No, I haven't missed your point. If you recall I already agreed with the point you're making in post #1247 ("If you define God as a supernatural entity, then many reasonable people would agree God doesn't exist").

But if you want to level this criticism at the compatibilist definition of free will then the onus on you is to show that the referent of the definition is nonexistent.

The basic definition of compatibilist free will is: Acting while free of coercion and other forms of undue influence.

For your argument to hold, you have to be claiming that no one ever acts without coercion or undue influence. Is this what you're claiming?

Or, are you adding 'coercion' and 'undue influence' to 'free', 'freedom' 'choose' and 'choice' as words that have no meaning in a deterministic universe?

I have already explained that words are symbols. Symbols that refer to objects, events, ideas, concepts, etc.


The word `Tree` does not mean a body of water, `mountain` does not refer to a cloud, and so on.

Now as the issue here is `free will` something that we call `free` has specific references, as does the word `will` - so what we call `will` must be `free` as the word is defined

To reiterate, if it is claimed that free will exists, will needs to be free.

But of course, that is not what compabilists do, where unforced or uncoersed is declared to be `free will,` disregarding inner necessity, etc, and makes compatibilism `a quagmire of evasion.`

This has been explained countless times over a period of decades, quotes, citations given....

 

[DBT]

First off, the definition DBT applies to randomness is not apt. Steve actually covered that at some point insofar as that randomness is a term referring to the inability to derive a function through statistical tests on it's output

first off, you are pulling stuff out of you know where.

Where exactly is this definition that I supposedly apply to randomness?

Second, deviation, real deviation where someone chooses steak and not salad, but also chooses salad but not steak (and the universe splits in to at the moment of to reject the contradiction from being observable) is nonsensical, unobservable, and an untestable hypothesis, and furthermore is unnecessary. All we have ever seen or contemplated, there is just the one life, the one "play-through" as it were.

There is, after all, a real world we return to when we wake from our simulations inside ourselves. Even these dreams are in their own way real, real enforced relationships between data whose manipulation acts relatively to objects outside. But still... one must dream of deviations for us to make choice of these dreams as to which to realize.

I may not know which dinner I want. It may take some mental exercise to figure it out, put together some choices, and actually choose.

Sometimes it takes putting together a list, enumerating that list upon a rock's face, and letting the rock's form of fixed choice of "how it settles following being provided a moment of force across a surface" be what ends up rendering the decision. In this case alternatives are usually regions of stable potential relative to the center of mass of the material.

This is a different kind of choice function.

I wonder if DBT would dispute that the dice does not have sides? Sides here are alternatives. Alternatives continue to exist, to have existed, because they were made as a potential, not necessarily an actual.

The rock may not have carved itself into a dice, but the shape of the dice as it is, as it continues to be, is essentially to the choices made by it.

If the dice makes "bad" choices, fails to represent a flat distribution across a large number of rolls, the dice may be regulated: cut the dice down or build the dice up somehow to produce flat faces and an evenly distributed mass.

Alternatively, it may be favored by another sort of metaphorical "dice" that tends to make "bad" choices.

The thing is, this second "dice" that makes "bad" choices has available to it the means to sculpt its own selection surface as it were. Metaphorically shave it's faces down.

Responsibility is about seeing that dice roll in a way where all the dice get to participate in all the rolls, as it were.

In this gross oversimplification the "dice" in question are given leave to shape themselves as they see fit, metaphorical arms that may shoot out to cut down or add material as is available.

Self regulation is possible.

It's possible to describe all sorts of systems which self-modify.

So, it seems that you believe words have intrinsic meaning regardless of how those words are commonly used and, at the same time you believe the meanings of words are represented by their definitions (statements of common usage).

These two views are contradictory. They can't both be true. You can believe both but that would just mean that you are confused.

You missed the point. Which is that words are just symbols, language, used to convey information in the form of references to objects, events, ideas, concepts, etc. Which doesn't mean that because words have meanings that what they refer exists; God, gods, angels, demons, etcetera.

No, I haven't missed your point. If you recall I already agreed with the point you're making in post #1247 ("If you define God as a supernatural entity, then many reasonable people would agree God doesn't exist").

But if you want to level this criticism at the compatibilist definition of free will then the onus on you is to show that the referent of the definition is nonexistent.

The basic definition of compatibilist free will is: Acting while free of coercion and other forms of undue influence.

For your argument to hold, you have to be claiming that no one ever acts without coercion or undue influence. Is this what you're claiming?

Or, are you adding 'coercion' and 'undue influence' to 'free', 'freedom' 'choose' and 'choice' as words that have no meaning in a deterministic universe?

He would have to add "here" and "there" to the list of words without meaning then.

Substantively, the idea of "undue influence" is a discussion, spatially, of "did the influence come from here (inside the brain), at the time of the decision, or did it come from there (outside the brain)?"

if when he orders the salad one can observe the immediate chain of decisionmaking in "order salad I've got a gun", the influence came from "there", not "here".

And wherever the decision came from and the nature of it determines who gets the bill, even if the bill is "police, drop the gun!" and payed in blood.

You are making all the same errors, over and over, errors that have been pointed out way too many time, to no evail.

The sad truth is that you still haven`t grasped the implications of your own definition of determinism, and most likely never will.

I don`t have the time to explain it to you again, only to see that you failed to grasp the basics.


``Determinism entails that, in a situation in which a person makes a certain decision or performs a certain action, it is impossible that he or she could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did.''

https://www.britannica.com/topic/determinism