There is no special engineering or science logic per se. Deductive and inductive reaoning is the same however it is applied.
Science is tied to unambiguous defined physical units of measures.
Therrer are basic principles like conservation and causality.
In philosophy obvious in this thread terms are never precise, there is no agreed upon definition of free will and determinism.
So it becomes if this definition then that means ….
My response will be if this detestation how would it play out in reality if it is true, with examples. If not then it is just fanciful daydreaming.
As Hercule Poirot would say, exercising the little grey cells. Pretty much why I parachute on on the philosophy forum from time to time. I heard it said the best entertainment is leaning something new.
In his book on QM David Bohm made a passing reference to an uncertainty principle of the mind. Paraphrasing as I remember it the more you try to increase the precision the more dispersed the thinking becomes.
I mean, I offer examples; they are concrete and quite close to something you can observe yourself.
This is why I say "download and play some Dwarf Fortress", so I have a common and shared concrete example which can be discussed.
In Dwarf Fortress, for instance, there is a component roughly equal to the bizarreness of the Quantum Mechanical realm: the pRNG, the thing that rolls the dice and forces otherwise ambiguous events to resolve in one decided way... Or to leave the dice unrolled until later when it needs to have been decided, and then it will be treated as having always been that way!
You can take the frames of the game, save each, and create a static block from the product.
It also has autonomous entities within it that, while deterministic, have literally "probabilistic" elements to their decision making, insofar as they are linked explicitly to the pRNG.
You can see how it all works with the blessed simplicity of binary logic on a machine capable of opening a debugger; there is even a very powerful debugger already developed and readily available for use called "DFHack".
You can follow along with everything I say, and actually use computing terms because it's a computer program, and experiment instead using the language of compatibilistic free will.
You could answer, for instance, that you would not tolerate a drunken thing whose constant state of internal rage and love of fighting which regularly intersect with the randomness that forces it to choose, but only based on its own nature, what it will do.
Even in this deterministically probabilistic setting, it's not the fault of the RNG, at least at that point in time, that he became such.
In fact, it could be his own need to wander, and the fact of a sudden rainstorm, all products of the procedural random number generator, that caused him to be out under the rain in the Spring of the Year 102 and to be put in this state of internal rage.
The one place this departs from the game is that here we consider a dwarf capable of asking the question "how do I end this state of rage? Do I? Do I even acknowledge that it is real?"; or even we might consider the idea of a dwarf who is surrounded by messages to do so, following several bloody incidents, one of them including a gelding blow to the mayor, and the second leading to another dwarf getting VERY good at crutch walking.
If the dwarf refuses to seek help for this, one could say they are rather a failure of a dwarf, and whatever nature made would at some point be better to isolate in some manner of asylum where they are kept as happy as possible, and as mentioned, isolated; but the dwarf cannot be allowed to remain free either.
In some respects, the responsibility of the pRNG coalesces to become the dwarf bearing said responsibilities forward.
Yet, we cannot say that this is the only way a dwarven world can be. It is not the only way THAT dwarf can be.
We can actually create a parallel world and see what happens when that dwarf is NOT in a constant state of internal rage. You just save the game, copy, paste, reload, and bam, there it is, events unfolding onwards from 102 in a way where that dwarf BUT without that personality trait makes different decisions, better decisions, and far less violent ones.
Likewise, you can create a world where... The whole world is entirely different in every way, where there aren't even any dwarves in the first place, and where zombies endlessly spawn and senselessly kill one another forever everywhere.
One thing about the dwarves is that they have the ability to hold a "will" in the sense I describe: a dwarf can have a list of actions to perform to attempt a task, and can observably encounter specific conditions which prevent the completion of that will.
For instance, let's assume that one dwarf with the anger problems encounters a suddenly locked door while executing the will "go to get a keg, bring it to the dining hall, and drink" while their need to fight is very very distracting to them (meaning their internal state uses whatever randomness to often select this need for execution).
Because some of these factors are clearly owing to the system state that composes the specific dwarf, some are owing to the "raw values" defining all dwarves in this world, and some are owing to the particular outputs of the pRNG as is filtered from pointedly probabilistic yet deterministic outcomes to long term statistical certainties (like the fact that this dwarf WILL leave a body on the floor this time because some dumbshit let him be Captain of the Guard, whose uniform includes a VERY sharp axe).
You can say with certainty that if this dwarf finds a locked door along his path, his will will be constrained and in so doing, a very violent outcome will be avoided.
Instead, he will find himself locked in the temple, alone, with nobody to attack.
Because he has a hair trigger, however, he decides to attack one of the statues in the temple, moments before the full moon.
He transforms into a werelizard, to find himself stationed in a tower, trapped permanently, keeping watch for Invaders.
And now we switch perspectives.
It also happens to be MY fault because as Bruce points out, the actual "god: TzimTzum" in this play is a human being, and doesn't have a clue what's actually about to happen until it does. They have a sort of omnipotence: they can actually reach out and access alternatives, but this doesn't allow them to change "what happens when they don't interfere"; and omniscience, too! Look, I can look at any state in all the world and even scrub through the frames which were explored by the pRNG and do the same at any given moment, at least of the ones I've already observed.
Arguably, there is a certain outcome in all cases, an unavoidable fate for any situation where the creator does not intervene: a few seasons pass and every dwarf that shows up to that place to live there starves to death or dehydrates to death or otherwise dies.
The entire game is defined in some way by driving one's access of the deterministic system through the alternatives, selecting whichever one (or more) is least likely to suck, and seeing what happens.
You can see which elements of the literal moment, the frame, are responsible for whatever outcomes of the next, and also what outcomes they could be responsible for; you can actually look at the things the pRNG "could" choose arrayed before the modulo is applied to the output to get a remainder.
Humans use much more sensible and determined methodologies than rolling a glorified dice to determine our next decisions; in fact, most of the use of the pRNG is there to simulate the much more sensible and deterministic sorts of decisions a human might make; the pRNG would ideally be replaced with coding that better correlates the output to the events of the dwarf's life and thoughts as determined by their life and thoughts, but alas!
For the dwarf, much more of that comes down to directly statistically uncorrelated data... But as noted, this does not erase the statistically correlated data: no matter what pRNG you put on that dwarf, they are about to go get drunk and fight and hack off half someone's limbs as they bleed out and vomit everywhere, leading to a large-scale riot and
many, many deaths.
It is not that this "must" happen. There are plenty of times and places where this doesn't happen. There's even a world you can observe where it doesn't, given a wildly different and very specific pRNG seed.
If I was to design a universe like ours so as to play a game such as that in it, I would need such a mechanism as quantum mechanics, which might force the universe to never
really sit at an outcome that would be ambiguous in the first place.
But I agree, Steve, that concrete examples are important. That's why I describe and use this one, and why I'm so disappointed that nobody else here seems to take the time to understand it.
One of the reasons I speak with the authority I do on the subject is because I looked very carefully to see if I could find such concrete examples.
In fact, the concrete examples are what I built my understanding on the topic up from.
