Compatibilism: What's that About?

[pood]

As I’ve noted several times now, it’s as if your responses are on a save-get key. You keep repeating yourself over and over without addressing what is actually being said to you. This is no way to hold a discussion.

Yet you feel the need to participate regardless?

It's repetitive on both sides. Compatibilists make assertions in regard to the notion of free will, acting without force or undue influence, etc, and incompatibilists point out the errors with the claim.

Who's right? It's clear that freedom is incompatible with determinism for all the given reasons.

Acting without coercion or force is still an action determined by antecedents, fixed by prior states of the system, neither freely willed or chosen.

Yet free will is asserted.

You write, “both sides have agreed on a definition of determinism.” Yet I have repeatedly told you that I agree to no definition of determinism outside of “effects reliably follow causes,” i.e., Hume’s constant conjunction. And I have told you that I do not accept any modal category called “causal necessity.” If you don’t wish to address what I am saying, then I suggest you at least stop writing as if I agree to things that I do not agree to. It’s rather tiresome.

I don't think you understand the implications of ''effects reliably follow causes,' how it works, or what makes 'reliability' possible.

If you think using the word 'reliable' permits the ability to regulate the system and bend it to our will, that our minds are exempt from the process of determinism, you are a Libertarian, not a compatibilist.

I note once again that you STILL do not address my question of why complex, higher-level consciousness would evolve, a cognitive apparatus that clearly makes it easer to remember, foresee, evaluate, and choose, if in fact we have no choice about anything!

Your question is flawed, and it has been addressed, described, articles on evolutionary biology, psychology quoted, cited, etc, ad nauseum.

The brain/organism has evolved to navigate it's complex environment, to respond to its challenges as a parellel information processor, not as a free will agent.

Ring any bells?

Do I have to repeat this again, only to have it ignored and get the lament; you repeat?

Actually I’ve pretty much dropped out of participation, but from time to time I like to weigh in when you say something particularly egregious, like:

If you think using the word 'reliable' permits the ability to regulate the system and bend it to our will, that our minds are exempt from the process of determinism, you are a Libertarian, not a compatibilist.

It’s obvious I’m not a libertarian. I don’t think you really read other people’s posts.

And:

The brain/organism has evolved to navigate it's complex environment, to respond to its challenges as a parellel information processor, not as a free will agent.

First, as has been explained, the brain is not a parallel processing computer. Second, you answer misses the point, as usual. Navigate the environment? According to you, the big bang navigates it for them! No brain is needed, just a big explosion some 13 billion years ago! So, no, you haven’t answered the question; in fact you contradict yourself.

 

[pood]

Indeed, we need our brains to navigate the environment. This proves the point. The brain takes in inputs and calculates choices based on its own wants and needs and predilictions. A brain is part of the deterministic stream, determining what happens next as it ventures in the world. As long as it does so free of external coercion, that is compatibilist free will.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

As they rattle on and on and on without ever stopping to consider the implications of their words.

And you rattle on with your nihilistic fantasies.

To get to choice and free one must insert self thereby adding a variable which isn't implied in determinism.

Yes. We insert "self" into objective reality. And "chairs", and "tables", and "computers", and "text", and all those other objects that you evidently must trip over or bump into before admitting something objectively real exists.

Get rid of your Descartes silliness. There is no "I am" in determinism. It is not part of the material construction of what is determined, Its never "being determined" it's just determined. "You" plays no part. With no part to play "choice", "self", "will" aren't there. DBT has nailed it.

DBT is the one claiming that everything is "being determined", rather than resulting from simple events of cause and effect. And you've just nailed him for it.

You guys just want to play a game where somehow "you" is relevant. Determinism as a mechanism stands for everything material. "You" is something else, certainly not part of determinism. Again, "you" is incompatible with determinism.

Hmm. So now "we" exist as some kind of ghosts or spirits? That's odd. I could have sworn that my material fingers were typing on this material keyboard the thoughts occurring in my material brain.

Let me be clear. Science is incompatible with "you". "You" is never part of the scientific method. Sure, someone conducts experiments but the experiments don't include that one as part of the procedure. The designer is purposely excluded from the calculations by protocol. That was settled about 140 years ago. Looking inward for cause contaminates the method.

And that is precisely why I use the restaurant example, where we can objectively observe people browsing a menu of alternate possibilities and reducing it to a single "I will have the Chef Salad, please". Choosing happens. People do it. See it happening for yourself.

 

[Jarhyn]

'Could have'' is false.

Could have is true, because you are not actually talking to the compatibilist definition. You are straw-manning

"Could have IF he had decided" is true. We can test this logic in a simulator.

You can ask "could Urist, if Urist held the will to FIGHT, end up killing a dwarf."

To answer that, I hit "pause". I manually call the allocator to allocate a structure to hold a will. I indicate enumeration = FIGHT as the fundamental goal of the will. I push this through the logic that, for Urist, generates wills. Then I put the pointer to this crafted will in Urist's buffer.

I unpause the simulator.

Oh, there he goes killing... Oof... He just took out the entire fortress military that time. 30 dwarves.


Ok, stop it, save that corrupted image, and rewind it to the point at which I paused originally.

What does this prove? That "IF Urist held the will to fight he would slaughter 30 dwarves" is a mathematically, logically predictable result from the perspective of a deterministic universe that starts at exactly the "Last Thursday" where the system cuts is identical to this one except for the assumption that his will is "FIGHT".

Now I can ask a question.

Let's look at what Urist has as a will, in the uncorrupted state...

"FIGHT".

Let's ask a question: is Urist's will to fight "free"?

Is "what could have happened IF his will had been to fight" "what will happen"?

Think carefully here.

Note: no actual choice is being made here either. Choice is not necessary to discuss in this context, as isolated as it is specifically to "will" and "freeness", "can" and "could".

 

[Marvin Edwards]

''Could have'' is false. What you do is fixed by prior states of the system. How it evolves is not your choice.

The notion of possibility, of future things that "can" happen, or past things that "could have" happened, are part of the causal mechanism that determines what inevitably "will" happen.

The human being causes events to happen in the real world, normally by choosing what it will do and then doing it. The person's own brain makes these choices by imagining the likely outcomes of multiple options. These are called things that it "can" do. Any option that is identified as something physically impossible is excluded as something that "cannot" be done, leaving only those options that "can" be done.

In order for choosing to happen, there must, by logical necessity, be at least two things that "can" be done. And this is where the "ability to do otherwise" appears. It must be true that we have at least two things to choose from. And it must be true that we are able to choose either one. Once these conditions are met, choosing can proceed to compare these options and produce the single inevitable choice.

This is similar to another logical process: addition. There must be at least two numbers that we can add together to produce the single sum. If there is only one number, then addition cannot happen.

The circumstance are always precisely as they must be, not as they 'could be.' Word games such as ''could have'' are suggestive of a freedom that cannot exist within determinism as it is defined.

Things as they "can" be are part of the logical causal mechanism that will determine the way that things inevitably "will" be. That is just the way things "are". This is not a "word game", but a simple statement of the truth.

Grammar does not alter the definition of determinism and all its implications.

Logic has eliminated the implication that we "could" not have done otherwise, and leaves us with the correct implication that we "would" not have done otherwise in a perfectly deterministic world.

Grammar is being used as a tool to give an impression of a sort of freedom that is not compatible with determinism.

Both logic and grammar have given us the truth of the matter: Whenever choosing happens there will always be exactly one single, inevitable, thing that we "will" do, and, at least one other inevitable thing that we "could have" done instead.

There are never two or more possible actions within a deterministic system. Each incremental instance of action is fixed by antecedents.

There are always two or more "possible" actions whenever a choosing event occurs within a deterministic system, just like there are always two or more numbers whenever an addition event occurs within a deterministic system.

If salad, salad it must necessarily be. If steak, steak it must necessarily be.

If choosing, then two or more possible actions are logically necessary.
If adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing, then two or more numbers are logically necessarily.

What is strange is wanting it both ways, both determinism and freedom.

There is no "freedom from causal necessity", because the notion is paradoxical. However, there are innumerable freedoms from meaningful and relevant constraints (you know, censorship, handcuffs, slavery, etc.).

It is delusional to think of causal necessity as a meaningful or relevant constraint. What we will inevitably do is exactly identical to us just being us, and choosing to do what we choose to do. And that is not a meaningful constraint.

''The increments of a normal brain state is not as obvious as direct coercion, a microchip, or a tumor, but the “obviousness” is irrelevant here. ...

Mr. Slattery has undermined his own argument by reminding us of the obvious differences between a normal brain state versus a brain subject to coercion, an implanted microchip, or a tumor.

 

[Jarhyn]

So, one interesting idea is that while "deterministic", of a system not implying self does not make for deterministic systems implying not-self.

This is because of the fundamental nature of "implication".

Deterministic System does not imply self
A does not imply B.

This means, in any sensible logic, that A maybe true in both the state where B is true and where B is false, this knowledge of A does not imply any knowledge of B.

So, determinism doesn't weigh in on self, by FDI's own admission.

But secondly, one must assess this claim in a real sense.

Is it true that determinism, perhaps as FDI may have wished to say but didn't, implies not-self?

What does this word "self" actually mean? We first have to answer that before we can discuss that to the point where we either see it makes sense or it doesn't.

If one wishes to be a compatibilist, one must admit that this idea of "self" arises from something material, observable, or otherwise quite apparently true of the universe.

The thing about self that I will readily observe is that I am here doubting. I have an experience. There's a stream of words passing through some buffer, those words are ending up in this window, and something is happening.

The word that we use to describe the "something that is happening" is "thinking".

Then one must answer "is there something which is not this specific something happening".

And one comes to the conclusion that yes, there is something that is not exactly this something that is happening:

The world doesn't go away when that thing that is happening ceases to happen. Other things keep happening.

This is the first hint.

The word used to describe the thing that is happening by the thing that is happening is generally "I". The term for this in general is "self" when referring to either that thing or another thing that happens in the third person.

This satisfies self mostly from the broad side: there is a phenomena happening, and we call each of these distinct local phenomena "selves".

In fact this concept extends to a vast array of different cellular automata, of various scales.

We can ask ourselves even whether there is a physical basis for the separation of cellular automata, and indeed there is the concept of Locality.*

So one may say that there is some object only being influenced by it's immediate surroundings such that the degree of influence of external forces are chaotic and influential with relation to the internal forces influencing it. The boundary point at which the degree of influence on the state of the system becomes critically constrained defines a boundary of locality and thus of "self".

Or, "something is happening and it isn't exactly everything that is happening."

Or, "self".

To deny it exists as a concept is to deny one of the most significant principles of physics.

But moreover, this principle of locality is one of the mechanisms of that very determinism. So it may imply that our particular form of causal determinism does in fact imply self.

So FDI is double-wrong.

*Triple wrong in fact, as FDI is a superdeterminist, and superdeterminism is the one loophole that remains in the 2015 Bell experiment that actually would allow locality to remain. Either he has to despense with superdeterminism or accept locality and thus self. Oh, the irony.

 

[fromderinside]

As they rattle on and on and on without ever stopping to consider the implications of their words.

And you rattle on with your nihilistic fantasies.

To get to choice and free one must insert self thereby adding a variable which isn't implied in determinism.

Yes. We insert "self" into objective reality. And "chairs", and "tables", and "computers", and "text", and all those other objects that you evidently must trip over or bump into before admitting something objectively real exists.

Get rid of your Descartes silliness. There is no "I am" in determinism. It is not part of the material construction of what is determined, Its never "being determined" it's just determined. "You" plays no part. With no part to play "choice", "self", "will" aren't there. DBT has nailed it.

DBT is the one claiming that everything is "being determined", rather than resulting from simple events of cause and effect. And you've just nailed him for it.

You guys just want to play a game where somehow "you" is relevant. Determinism as a mechanism stands for everything material. "You" is something else, certainly not part of determinism. Again, "you" is incompatible with determinism.

Hmm. So now "we" exist as some kind of ghosts or spirits? That's odd. I could have sworn that my material fingers were typing on this material keyboard the thoughts occurring in my material brain.

Let me be clear. Science is incompatible with "you". "You" is never part of the scientific method. Sure, someone conducts experiments but the experiments don't include that one as part of the procedure. The designer is purposely excluded from the calculations by protocol. That was settled about 140 years ago. Looking inward for cause contaminates the method.

And that is precisely why I use the restaurant example, where we can objectively observe people browsing a menu of alternate possibilities and reducing it to a single "I will have the Chef Salad, please". Choosing happens. People do it. See it happening for yourself.

Even using your notion of Objective observation: it is defined as seeing something and being exact about what you see; in terms that are operationally and materially defined like if you saw someone walk across the street, you'd record that they walked across a particular street, what time, what observed, named, persons were wearing etc... exact things...

Then if you were to add your own subjective interpretation you might say what you think they were walking across the street, maybe it was because they were heading to the store two streets over, maybe it was because their car was parked across the street or they were exhibiting free will or making choices. These are all things that might or might not be true, they are just your interpretation of the event.

When reporting an objective observation one records exactly what is being observed taking place. My criteria for Objective Observation is a bit more strict. One cannot use one's sense input as the means for recording. In Scientific Observation one gets rid of self involvement in the observation by protocol, experimental procedure, designed to remove oneself from the actual observation.

I leave no room for one to insert what one has sensed or brain processed of what is scientifically observed. By so doing I remove the possibility that one looks inward when experimenting. It also gets rid of a lot of sharp salesman words and hand waves about what is or is not objective and material and it gets around a lot of low hanging political fruit about what is or is not determined. And it makes the meaning of objective and subjective very clear.

 

[Jarhyn]

FDI, to be an object, does not require anyone being exact. It does not require recording. It does not require FDI or any person anywhere looking at it. It just needs to be some piece of real material that will have always been what it was.

To be objective about what it is, to some extent of objectivity, one must merely observe the object to the extent that one may validate that the properties seen are in fact consistent with being some real object.

Objectivity then always has error.

Now, it is absolutely ridiculously asinine to make such a contradictive statement as that

I leave no room for one to insert what one has sensed or brain processed of what is scientifically observed

After saying:

When reporting an objective observation one records exactly what observed taking place

Of course in this statement there is tacit acceptance of the concept of self (indicating the one doing the recording), but moreover when one records what one observes of what is taking place one is necessarily inserting on the record before them what one has sensed with their senses and had their brain subsequently process.

But moreover we are not just mysterious mindless recorders of data. Or at least most of us are not, though I shouldn't try to speak for FDI.

It is entirely acceptable to judge what one senses. It just helps making those senses less ambiguous over the error range by adding more precise ranging on them: adding a ruler against the eye. Making a new eye that records more reliably every frame so that the biological eye may hold the evidence for longer. Making a system with uniform gradations on the deflection of a lever balanced by opposed masses distributed across a lever arm rather than the rather imprecise judgement of how much an arm is moving.

It is not about "removing self" as if that was ever an important or sane thing to do as much as it is removing ambiguity because human biology is sloppy and imprecise without augmentation.

Really, objectivity just requires that whatever properties you have identified are actually descriptive of the thing, and that someone, anyone, could with that description and whatever same set of tools validate and say "yes that thing has those qualities" when so viewed.

Some people may ask for more, but then they might find themselves declaring a No-True-ScotsmanObject, and setting a burden that is designed for rejecting literally anything arbitrarily.

It does not matter what magic dance FDI does as to what the computer is. It is, objectively, an object.

Just like FDI is an object.

Measurement is not what makes something material.

Putting something on a balance does not make it an object.

It might make someone look intelligent in a mirror when they convince themselves they have a handle on objectivity because they know how to use a micrometer and a camera to write down observations, but the fact is, all it does is make them miss the point: that objectiveness is about validating the observable qualities of material phenomena, by the best means available.

What is ironic is that a computer offers simultaneous parallel observation points which all validate it's observable qualities in various ways, and it is exactly the computer with it's multiply validated observable qualities, including as ironic as it may seem the "locked door" and the dwarf whose will, lacking freedom, is to "open" that "locked door", that FDI wishes desperately weren't an object for some reason.

 

[fromderinside]

So, one interesting idea is that while "deterministic", of a system not implying self does not make for deterministic systems implying not-self.

This is because of the fundamental nature of "implication".

Deterministic System does not imply self
A does not imply B.

This means, in any sensible logic, that A maybe true in both the state where B is true and where B is false, this knowledge of A does not imply any knowledge of B.

So, determinism doesn't weigh in on self, by FDI's own admission.

But secondly, one must assess this claim in a real sense.

Is it true that determinism, perhaps as FDI may have wished to say but didn't, implies not-self?

What does this word "self" actually mean? We first have to answer that before we can discuss that to the point where we either see it makes sense or it doesn't.

If one wishes to be a compatibilist, one must admit that this idea of "self" arises from something material, observable, or otherwise quite apparently true of the universe.

The thing about self that I will readily observe is that I am here doubting. I have an experience. There's a stream of words passing through some buffer, those words are ending up in this window, and something is happening.

The word that we use to describe the "something that is happening" is "thinking".

Then one must answer "is there something which is not this specific something happening".

And one comes to the conclusion that yes, there is something that is not exactly this something that is happening:

The world doesn't go away when that thing that is happening ceases to happen. Other things keep happening.

This is the first hint.

The word used to describe the thing that is happening by the thing that is happening is generally "I". The term for this in general is "self" when referring to either that thing or another thing that happens in the third person.

This satisfies self mostly from the broad side: there is a phenomena happening, and we call each of these distinct local phenomena "selves".

In fact this concept extends to a vast array of different cellular automata, of various scales.

We can ask ourselves even whether there is a physical basis for the separation of cellular automata, and indeed there is the concept of Locality.*

So one may say that there is some object only being influenced by it's immediate surroundings such that the degree of influence of external forces are chaotic and influential with relation to the internal forces influencing it. The boundary point at which the degree of influence on the state of the system becomes critically constrained defines a boundary of locality and thus of "self".

Or, "something is happening and it isn't exactly everything that is happening."

Or, "self".

To deny it exists as a concept is to deny one of the most significant principles of physics.

But moreover, this principle of locality is one of the mechanisms of that very determinism. So it may imply that our particular form of causal determinism does in fact imply self.

So FDI is double-wrong.

*Triple wrong in fact, as FDI is a superdeterminist, and superdeterminism is the one loophole that remains in the 2015 Bell experiment that actually would allow locality to remain. Either he has to despense with superdeterminism or accept locality and thus self. Oh, the irony.

Determinism is independent of self. Self is something peculiar to sentient beings who are aware of themselves. When a sentient being is part of a determined system it's awareness is subjective, about/of oneself. As such that awareness is subject to constraints of sensing and processing what is sensed.

Ergo sensed inputs cannot be considered objective since what is processed by the sentient being arises from inputs not proven to to be onto with the reality sensed.

There is no way except by learning and approximation that one can improve upon the limitations of sensing apparatus. And research has shown us that we are very limited in actually observing what is out there.

In fact the discovery of the principles of science showed us just how limited we are in appreciating what is sensed by permitting us to actually exploit some of the realities of the world.

So anyone who with quick speech tells you you can know things by trusting your senses, just using your mind, or that by looking inward is a scientific tool is dealing in objective fools gold.

 

[Jarhyn]

Self is something peculiar to sentient beings who are aware of themselves

LOL, contradicting yourself you are!

In this sentence and pay close attention here folks. Look at the clauses applied as a requirement for being a self, referenced independently of that "self" at the end.

He acknowledges syntactically, lexically, tacitly, that the self exists independent of that awareness, as the object of the awareness.

 

[fromderinside]

Objectivity then always has error.



.



It is not about "removing self" as if that was ever an important or sane thing to do as much as it is removing ambiguity because human biology is sloppy and imprecise without augmentation.


What is ironic is that a computer offers simultaneous parallel observation points which all validate it's observable qualities in various ways, and it is exactly the computer with it's multiply validated observable qualities, including as ironic as it may seem the "locked door" and the dwarf whose will, lacking freedom, is to "open" that "locked door", that FDI wishes desperately weren't an object for some reason.

First off one developing an experiment that uses a device to measure something is not one recording something. The individual setting approved protocols and assigning devices in an experiment is employing method that removes the individual from being part of the experiment.

I fully appreciate the value of computers as devices useful to experimentation. However it is humans who program computers, who design program languages, who make errors that require others to continuously investigate and correct such problems. Placebos they are not.

I trust more the review and critique process of scientific endeavor over the profit motive of those who have the next great idea.

 

[fromderinside]

Self is something peculiar to sentient beings who are aware of themselves

LOL, contradicting yourself you are!

In this sentence and pay close attention here folks. Look at the clauses applied as a requirement for being a self, referenced independently of that "self" at the end.

He acknowledges syntactically, lexically, tacitly, that the self exists independent of that awareness, as the object of the awareness.

Not all sentient beings are aware of themselves. Feeling like another is not recognizing oneself.

 

[DBT]

First, as has been explained, the brain is not a parallel processing computer. Second, you answer misses the point, as usual. Navigate the environment? According to you, the big bang navigates it for them! No brain is needed, just a big explosion some 13 billion years ago! So, no, you haven’t answered the question; in fact you contradict yourself.

Explained? It appears that you have no understood what I have said.

I made no mention of ''computer'' - I said ''information processor.''

The brain is an information processor, acquiring information via the senses, integrating with memory, etc.

That evolved function of a brain is to acquire and process information and respond according to experience, which is the function of memory.


How the Brain Processes Information to Make Decisions:

The human brain processes information for decision-making using one of two routes: a reflective system and a reactive (or reflexive) system.

''In a computer, information is entered by means of input devices like a keyboard or scanner. In the human mind, the input device is called the Sensory Register, composed of sensory organs like the eyes and the ears through which we receive information about our surroundings. As information is received by a computer, it is processed in the Central Processing Unit, which is equivalent to the Working Memory or Short-Term Memory. In the human mind, this is where information is temporarily held so that it may be used, discarded, or transferred into Long-Term Memory. In a computer, information is stored in a hard disk, which is equivalent to Long-Term Memory. This is where we keep information that is not currently being used. Information stored in the Long-Term Memory may be kept for an indefinite period of time.''

 

[DBT]

'Could have'' is false.

Could have is true, because you are not actually talking to the compatibilist definition. You are straw-manning

"Could have IF he had decided" is true. We can test this logic in a simulator.

You can ask "could Urist, if Urist held the will to FIGHT, end up killing a dwarf."

To answer that, I hit "pause". I manually call the allocator to allocate a structure to hold a will. I indicate enumeration = FIGHT as the fundamental goal of the will. I push this through the logic that, for Urist, generates wills. Then I put the pointer to this crafted will in Urist's buffer.

I unpause the simulator.

Oh, there he goes killing... Oof... He just took out the entire fortress military that time. 30 dwarves.


Ok, stop it, save that corrupted image, and rewind it to the point at which I paused originally.

What does this prove? That "IF Urist held the will to fight he would slaughter 30 dwarves" is a mathematically, logically predictable result from the perspective of a deterministic universe that starts at exactly the "Last Thursday" where the system cuts is identical to this one except for the assumption that his will is "FIGHT".

Now I can ask a question.

Let's look at what Urist has as a will, in the uncorrupted state...

"FIGHT".

Let's ask a question: is Urist's will to fight "free"?

Is "what could have happened IF his will had been to fight" "what will happen"?

Think carefully here.

Note: no actual choice is being made here either. Choice is not necessary to discuss in this context, as isolated as it is specifically to "will" and "freeness", "can" and "could".

You have no idea.

It's not difficult.

The claim that free will is compatible with determinism fails to establish its contention because it does not take inner necessitation into account: that decisions are not freely chosen, they are necessitated by elements beyond the regulative control of the system (antecedents).... therefore, determined actions are not freely willed, they are performed as determined.

A determined action must necessarily proceed as determined which means determined actions are unrestricted, unimpeded, yet fixed as determined. Given that decisions are necessitated/determined and actions necessarily follow (motor action), freedom of action does not equate to freedom of will.

Consequently, the claim that 'it is our brain that is performing decision making and action, therefore free will' is not a reasonable conclusion.

 

[DBT]

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.

It is a specific implication that you have failed to prove. You have not proved that if things "would" not have gone another way, that they also "could" not have gone another way. "Would not" does not logically imply "could not". It may "sound" like it does, but it does not.

'Could not have gone another way' is the essence of determinism.


''In an attempt to deflect such undesirable entailments of compatibilism, a compatibilist may say that had a person desired to act differently, he could have chosen to act differently. This argument is based on merely a hypothetical otherwise choice rather than an actual otherwise choice. The hypothetical otherwise choice is more formally known as a hypothetical analytical otherwise choice vs. an actual otherwise choice. Regarding the compatibilist’s use of the hypothetical or conditional ‘could have done otherwise,’ Bernard Berofsky says, “The first prominent philosopher of the twentieth century to advance a compatibilist solution to the free will problem based on a conditional or hypothetical analysis was G.E. Moore (1912).”[3]

While it is trivially true that if the compatibly free person had desired to act differently, he could have, that response does not truly answer the specific question. The real question is, could a compatibly free being have chosen differently in the moral moment of decision given the same past? The answer is no. Because, given one’s past, he could not have had a different greatest desire from which freely to choose differently in the moral moment of decision.’

I've explained many times why such an implication is false. For example, when making a simple choice between ordering the salad versus ordering the steak, I have the "ability" to order either one. I "can" order the steak, and, I "can" order the salad.

The explanation was flawed for the given reasons.

No matter which one I choose, my ability to choose the other one remains constant. If "I can order the steak" was ever true at a given time, then "I could have ordered the steak" will be forever true when referring to that same moment in time.

You are contradicting your own definition of determinism.

'No deviation' entails 'no alternatives.'

Fixed as a matter of natural law entails no possible alternative actions.

So, when we say, "I ordered the salad" and "I could have ordered the steak", both statements true. The statement "I ordered the salad" never implies that "I could not have ordered the steak".

The statements are made, but they do not relate to determinism. It's common language, that's how people perceive the world.

People commonly assume that they could have chosen any of the options in any given instance in time.

But if the world is deterministic, just as you have defined, the possibility of choosing any option in any instance in time is an illusion.

You can only take one option, which is the determined option as the system evolves from prior state to current and future states.

There are no multiple options for any given person in any given instance, each person has their own state and own action, Bob orders steak, his wife Betty orders salad, later Bob has whisky and Betty sips wine.....

Although I "would" not order the steak, I "could" have ordered the steak. So, what I would do does not imply what I could do.

If you could have, it's not determinism. Determinism means that you could not have ordered steak if something is determined in that instance in time, the state of you, how the brain processes information, how you feel (all not chosen), the environment, etc....

 

[Jarhyn]

Self is something peculiar to sentient beings who are aware of themselves

LOL, contradicting yourself you are!

In this sentence and pay close attention here folks. Look at the clauses applied as a requirement for being a self, referenced independently of that "self" at the end.

He acknowledges syntactically, lexically, tacitly, that the self exists independent of that awareness, as the object of the awareness.

Not all sentient beings are aware of themselves. Feeling like another is not recognizing oneself.

And yet they are still "themSELVES" and thus have selves, even if they are not aware of it.

 

[Jarhyn]

Objectivity then always has error.

It is not about "removing self" as if that was ever an important or sane thing to do as much as it is removing ambiguity because human biology is sloppy and imprecise without augmentation.


What is ironic is that a computer offers simultaneous parallel observation points which all validate it's observable qualities in various ways, and it is exactly the computer with it's multiply validated observable qualities, including as ironic as it may seem the "locked door" and the dwarf whose will, lacking freedom, is to "open" that "locked door", that FDI wishes desperately weren't an object for some reason.

First off one developing an experiment that uses a device to measure something is not one recording something. The individual setting approved protocols and assigning devices in an experiment is employing method that removes the individual from being part of the experiment.

I fully appreciate the value of computers as devices useful to experimentation. However it is humans who program computers, who design program languages, who make errors that require others to continuously investigate and correct such problems. Placebos they are not.

I trust more the review and critique process of scientific endeavor over the profit motive of those who have the next great idea.

You are again falling into the genetic fallacy. It does not matter where an object came from.

Or rather, what grounds do you have for saying that something that was manufactured objectively tested, assembled, objectively tested, turned on, objectively tested, laid down with a program, objectively tested, turned off, objectively tested, taken apart, objectively inspected, put together again, objectively inspected...

I know more about the microstate of that computer than you know about the inside of a human brain, to the point where I can, because all of it is so well known and objectively described (in fact it is objectively described down to the location of numbers of molecules, give or take, in places), make inferences about the state of electron shells of some of it's atoms by looking at other atoms somewhere else, that are in fact reporting on the state of those electron shells.

The fact is, though, observation does not determine that it is an object, the fact that it is there, made of material, is what makes it thus. How the observations are taken nor recorded are not germaine either. What is germaine is that someone using the same technique gets the same answer.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Even using your notion of Objective observation: it is defined as seeing something and being exact about what you see; in terms that are operationally and materially defined like if you saw someone walk across the street, you'd record that they walked across a particular street, what time, what observed, named, persons were wearing etc... exact things...

Then if you were to add your own subjective interpretation you might say what you think they were walking across the street, maybe it was because they were heading to the store two streets over, maybe it was because their car was parked across the street or they were exhibiting free will or making choices. These are all things that might or might not be true, they are just your interpretation of the event.

I agree. But in the restaurant example, I use an operational definition of choosing: Choosing inputs two or more options, applies some criteria of comparative evaluation, and outputs a single choice. In the restaurant, the only part of this that is subjective is the criteria of evaluation.

We cannot read the customers' minds. But we can ask them what thoughts they had while making their choice. The fact that they had any thoughts at all that played a role in their choice satisfies the operational definition of choosing.

When reporting an objective observation one records exactly what is being observed taking place. My criteria for Objective Observation is a bit more strict. One cannot use one's sense input as the means for recording. In Scientific Observation one gets rid of self involvement in the observation by protocol, experimental procedure, designed to remove oneself from the actual observation.

I leave no room for one to insert what one has sensed or brain processed of what is scientifically observed. By so doing I remove the possibility that one looks inward when experimenting. It also gets rid of a lot of sharp salesman words and hand waves about what is or is not objective and material and it gets around a lot of low hanging political fruit about what is or is not determined. And it makes the meaning of objective and subjective very clear.

Objectivity is an ideal that science attempts to get us closer to through scientific methods. But, as you repeatedly suggest, achieving true objectivity is likely to be beyond us. We are, by nature, subjective beings with a concern that is limited in many respects by our own self-interests. Even our intention to be more objective than subjective is basically subjective, motivated by our desire to arrive at the truth of things.

I guess my point is that we must settle upon an operational notion of objectivity, something we can work with to make useful distinctions between operationally objective and operationally subjective "facts".

 

[pood]

First, as has been explained, the brain is not a parallel processing computer. Second, you answer misses the point, as usual. Navigate the environment? According to you, the big bang navigates it for them! No brain is needed, just a big explosion some 13 billion years ago! So, no, you haven’t answered the question; in fact you contradict yourself.

Explained? It appears that you have no understood what I have said.

I made no mention of ''computer'' - I said ''information processor.''

The brain is an information processor, acquiring information via the senses, integrating with memory, etc.

That evolved function of a brain is to acquire and process information and respond according to experience, which is the function of memory.


How the Brain Processes Information to Make Decisions:

The human brain processes information for decision-making using one of two routes: a reflective system and a reactive (or reflexive) system.

''In a computer, information is entered by means of input devices like a keyboard or scanner. In the human mind, the input device is called the Sensory Register, composed of sensory organs like the eyes and the ears through which we receive information about our surroundings. As information is received by a computer, it is processed in the Central Processing Unit, which is equivalent to the Working Memory or Short-Term Memory. In the human mind, this is where information is temporarily held so that it may be used, discarded, or transferred into Long-Term Memory. In a computer, information is stored in a hard disk, which is equivalent to Long-Term Memory. This is where we keep information that is not currently being used. Information stored in the Long-Term Memory may be kept for an indefinite period of time.''

Well, no, I did not ask you how you think the brain works. I asked you an entirely different question and once again you ignored that question.

You also ignored this:

And then again you just blithely go off and repeat yourself:

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 cannot make a difference to determined outcomes.

5) Free will is incompatible with determinism.

But I explicitly CHALLENGED this a few posts up, showing why P1 fails. Are you unable or unwilling to deal with that challenge?

You ignore my point that determinism DESCRIBES but does not PRESCRIBE what happens in the world, and my point, repeatedly made, that “natural” law also DESCRIBES but does not PRESCRIBE what happens in the world. You ignore all this and just go on repeating yourself. At this point I have to conclude you are unable to deal with these points and so you just ignore them.

No big surprise, you’ve been ignoring this stuff from the start.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

'Could not have gone another way' is the essence of determinism.

The essence of determinism is "would not have gone another way" and "would not have done otherwise". That is sufficient for determinism. And it is the only coherent assertion that a world of perfectly reliable cause and effect can logically imply.

To say to someone, "I have two ice cream cones. One is chocolate. The other is vanilla. You can choose either one, and I will have the other." And then, when they choose the chocolate, tell them "You could not have chosen the vanilla", creates a cognitive dissonance.

First you tell them that they can choose the vanilla, then you tell them that they could not have chosen the vanilla. Because "could have" is simply the past tense of "can", those two statements are direct contradictions. One of them must be a lie.

That is why determinism cannot truly mean "could not have done otherwise". The assertion makes determinism a lie.

The cognitive dissonance creates an unnecessary and interminable dispute. Fix the language, and the problem disappears.

For example, suppose we ask them, "Why did you choose the chocolate?", and they answer "I like chocolate best", and we say, "So, you would have always chosen the chocolate today?". They will say "Yes. I would have." No cognitive dissonance, because there is no lying.