I meant that we never have complete information about the system as it develops, that our perception and understanding of the world is necessarily incomplete due to our limitations.
I think we both agree on that. But not on this:
That doesn't alter anything in terms of how the world develops or evolved because our condition of incomplete understanding is entailed by it.
How the world develops is entailed by the the behavior of the objects and forces that make up this world. You seem to be overlooking this fact. The abstractions of "causation" and "determinism" do not cause or determine anything. All of the causation is by the actual objects and the actual forces. Their behavior determines what happens. For example, the accumulated snow on a mountain side can reach a weight where gravity will cause an avalanche. The object is a mass of snow. The force is gravity. The event is an avalanche.
The avalanche is not caused by causation, or determined by determinism. The avalanche is caused by the mass of snow and the force of gravity.
We are objects, specifically living organisms of an intelligent species. And we can exert force upon other objects, as we do when we pick up the menu and open it. We can cause things to happen. When we order the Chef Salad, the waiter takes our order to the chef, and the chef prepares our salad.
The events of the world proceed, not through free will or choice, but fixed: as determined,
And that blatantly contradicts the fact that choosing not only happened, but was determined to happen. We actually chose to order the Chef Salad, and that choice caused us to tell the waiter, "I will have the Chef Salad, please".
Choosing is a physical event performed by our own brain. It actually happens in the real world. And the choice causally determines the subsequent behavior of the waiter and the chef. That is how determinism works. It is the reliable string of events unfolding as they inevitably must happen, where each event is the reliable result of prior events.
Given determinism, what we do or do not know is entailed by the system, as are all its events including what we think and do.
That is provisionally correct, assuming that you include us within that system of objects and forces that through their reliable interactions bring about all events. We cause things to happen, and we can choose what things we will cause to happen. For example, I could have chosen to have the chef cook me a Steak dinner instead of the Chef Salad. Of course, given the current circumstances (the bacon and eggs I had for breakfast and the double cheeseburger I had for lunch), I never would have ordered the Steak, even though I could have.
Given determinism, Bob must necessarily get the idea of taking his wife June to dinner on Saturday before the thought is formed. It has to happen as determined.
You have a logical error in that statement: getting an idea is exactly identical to a thought being formed. But I take it that what you mean to say is that Bob will inevitably get that idea/have that thought precisely at the moment he does. Yes, of course. And it will have its reliable prior causes, which will be Bob's own goals and reasons (which will have their own prior causes, etc., ad infinitum).
That's not free will, it's entailment.
It is both, of course. It is free will if he chose to take his wife to dinner rather than having dinner at home. And this free will event is fully entailed by prior causes, as is always the case with determinism. Now, if his wife had told him, "If you don't take me out to dinner tonight I'm going to divorce you", then his will would be subject to hers, and thus not free.
It's the nature of the system where initial conditions, time t and the way things go fixed as a matter of natural law, that we call 'determinism' The word 'determinism' simply represents how the system works; causal, events fixed by antecedents, etc...
Of course. After all, it is a law of nature that intelligent species can choose for themselves what they will do. That is their nature.
We, by nature, are causal agents. We get to choose what we will, or will not, cause to happen. And we are held responsible for what we deliberately choose to do.
That's why the waiter in the restaurant brings the bill to us, rather than presenting the bill to "the system".
Where there are no alternatives and the actions are entailed, there are no decisions being made.
I'm still hoping you'll discover that there are two separate contexts. In the context of the abstraction of determinism, there are no decisions being made. But in the context of the reality of determinism, decisions are being made all the time. This is the distinction that I hope to evoke when I say:
We have no choice but to choose. Every mental event in the choosing operation is causally necessary from any prior point in the past. We have no choice about that. But that series of mental events that inevitably happen, as we convert the menu of alternate possibilities into a single dinner order, IS an actual choosing operation. In other words, a decision IS being made. We have no choice about that either.
Within this actual choosing operation, each item on the menu is a real possibility, something that we are able to choose, even if it is inevitable that we will not choose it. Because it is logically necessary that we CAN choose it now, it will also be true later that we COULD HAVE chosen it. This is a simple matter of verb tense, which is how we keep straight our notions of "past", "present", and "future" events.
The appearance of alternatives is an illusion.
I really wish academics would teach people the difference between a "model" and an "illusion". The brain organizes sensory data into a model of reality that we use to make our way in the world. When the model is accurate enough to be useful, as when we navigate our bodies through a doorway, then it is called "reality", because the model is our only access to reality. It is only when the model is inaccurate enough to cause problems, as when we walk into a glass door, thinking it was open, that we call it an "illusion".
The fact that possibilities are part of the mental machinery used to make decisions means that they are "real" mental events serving a real function. They are not "illusions" of possibilities. They are just what real possibilities are: mental tokens manipulated by the mind as it considers its choices.
Before knowing what we will order for dinner, we must narrow down the menu of possibilities to a single order. Choosing is the operation by which we accomplish this task. And choosing always requires (1) two or more real possibilities and (2) the ability to choose either one. This "ability to do otherwise" is built into the logic of the choosing operation. And if you try to eliminate it, you break the operation, and end up trapped in a paradox.
Being presented with a collection of things that can happen in the system as a whole - someone does this, someone does that, does not mean that each person could have done differently in that circumstance.
And you've yet to catch on to the fact that the person could have done differently even though he wouldn't have done differently.
Choosing always requires MULTIPLE things that we CAN do in order to determine the SINGLE thing that we WILL do. This will always result in the single thing we WOULD do and at least one other thing that we COULD HAVE done instead.
The notion that there is never more than one thing that we CAN do literally breaks choosing, as is easily demonstrated in the example:
Waiter: "What will you have for dinner tonight?"
Diner: "I don't know. What are my possibilities?"
Waiter: "Determinism only permits you one option. There is only one thing you can order. Everything else is impossible to order."
Diner: "Oh. Then what is the one thing that I can order?"
Waiter: "After you tell me what you will order, I will know what you can order. Because they are the same thing."
The ability to choose what we will do has given the human species a huge survival advantage. It would be a huge mistake to break it.
