Are there any valid counter-arguments to determinism that are not simply whining from people who want to have free will?
Universe tells us localism is wrong for the last 50 years.
>>1009021
Well there's evidence that some quantum events are truly random, that is, not determined in advance.
But that hardly proves free will. Instead of your will being controlled by an inevitable chain of causality, your will is being controlled by a chain of causality with several random elements.
Same difference.
>>1009051
>truly random
Could they not just follow a pattern we don't understand?
>>1009021
>who want to have free will?
Free will has nothing to do with it. The opposite of determinism is randomness. i.e. things either happen for a reason or they don't. Which one is "free will?"
That said, most physicists don't believe the universe is fully deterministic. However, it is not a settled question.
>>1009062
We don't know that there's a pattern.
Anything's possible. What are you gonna do.
>>1009072
>Free will has nothing to do with it.
>One of the important philosophical implications of determinism is that, according to incompatibilists, it undermines many versions of free will. Correspondingly, believers in free will often appeal to physical indeterminism. (See compatibilism for a third option.)
>>1009021
Well first of all, it all depends upon how you frame the definition of "free will".
Is free will simply the ability of a conscious agent to make choices, or is free will the ability to make choices that transcend circumstances and genetics?
If you define free will as the former, we have it. But if you define it as the latter, we do not. Most people associate free will with the first definition.
>>1009099
>>If you define free will as the former, we have it.
How can a conscious agent make a choice if the choice (and their entire existence) has already been determined prior to their birth in a deterministic world?
>>1009108
>How can a conscious agent make a choice if the choice (and their entire existence) has already been determined prior to their birth in a deterministic world?
Because regardless of whether that is true or not, humans make choices, in phenomenologically speaking, humans feel subjectively like the agents of that choice.
>>1009120
and phenomenologically speaking*
>>1009120
>humans make choices
How can they "make" a choice that's already been done for them before? Human go along with a predetermined choice sounds more accurate to me.
>humans feel subjectively like the agents of that choice.
That sounds right
>>1009095
Yes I am aware that many people think it does.
>>1009277
>How can they "make" a choice that's already been done for them before? Human go along with a predetermined choice sounds more accurate to me.
I agree, but many people don't see it that way. They see it like they have a choice between A and B, and if they chose A, it means they could've chosen B instead, even if that's not the case.
>>1009277
>How can they "make" a choice that's already been done for them before?
Just because it could not have happened otherwise does not mean it isn't the mind that is doing it.
>>1009021
I believe in free will because I choose to believe in it.
Get rekt scrub.
>>1009277
It wasn't made before, just like a barrel doesn't start rolling down hill before it's placed on the top.
You are the last link in the chain of events up to your decision. Naturally, your choices are consequences of causes largely beyond yourself but you aren't outside the process. You are part of the system and there would be no choice without "you".
As to "how" choice can be real, ask yourself if pleasure and pain are real - you can feel them and infer their presence in other critters from their reactions. Something tells you that some sort of internal switch was flipped.
>>1009021
Nobody who believes in hard determinism argues for it. It's a weakness they cannot avoid.
>>1009021
No, and in all honesty the best you can do is stubbornly and somewhat disingenuously do as a libertarian is point to the fact that determinism has yet to be sufficiently proven to the empirical standards of the average deterministic. This is basically hypocritical and a poor defense though. It requires both not applying any kind of positive proof standards to the libertarian standpoint and forcing those standards onto the determinist.
t. A libertarian
>>1009021
Both would require omniscience. One can make best guesses at the outcomes of their actions, but to truly have "free will," one would have to know the outcomes ahead of time and choose from them.
Therefore, both are absurd from a phenomenological perspective, as we simply do not have all the information and cannot make fully informed choices - nor can we distinguish whether or not our desires are caused by an external force that just wills us to not know its existence.
"Random events," of course, do not exist. The causality of all events physically exists whether or not we have the capacity of understanding them, which we can only do once they have happened. We would literally have to be outside of spacetime to be able to have free will, viewing all consequences simultaneously, then "snapping back in" and carrying out our wishes at every moment.
Not that this might not be happening on some level, mind you. It's a non-zero probability.
But, in short, the arguments of determinism and free will generally ignore the fact that they would both require omniscience, the former by whatever force is controlling actions, the latter by the self choosing those actions.
I don't know if it's a counter-argument or a compromise, actually, but I hope it's interesting as grist for the mill...
>>1009062
>>1009082
>Could they not just follow a pattern we don't understand?
Physicsfag here, and not really. To be a little technical, either they have to be random or completely "superdeterministic".... as in every motion of every particle and every particle interaction is following a predetermined course.
>inb4 everything is predetermined
no. I'm not advocating that and neither is any reputable physicist. We just can't prove it's false in the math.
Look into the Bell inequalities if you're interested. Long story short, you have to at least consider all possible outcomes as possible if you want to calculate the right answer.
>>1011251
>either they have to be random or completely "superdeterministic"
Is this because of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, stating that the more precisely you know where a particle is, the less you know about where it is going, and vice-versa?
>>1009021
>Are there any valid counter-arguments to determinism that are not simply whining from people who want to have free will?
I've sought knowledge all of my life and this is the only thing I've learned that really, truly bothers me. I simply can't get around the fact that free will is a complete myth. Free will fails at every level.
All the experiments that measure movement in the brain before we're aware that were going to move, the fact that one can alter how you act by removing part of your brain, the way the brain seems to act in interpreting and model building, etc.
Then there's the physics at work with respect to the particles that make up your brain. How in any way can your conscious thought physically act on the very particles that constitute the thing that composes the thought? Even if you think about the brain at the cellular level the same problem arises. The idea is just silly. Your stream of consciousness is just that, a stream of information your brain processes. It's your movie that you get to watch. A byproduct of evolution producing a brain that models our surroundings in a way that helps us produce viable offspring.
Consciousness is a measure of the degree how "adnavced" the brain is and every mammal and most animals have it to one extent or another. I bet if we had any idea of how close dolphin and chimp consciousness is to ours we'd be shocked... not saying it's particularly close but it's far closer than we'd like to admit.
>>1011326
>Is this because of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, stating that the more precisely you know where a particle is, the less you know about where it is going, and vice-versa?
Not directly in the way you would think... but kind of. This more has to do with the "philosophical" enterpretaions of quantum "collapse" and the role of the "observer." Which sounds like the traditional explanation of the heisenberg uncertainty principle but is inadequate to what's truly happening.
Uncertainty plays into every quantum calculation you make but the heisenberg uncertainty principle, while extremely profound, is waaaay overblown in pop science in all the wrong ways.
It's always explained by saying that the observer affects the measurement somehow. One of my chemistry professors claimed the person that solved it would get a Nobel prize. It can't be solved because when you get down to it the uncertainty principle has to do with the nature of waving objects. All objects that behave like waves carry uncertainty to an extent. That's just the way the math says they should act and it's the way they do act. Since "waving" is part of being a subatomic particle so is being uncertain about them.
Bells theorem has to do with statistical results of experiments and how to calculate the right answer. If things are random then we can consider two bodies of statistical measurements: the outcomes that happened in a lab and the ones that were possible to have been measured. It turns out that in order to calculate the correct probability of measuring an outcome you have to consider the population of outcomes that would NOT measured.
>>1009021
There is the reductio ad absurdum argument that if determinism is true, then we must abandon ethics, politics, and all normative science because the concept of an "ought" proposition dissolves if we don't have free will.
(I personally don't think this argument is sufficient)
Pragmatism.
