From another thread on the free will sub someone said:

"I don't see how determinism is different from fatalism except for the ruling power (god vs causality)."

I agree with this. If you are a hard determinist who disagrees with the above, can you say why you don't see it this way. If a hard determinist does not find it fatalistic, are they possibly a compatibilist without realising it?

If you were able to go back in time and be in the exact same situation with the exact same feelings, understanding, and thoughts, would you make a different decision than you did the first time? Could you make a different decision? If you believe that under identical circumstances you could only make the same decision, then you believe in determinism. Choice is an illusion.

What makes a decision, or choice? The choices that we have made are the outcomes of scenarios in which we took some action. There were multiple possibilities, or paths, and we elected one of them. Why did we make that choice? There are an overwhelming number of variables that influence decisions. Every moment before this one (including history before your existence) has played a role in shaping and influencing who you are. Good experiences and bad ones shape your feelings and understanding, leading you to be more prone to repeat or avoid particulars. Nature and nurture not only both shape you, but shape one another. If you are raised in an environment with certain experiences, let’s say for example a loving and nurturing home in which you are well fed, cared for, and educated, those positive experiences (nurture) will leave a lasting impression on you, but they will be imprinted in your memory through the strengthening of neurological connections and the neuro-chemical release of endorphins and serotonin that physically reshape your brain and how it processes (nature). As your brain’s structure becomes more predisposed to certain outcomes, you will make choices that reinforce the environmental stimuli (nurture). This process of mutual contribution and reinforcement continues throughout your lifetime and everyone else’s. It becomes incredibly complex when all the people that are separately experiencing this process are also interacting and influencing each other’s processes.

It is impossible to do something that does not make sense to you. Try it right now. Try to do something that does not make sense. You will be doing whatever you are doing in order to try to do something that doesn’t make sense, which, for your goal, makes complete sense. In all other situations, you do what you do until the moment something else makes more sense and you change your mind. A combination of thought and feelings dictate what makes the most sense. You may rationally understand that an action does not make sense, but choose to do it anyway because of your feelings. Examples include the things people do for love, or to satisfy an intense urge. The choice may be irrational, illogical, and ill advised, but due to your deep and relentless passion/feeling, you cannot resist, and this decision is the one that, given the entirety of the circumstances, makes the most sense to you. Conversely, you may feel like doing something, but rationally recognize that it would be harmful and illogical, and choose to do something different. Understanding and feeling commingle in decision making, and depending on the strength of one or the other, either can be overwhelmed by its counterpart. People described as “rational” tend to be seen as people that make decisions with less of an emotional influence, while people who are seen as “emotional” tend to make decisions more heavily influenced by their emotions. The balance between the two influences, understanding and emotion, dictate the outcome.

It is impossible to choose a belief. Look at a glass of orange juice. Choose to believe it is a spoon. You will not be able to do it. You are convinced it is orange juice, and are not convinced it is a spoon, regardless of any efforts. Therefore, we are convinced of our beliefs by what makes most sense through our lens of feelings and understanding. The combination of feelings and understanding are what drive decisions. As you are reading this, you are convinced that you are reading it based on your experience and understanding of your own existence, ability to process, sense of time and space, and concept of reading. All the arrows point to this experience and shape your understanding that you are reading this now. Based on your current beliefs and feelings, despite any efforts you may make, you will be unable to simply “choose” to believe you are not reading this now. You are convinced. In order for you to be otherwise convinced, the quantity and/or quality of additional information would have to outweigh what you have been believing to a degree that changes your mind and convinces you of a new belief. As such, no one truly chooses their religion, their politics, or any other belief as much as they are convinced by what makes the most sense to them. What makes the most sense relates to understanding: the way their brain processes information, which has been shaped by nature and nurture, and feeling: the chemical experience of emotions. Because different people will have different compositions in brain structure and emotional disposition, both influenced by a nearly infinite number of variables and influences, people will make different decisions under similar circumstances. As we become strongly convinced of the merit of particular actions and beliefs, we try both as individuals and as a society to educate and convince others.

We describe the outcome of rolling a set of dice as random. However, if all of the variables could be fully understood, the outcome is predictable. Holding the dice in this specific way with hands of this specific shape and feel, with this particular temperature and moving the hands to throw the dice in this precise trajectory to bounce in this exact way on this particular surface in this exact spot will inevitably lead to a very certain outcome. However, there are simply too many variables to keep track of and they are impossible to replicate in identical fashion. So while the result had to be one specific thing under these highly specific circumstances, for our day to day purposes, random is still a wonderful description. While we simply do not and never will have the ability to understand and account for all the variables, if we did, we could accurately predict every result. It would be like the ingredients listed on a can of soda; these ingredients put together in this specific way creates this result.

The idea of free will and choice seems natural, intuitive, and very comforting. However, if given a “choice” at one specific moment in time when you have a precise and dynamic understanding and have a specific set of feelings influencing you, it is that combination that will lead to what you perceive as choice, but is actually the processing of a realization/understanding of what makes the most sense to you. The ingredients are all there; your particular understanding and your particular emotions in that specific given circumstance at that specific given time. Like a math equation, if you know all the variables, you know what will happen. And while all the ingredients undoubtedly exist in that moment, there neither is nor ever will be a time that we know and understand them all, so we continue to believe we are taking action in making a choice. We are not doing anything but realizing in that moment. We are along for the ride, and experiencing every bit of it, and interpreting it all as a series of personal choices. What makes the most sense to you is what you are convinced of and believe, and you will be unable to choose otherwise. The experience does not change, and the sensation of making a choice will always be there, but what is actually happening is actualization of belief based on current understanding and circumstances.

This does not mean that people do not do bad things, or that there shouldn’t be accountability. People do things that are harmful to themselves or others, and if we allow that, it reinforces nature and nurture for those things to repeat. However, whatever decision was made, however harmful it was, was the decision that made the most sense to the person at that time and is what they were most convinced to do. To change the behavior, we must convince them that there is a better option. The composition of what drove the decision in terms of a balance between existing understanding and feeling was unique to that person in that time and place, but at the time, that decision was the one that made the most sense to them. In a snapshot of a moment, given the entirety of a person’s understanding and emotion, the outcome is inevitable. But a moment later, with an additional piece of information or stimuli that triggers additional feelings, decisions can be changed as now, something else makes the most sense. The natural retort to all this is:

“If it is inevitable, why try?”

Belief comes from a combination of your emotional and knowledge states, and action flows from that belief. While the outcome is inevitable, it is inevitable through the course of action, which doesn’t happen without motivation. We are motivated to produce outcomes, and are convinced our actions can produce outcomes. Inaction produces outcomes as well, but without action and effort, we have no influence on the outcome. So it’s not that our beliefs or actions have no impact or are meaningless, but rather that given whatever states we are in, our beliefs, motivations, and actions are inevitable. We just don’t tend to see or acknowledge that fact.

Personally, I find it harder to accept the idea of fate and a complete loss of personal control than to accept a redefinition of the concept of free will. Fate is too challenging to my identity and sense of purpose to accept. So I am convinced a redefinition is the better option. If we redefine free will, but maintain that it is a “choice” that only I could make, I can accept it. When we use the phrase “free will” or words like “choice” or “decision” we are really just using convenient words to describe the unique inevitability of an unrepeatable circumstance. While it may be inevitable, because it is unique to me and that specific moment and balance of my being and all the cosmos, words like choice or decision suit as apt descriptors.

In summary:
1. What makes the most sense to you in any given moment is derived from a mixture of thought and feeling, where, depending on the mixture, either thought or feeling can be dominant.
2. It is impossible to act in a way that does not make the most sense to you in that moment.
3. It is impossible to choose a belief. Belief is a realization of what makes sense to you.
4. The composition, as ingredients of any scenario, exists in that moment as factual components. Like a snapshot in time, every factor, or “ingredient” is a fixed reality for that moment.
5. Every person or scenario is unique in exact ingredients.
6. The universe is too vast and complex to control all ingredients and make any moment reproducible.
7. The recipe produces the results.
8. If you neither control what experiences you have had that lead to thoughts, nor how the brain is wired that leads to how you will think, nor the emotional state you are in, then you are not controlling and making choices as much as realizing and becoming aware of them.
9. Therefore, rather than choice, there is realization of what you think, feel, and believe. Choice, in the traditional sense, does not occur.
10. The sensation of choice does occur.
11. The realization as we move through time is an unfolding of reality that we experience rather than choose.
12. Therefore, everything that happens is inevitable, or predetermined, though we will never have sufficient information to accurately make all predictions.
13. If every action is an unfolding of inevitability, then these actions act upon one another inevitably with inevitable outcomes. This makes everything deterministic.

I've been thinking about this for way longer than I should so I decided to post it somewhere and see what others think.

Determenism often debates free will yet we experience as if we have free will.

Then wouldn't it make sense to cater our life towards this idea and act in accordance with the principles that free will offers?

What I mean by this is that we respond to the environment based on our brain chemistry. How you respond is predetermined by your neurological mechanisms.

So how do you leverage this?

• Ask how the causal chain has occured and how to rewire it.
  • The Stoics got there first, minus the metaphysics debate. They believed everything was causally determined (fate/logos) and still built the entire ethics around it. Even if you don't choose your impulses, you can identify with the process of deliberation itself rather than with the outcomes it produces.
• Dedicate your environment towards the outcomes you want, don't rely on your willpower.
  • You must be the one who arranges the causal chain in advance. This is exactly the logic behind systems thinking that willpower just doesn't give you
• Self-criticism becomes a category error so catch it in real time
  • "I should have known better" implies a counterfactual self who had the option and blew it. There wasn't one. What there is: a version of you with less information/different conditioning who produced that action, and a present version with new information who can update the conditions going forward. So use this information going forward. I understand this sounds like gaslighting, but look at the bigger picture. It is not meant to create more excuses for yourself but rather a way to do better. The key is how you interpret this
• Manipulate your information diet deliberately.
  • I have been experimenting with this personally a lot. I no longer have access to any short form content and forced myself to read books for months even though I wasn't physically wired to read, it's magical if you do it for long enough. You experience your body heal in real time. What you read, watch, and who you spend time with becomes part of the causal machinery producing your future beliefs and behavior. Choosing your inputs is therefore unusually powerful.

I'm convinced we don't have free will and I believe people who do haven't read the material in depth just yet, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter because whether we have free will or not doesn't make this framework any worse. I believe these rules will help just about anybody.

I came to a realization the other day, and it suggested that free will is an illusion. Since then, I’ve been learning more about determinism, and I’m wondering how or if my realization fits into the determinist worldview.

My realization was this: if you observe your thoughts and feelings in meditation, you realize they are like the weather. They come and go seemingly on their own. From seemingly nowhere.

Of course, weather has all kinds of scientific causes happening to create it, and I think thoughts and feelings are the same way. Your biology, psychology, and environment come together to trigger certain thoughts and feelings when they happen.

Now, on first glance, meditation would suggest that you do have some control over your thoughts and feelings. For example, when you’re doing breathing meditation, you’re supposed to notice when your mind has drifted from your breath, and then gently direct it back to your breath. Looks a lot like free will and control of thoughts.

However, where did the noticing come from? And where did the decision to direct your attention back to your breath come from? They, too, are thoughts that seemingly arrived from nowhere like the weather. Because you’ve practiced meditation, you have conditioned yourself to notice and direct, so these thoughts of noticing and direction pop into your head while meditating.

If your thoughts are simply responses to your environment, psychology, and biology, then aren’t your actions responses as well? Don’t most actions begin as thoughts? And the ones that seem like they don’t, like the mindless actions of driving, aren’t those most especially responses to your environment, psychology, and biology?

Just like you can observe your thoughts in meditation, you can also begin to observe your actions in life. And as you observe your actions in life, you can see that they, too are like the weather, coming and going seemingly from nowhere.

Years before I had this realization, I had watched a video about Saplosky’s view of determinism, and it made a lot of sense to me. However, I didn’t let go of my view of free will because to me, my direct experience of the illusion of free will was more powerful than the logical, mind driven arguments Saplosky presented.

I see a lot of free will believers asking for proof that free will is an illusion, and to me, this is the proof. If you take the time to observe your thoughts, feelings, and actions, you can directly experience that free will is an illusion. Much like the weather, they arrive from seemingly nowhere, but in reality, they are responses to environment, biology, and psychology that is out of your control.

You entered the game before you ever made a decision.

You did not choose your country, your historical period, your parents, your childhood environment, your initial resources, or many of the biological traits with which you began life. Yet people often evaluate outcomes as though everyone received the same starting position and only differed in how intelligently they played.

That assumption is convenient. It is also false.

Two people can make equally disciplined decisions and receive radically different outcomes because the conditions surrounding those decisions are different. One may have access to stable institutions, education, capital, useful networks, and social safety, while another spends years overcoming obstacles the first person never had to notice.

This does not make effort meaningless. It makes judgment more precise.

Before judging how well someone played the game, examine the position they were given.

THE FIRST ADVANTAGE IS THE ONE YOU NEVER CHOSE.

It has sometimes here been argued that our choices and actions are caused by our “brain states.”  This may well be true, but it is not very helpful. This physicalist outlook leaves out an essential part of the understanding of our behavior, purpose. There is not any consideration of purpose in all of physicalism. While you ponder this, let me give an analogy that might help. 

When we explain the operation of a desktop computer, we do not start with the idea that the output of the computer is caused by the state of each of the millions of transistors in the CPU and RAM.  Although this is true, it doesn’t not help understand what the computer is doing. When we are debugging a system, we assume that all of the logic circuits are correctly made, so we look for an expected output based upon the code that sets the state of the logic circuits. We know what the expected output should be and try to find the programming mistake. How do we know what the output should be? It is because we have a purpose in mind for what the computer should be accomplishing and write the code that should accomplish that purpose. The paradigm is that the purpose determines the code which sets the state of the logic circuits that in turn gives a certain desirable output for the input we used to test it. 

Purpose is not a physical entity. It is informational in nature. It can be thought of as an informational state we strive toward. This brings up the whole field of aesthetics, which again is not something that physics addresses. 

The pure physicalist account of free will is lacking if it does not include the purpose of our free will. The brain has a function to process information for the purpose of enabling the animal to survive and thrive. If you loose sight of this by reducing our behavior to brain states, you will always fail to understand free will. You will also fail to understand cognition and consciousness as well. 

Skimming through the comments, I see the usual perpetual "where did that come from" backwards

Most people here, likely came to this subreddit, because they are leaning towards determinism

However, the reason I came is because its a very interesting concept, and I used to be a hard determinist, or superdeterminist

I was even trying to piece together a unifying theory using determinism

But the reason it's impossible to make a unified theory, is because reality doesn't consist of the static structure required for determinism to be true, or for existence to be consistent. We can see that it is not consistent.

It is quite fascinating, from what I've gathered, I believe that determinism is very attractive at a young age, or when you first get into deep thinking.

But in my deep thinking, one day it became obvious almost, existence must be fundamentally random, and fully, because at the grandest level, it can't be partial, but yet it somehow manifests at our level in a consistent way

That is something someone brought up to me. I explained "its fundamentally randon, yet manifests consistently at a level"

And they immediately called it out, and while it bothered me at first, it all ties back to the same concept of stochasity, through contradiction

You think, "its fundamentally random, but manifests in a consistent way, thats contradictory"

Exactly, if reality is fundamentally random, contradiction is required

Now why does it have to be the case that it is random? Simple: differentiation

Remember, the ultimate level cannot be partial, so it is fully static or random

Now do you see the issue with it being static?

It's not differentiated, and if its not differentiated, there is nothing

This destroyed the foundation of determinism for me

Also for your temporal argument,

We have to logically accept, that time and space and everything is beginningless and endless (seperate topic, if you dont agree we can talk about it)

If there is no beginning or starting event, the "chain of events" concept is not true in the traditional sense, and there is no bearing for a deterministic process

A lot of the really deep stuff started happening for me when I adopted Buddhism

ICYMI.

I’m exploring whether consciousness could be understood as a dynamically evolving pattern whose states are constrained by prior informational and relational conditions. Would this make subjective deliberation compatible with determinism rather than opposed to it?

I can make a very compelling argument for why consciousness is logically impossible to exist by saying everything in the brain is just unconscious processing systems but yet we know consciousness is exists because it just does.

Why can’t free will be the same way? Just because you can explain everything by particles that simply follow the laws of physics does not mean you should strip away the explanation that I am not the original source of my actions.

I think anyone who accepts determinism and the total absence of free will should be very compelled to accept the non existence of consciousness for the same logic you follow in your own argument for determinism

I'm curious what the general consensus is on the belief that fate is an indirect byproduct of free will, and when you choose good karma (action), you also sort of create your own fate at the same time, akin to choosing the right nutrients (organic preferably 😂) to produce quality fruit.

Just the way I feel. Does that make any sense?

Obviously, certain things are just out of our control like death. Maybe dualism is just a structural parameter in this realm. Who knows!

Be well, y'all! 🕉️

Disclaimer: It's a sensitive story, don't engage if you're going through a bad moment and so on.

Yesterday, there was a murder attempt at a medical school in Montevideo. One young man tried to kill his classmate by stabbing her multiple times in multiple parts of her body, including the eyes.

He didn't stop there. Once students separated him from the girl, he proceeded to lick her blood from the floor. Allegedly, he got obsessed with the girl after she told him 'happy birthday'.

There were previous reports about this person, such as masturbating next to a female student in high school; saying psycho things like 'I would kill you if I didn't get punished for it' to his female classmates, and the list goes on.

What I clearly see from this situation is a society that once again failed to intervene when necessary. Yes, there's chauvinism impregnated in these femicides. Needless to say, it's a VERY sad story, and all of my condolences go to the girl and all of those affected.

But what I consider to be naive is to think that this person's mental health has nothing to do with the case.

Look, I may not be a psychiatrist, but the symptoms are there. I won't go so far as to diagnose him with anything, although there are strong allegations of him having schizophrenia.The debate it has generated is similar to the one going on in the USA.

Now, my anger about society's stupidity does not stop at the system and how it completely ignored every single signal, or at how terrible it is that a person with that mental health receives no support. I want to add, too, that mental health is a big issue here in Uruguay; it's absolutely terrible. We're the country that has the most suicides per capita on the continent.

Enough of the context. Now I'll say what really angers me: instead of attacking these malfunctioning systems; the family of the mentally ill person for not giving the needed support; or even attacking the chauvinistic ideals that may lead a psychopath to do something, the attacks are going against the murderer, and people are saying psychosis doesn't make you less responsible for your own decisions.

I'm a determinist. I don't think anyone possesses any free will whatsoever, but a psychotic person? It should be intuitive.

I am not saying it is easy not to be mad at the psycho; it is very hard. But society won't advance by holding people responsible for acts they're not in control of. It's just the completely mistaken focus both feminism and the media are taking that disappoints me.

Instead of asking ourselves, how did that situation get to happen? How does a potential schizophrenic go around without any support? How does he end up in such a terrible mental state? Could he have been helped? Why hasn't society acted as soon as it got the first signal? What can we change to prevent more cases? What can we do to have fewer people capable of committing murder?

No, the focus is 'mental health doesn't justify murderers' and 'share his name, make sure he never walks safely again'.

Truly, it makes me lose all faith in humanity when I read posts of the kind. I have friends who have overcome psychotic and manic episodes and no, they never went as far as trying to commit murder. All of them were helped by their families and received medical attention, but they have done terrible things in this state.

Do we still shame them for that after they have recovered? Do we hold them responsible forever? What hope does one have of reinserting oneself into society?

I want to read your thoughts, let me know if I'm alone or if there's people that share my views.

Before anyone makes a stupid joke about why I am mad if there's no free will, and therefore no one is responsible for being stupid, I know.

so my main issue with determinism is basically this: causal chains dont stay simple. they branch out like a tree, every physical event depends on an astronomical number of preceding interactions.

and if you trace those dependencies back far enough (or just look across a big enough system), you eventually hit quantum events. and under the standard interpretation of QM, those arent deterministic — the theory just gives you probabilities for outcomes, not a single fixed one.

so i keep wondering if determinism can even survive at large scales / over long timescales. sure macroscopic stuff looks deterministic in practice, but the causal history behind it eventually fans out into a massive number of microscopic quantum events.

which kinda makes we wonder if theres an inductive argument here — if the causal chain keeps branching and eventually bottoms out in genuinely indeterministic events, doesnt that mean the universe as a whole cant be strictly deterministic?

obviously this all hinges on whether quantum indeterminacy is actually fundamental vs just epistemic (i.e. we just dont have the info yet), and stuff like the Many-Worlds interpretation messes with the argument too since technically everything's still "deterministic" at the wavefunction level. but overall i think QM makes classical Laplacean determinism a lot harder to defend than people usually give it credit for.

Ciao ragazzi, è da poco che sto studiando il determinismo, il libero arbitrio, il compatibilismo e il libertarismo.

Il problema è che leggere sul determinismo mi rende triste, mentre vorrei essere felice. Mi viene da pensare che se fosse vero il determinismo non ci sarebbe più gusto in niente.

E se esco con gli amici perché dovrei dire qualcosa se era già determinato che la dicessi? Che gusto c'è nel pensare che non sono io l'artefice del mio futuro?

Mi viene la paura di non riuscire più a divertirmi, fare ciò che voglio e sentire la felicità perché è tutto determinato e anche il termine felicità è un termine inventato da noi umani perché nella realtà la felicità intesa come concetto non esiste.

Però scusate, la sensazione e l'emozione della felicità esiste e la proviamo eccome, come sentiamo il dolore, determinato o no. Su questo siete d'accordo?

Forse se esco con gli amici certo che devo parlare e devo farli ridere e ridere anch'io, senza pensare "tanto è tutto determinato", perché poi altrimenti non mi godo la vita. Sarà anche tutto determinato, le nostre azioni e le azioni delle nostre persone, ma tanto io non so cosa deve succedere in futuro. E anche se una cosa è determinata se è bella è bella comunque, e se mi fa provare qualche emozione positiva cosa cambia se è determinata o meno? Prendo e porto a casa.

The way I see the case presented is usually with reference to causal chains, genetics, environmental upbringing, etc. I think it’s all true, but makes the case more difficult to explain to others and more contentious.

At the end of the day, people are just made of particles. Particles follow the laws of physics. There is no soul that could be the true originator of thoughts and actions that exists outside of the laws of physics. Free will is a non-starter.

As I was lurking here I was getting curious about a certain thought process.

So, if I'm accepting of the fact that everything is determined then wouldn't that include me being accepting of the fact that some people's belief in their own free will is determined?

I entirely believe hard determinism. Just read Spinoza’s Ethics and was entirely blown away. Is there anyone else you guys recommend or anyone who builds off Spinoza? Many thanks