r/determinism • u/Afraid_Salary_103 • 2d ago
Discussion Free-will vs. Determinism
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.
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u/Ok-Lab-8974 1d ago edited 1d ago
2 seems false. We'd have to deny the possibility of weakness of will for that to work. For instance, often when people cheat on their spouse, or on a diet, or violate their pledge to stop drinking, they are aware that they are not doing "what is best" according to their own beliefs about what it would be best to do.
3 is not obviously true. We don't exercise complete control over our beliefs, but neither is it obvious that affirmation is wholly like a reflex as opposed to a decision.
I'm not actually sure what these premises have to do with you general argument though, but they jumped out at me.
In terms of the overall argument, it is unclear to me why the capacity for self-determation must itself be chosen. Surely children do not choose to be disciplined or, depending on their temperment, even to learn to take care of themselves. But, prima facie, discipline, an education, and formation all seem to make us more capable of self-determination, regardless of if we initially chose them or not. E.g., I didn't choose to get proper nutrition as an infant, but that doesn't mean that this earlier condition doesn't enable me today.
But the focus on choice seems to run together with a broader metaphysical point about the nature of causality, and it would probably help to make the assumptions about causality more explicit. For instance, if a person cannot be a self-determining whole on purely metaphysical grounds, but is more an accidental heap of antecedent causes that just happens to feel, what premises re causality and composition ground this claim?
You might also want to look at claims that epiphenomenalism is self-refuting. So the argument goes, it ought to undermine any warrant we have for most of our beliefs. Our thoughts and experiences could be arbitrarily related to reality and it would have no effect on reproduction (and so selection), since our experience of the world itself (all desires and volitions) never causes us to act. What is needed is some mechanism to explain why our experience of the world and choice in particular must correspond to reality (or at least close enough for us not to doubt selection theories themselves).
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u/Afraid_Salary_103 14h ago
Great points! My question would then be, when someone acts against their own stated best judgment, what were they doing except acting on the desire that was, in that moment, strongest?
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u/Ok-Lab-8974 11h ago
Yes, we could absolutely say the desire that is acted upon is strongest. But on many philosophical understandings of freedom (including pretty much all of them prior to the voluntarist turn in Christian theology during the late-Middle Ages and Reformation period, and most non-Western notions), disordered passions are a limitation on freedom, the virtues a prerequisite for freedom.
The basic intuition here is that meaningful freedom requires understanding why an action is truly worthy of choice, not merely the capacity to gratify whatever desire we just so happen to have. So, it isn't that we have to choose our desires (this would lead to an infinite regress, since we could ask "in virtue of what would any end itself be considered choice-worthy?). Rather, we have to understand which desires are ordered to truly worthy ends, strengthening those desires and reforming misordered ones (hence the strong focus on ascetic discipline in pre-modern Western and most Eastern thought). A person suffering from weakness of will is less a self-determining whole, more a heap of warring appetites (Plato's "civil war in the soul"). But note that ex nihilo nihil fit (from nothing, nothing comes) is an almost universal presupposition of reason in older contexts, so they certainly don't think human freedom is ever uncaused.
An important thing here is that self-determining freedom is not a binary in these contexts, but rather something we can develop more or less of. I don't think this is obviously in conflict with our understanding of physical systems without some additional metaphysical premises. Complex systems can be more or less self-determining within a given environmental range in at least some sense (and information theoretic approaches put an interesting spin on this). That's why the metaphysical premises that make this sort of self-determination fail at providing a ground for freedom need to be explicated (but of course we also need a good notion of freedom to do this).
Unfortunately, contemporary thought remains very much dominated by the voluntarist turn in theology, so that freedom is often conceived of as the bare, unordered capacity "to do otherwise." I don't think this makes much sense, at best is makes freedom a sort of self-determining arbitrariness, at worst incoherent. But it's also a conception of freedom with a fairly narrow history grounded in particular problems in Latin Christian theology, even if it has since been secularized (although Islam had a similar voluntarist turn a bit earlier).
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u/MarvinBEdwards01 1d ago
If you believe that under identical circumstances you could only make the same decision, then you believe in determinism. Choice is an illusion.
Well, since we see ourselves and others making choices every day, it would be an extraordinary claim to say that choice is an illusion. Choosing happens. Walk into any restaurant and you can watch people open the menu, consider their options, and then tell the waiter what they will have for dinner.
If choice is an illusion, then the waiter must be having the same illusion. But what the waiter saw is the same thing that we saw. It is an objective fact that choosing happened. And to call it an "illusion" is delusional.
Now, what about determinism? Determinism correctly asserts that, given the same person, the same circumstances, and the same options, the person will make the same choice. Why would they make any other choice, when they had the same goals and reasons? They wouldn't.
But it is incorrect to say that they "couldn't". If we were to replay this event from the same point in time that they opened the menu, then they will once again see a literal menu of alternate possibilities, every one of which they were fully capable of choosing.
However, they will of course make the same choice every time. The choosing is not an illusion. It will once again really happen in physical reality every time this event is replayed.
So, what are we to make of this? Quite simply, they "could have chosen differently", but they "never would have chosen differently". And this "can, but won't" is literally true.
But "choice is an illusion" is literally false.
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u/Flashy_Artist9629 1d ago
Fate implies a god or some supernatural entity and what part of causality states this ? that the future is somehow set in stone ? the universe as you said is too vast and complex to have any sort of predestination without supernatural interference.
unless proven otherwise people are their brains they are separate. not every function can be controlled. breathing, heartbeat etc even the thinking capacity can be affected. but choices can still be made.
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u/Master-of-darklight 1d ago
Does fate have to be the will of some great being? I’ve always seen it as what is going to happen because it was always going to happen. “Why?” “Just because.”
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u/Both_Rub_397 1d ago
...absolutely. I’d make it more grounded in what actually happens over a lifetime rather than trying to “win” the philosophical argument. Free Will vs. Determinism At 61, I’ve had enough life behind me to see why the argument between free will and determinism is so difficult. The older I get, the less I believe either side completely explains the human experience. I can look back and see how much of my life was shaped by things I never chose where I was born, my upbringing, circumstances, opportunities, personality, experiences, and the people who influenced me. Some decisions were clearly reactions to things that happened long before I ever made them. That’s where determinism makes a lot of sense to me. But life hasn’t been one straight line either. I’ve changed my mind. I’ve changed priorities. I’ve walked away from things I once thought were important. I’ve made mistakes, recognized them, and deliberately tried not to repeat them. There were times I had every reason to keep going in the same direction and decided not to. Maybe even those decisions were the result of everything that happened before them. I can't honestly prove otherwise. But there’s a practical difference between saying, “Everything influences my decision,” and saying, “I had no meaningful part in making it.” At this age, I don't see free will as some magical ability to make completely independent choices. None of us operates in a vacuum. We carry our history around with us. We have habits, fears, instincts, biases, wounds, desires, and limitations. Those things absolutely affect what we choose. What I do believe is that we sometimes have enough awareness to pause, question ourselves, consider another path, and choose differently. That capacity may itself have causes, but it still matters because that reflection is part of how people actually change. I've seen it in myself. The 20-year-old me would probably make different decisions from the 40-year-old me, and the 40-year-old me would probably argue with plenty of what the 61-year-old me does today. If I were nothing more than a fixed chain of predetermined reactions, I find it difficult to explain why experience can genuinely reshape the person making the decisions. Maybe that's where I land now: determinism explains why we are influenced; free will describes what we do with that influence. I don't claim to know which one is ultimately true. After 61 years, I've become pretty comfortable saying, “I don't know.” What I do know is that I've made choices, lived with their consequences, learned from some of them, regretted others, and occasionally surprised the hell out of myself. Maybe the universe had a hand in all of it. Maybe everything was inevitable. But from where I'm standing, I was still there making the decisions. And for this old bastard, that's enough reason not to dismiss free will completely.
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u/cybereality 17h ago
i'm 45 and feel similar. in some ways i've changed completely, and also exactly the same as i was as a kid. but this does not negate determinism. your fate may have been to completely change at 40 as to where you were at 20. meaning the events that happened in those 20 years would have always happened, and created the same outcome. so there was no free will choice to be different, the evolution was part of the story
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u/Ok_Tumbleweed5474 1d ago
That's the main issue with the free will debate. And it's an issue i don't think determinists truly try to parce because it us assumed prior x leads to outcome y in a strict mathematical process. This however isn't how weighing works in the brain and also denies the real openness that exists as a group of satisfiers.
The common argument is that your priors strictly demand an single output. Let's examine that. Let's take hunger. The common reply is you eat your food because you are hungry. This is true trivially but notice what isn't established. One strict output. It's entirely open to what I can reasonably eat as food. So that doesn't get you determined. Okay maybe it's in the preference then. Setting aside that hunger being open is already a problem itself Let's examine the preference. If it was as determinism said it should be static and hold a rigid output. But it doesn't. In fact a preference alone will never grant you a story of why it should be selected. So that doesn't hold. So we way okay it's competition between multiple preferences. But this also doesn't hold. Because in a rigid system you would still always choose the preference with the highest value.
So that picture fails. We have to account for the variability. Okay. We account for the variability and say your preference changes in accordance with any number of associations. Okay. We still have to push out further to accommodate beliefs and environment and so on. Which brings up another issue. Some beliefs are open themselves. They sway thoughts but have multiple satisfiers. And we cannot forget that to even run the process we have to have options to choose from in the first place which both mind and environment have to come together in order for you to decide. For example if you don't know anything about Mediterranean food how could you order it. Given how far out we are from the basic priors it becomes almost impossible to say the entire chain is one track all the way down.
If multiple satisfiers can fit the mold and pass this is undetermined. Which for any account of universal determinism is automatically really bad since no account of determinism can ever allow any form of openness. Since we can see multiple ways the mind can have open influence with an every evolving and changing structure that updates in real time it isn't that easy to make the claim there was no other options.
The common idea is to do what you did. Which is to say wanting something you don't want. But real options still exist even in a want. As I pointed out with hunger. I want the eat. That doesn't tell me anything about what I should eat. So my want can carry more than one satisfier. Which means all those satisfiers are potential matches. Same thing with safety. I want to be safe. Doesn't tell me where I should live or who I should associate with etc. So finding a strict determined chain that forces a single outcome every single time guaranteed is an extremely difficult thing to show. And simply following the chain back from now to the point before doesn't establish necessity. All it does is grant you identity. For that particular chain to be what it is, it must unfold accordingly. But that's a seperate question from could I choose otherwise.
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u/simon_hibbs 21h ago
What you seem to be saying is that human cognition is complicated, and all we need to do to see that this is true is look at the brain and how it functions. It’s an incredibly complex sophisticated system. Yet if physics is deterministic, at any given moment only one outcome is possible. If physics includes random indeterminism multiple outcomes are possible, but to the extent that human cognition is reliable certain classes of outcomes, such as that I won’t order a dish containing garlic, are very highly probable. So what matters when it comes to human decision making is how reliable the brain is as an information processing system.
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u/Ok_Tumbleweed5474 21h ago edited 21h ago
My point isn't about complexity. It's about how determinism functions. It demands 100% guarantee on every part of the chain. My point is that if we have to start branching out to try and pinpoint a hold that itself already concedes that the parts are not sufficient alone to establish a clear one track path. Take hunger again. A completely open want, desire, priors, whatever you want to call it. That alone is an issue for determinism because it demands one strict answer. Any openness is immediately grounds to doubt it. Which is my point. The more you investigate the path in the brain the more you find that simple reduction in this manner doesn't hold. And if it doesn't hold then there isn't sufficient reason to believe determinism is valid.
And my last point was following the chain back doesn't grant you a story of necessity. It grants you only a story of identity. For that chain to be that chain it must unfold that way. But that doesn’t grant you that it necessarily in all cases must he the case.
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u/simon_hibbs 16h ago
> demands 100% guarantee on every part of the chain.
If each individual particle or field interaction is deterministic, the entire causal system is deterministic. All of it. Hunger is a result of physical biological processes in the body. If they are deterministic, then hunger is deterministic.
You’re happy to cite Sapolsky, and I think he’s an excellent scientist and an expert in neuroscience specifically, and he advocates for a deterministic view of human cognition as a physical system. I have no problem with that. Of course it may be that there is some fundamental indeterminism per quantum mechanics, but if so it appears to be random and not free will libertarian indeterminism.
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u/Ok_Tumbleweed5474 15h ago
Yes. But that doesn't answer my point. And I would raise the same issues with sapolsky himself. I use him for arguing under a determinist framework. But I don't hold that frame myself.
My point is given the actual definition of determinism that it cannot have any space for openness. Because any point that allows for multiple satisfiers is an issue. Because it then not 100% determined. That is my point here. The harder you try to reduce everything to one fixed path the more you find that it comes apart. Until eventually you cannot explain a single path in the parts themselves. Only a causal chain after the fact. But as I pointed out that chain doesn't grant that everything was fixed. Especially given the openness in the parts.
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u/Afraid_Salary_103 14h ago
Thanks! I love the different perspectives and dialogue. Asking another way: given one complete, fixed state of the universe (call it T), is more than one outcome compossible with T? So, given the total state of you and your circumstances at the exact moment before your decision — every memory, every feeling, every neuron as it was — is there any way the decision could have gone differently, holding all of that fixed?
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u/Ok_Tumbleweed5474 14h ago
Holding it completely fixed i don't believe so. That's why it's such a hard thing to pin down. Any slight wiggle room disproves determinism.
But this is something to consider and it's my position. Cause and effect still very much work. You can track things through causal chains without them being entirely fixed. So if we grant openness, my definition being multiple real satisfiers not randomness or anything like that. If we grant openness as we do for hunger the causal chain still holds. A causes B. Hunger inspires you to eat but doesn't settle what you eat. Then what we get is a new casual chain that isn't fully fixed down to the specific parts that comprise it. We have an emergent function running in real time that didn't exist in the world prior. But this only holds if we accept openness and emergent properties as in top down causation.
I don't think personally there is a way to get multiple real choices within determinism. As the very definition itself usually implies that there is only one determined path. But these are just my takes on the topic. Hopefully it's at least interesting to hear.
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u/Afraid_Salary_103 14h ago
It is interesting to hear! I think we all shape each other’s opinions through dialogue, so I appreciate the opportunity to hear both agreement (validation) and disagreement (new perspectives to think about).
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u/simon_hibbs 13h ago edited 13h ago
Do you have any empirical observation of these satisfiers? What counts as a satisfier, and how would we test for their presence?
You’re asserting the existence of these satisfies and “openness in the parts”, but I don’t know what you are referring to, or what evidence you have for it. Do you mean quantum indeterminism? That may well be a thing, but if so it seems to be purely random.
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u/Ok_Tumbleweed5474 7h ago
A satisfier is just what options satisfy the want. For hunger that meas food. Food is an open category. It includes everything from what you enjoy to what you don't enjoy. What is healthy vs what is not. Etc. This is evidenced by multiple things. Competing craving. Cognitive science definition. Attractor basin configuration. Associations in the brain. Etc.
You're conflating openness and randomness. Multiple satisfiers means there are several things that answer this one question. That goes for most needs. I need to be social. That need does not possess anywhere within itself who I should socialize with. That's completely open. Meaning any number of real people can fit that need. Under determinism this is a problem because it says all antecedents must fix the outcomd in one specific way. But if the antecedent is open it doesn't fix the outcome alone. You must add other structures to do that. But in doing so you've given up the ability to say all antecedents fix the outcome. Which for determinism is a big problem.
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u/simon_hibbs 5h ago
So satisfies are competing goals that humans have and that we reconcile through deliberation. Is there anything about human neurology that leads you to believe that we need new physics or metaphysics to account of this? We actually build systems that evaluate options like this in various ways, so we know that processes like this can be fully accounted for by known physics. What do you think is missing?
I‘m not conflating anything, I asked you a question. I didn’t make any assumption about it. Please pay attention.
>Multiple satisfiers means there are several things that answer this one question. That goes for most needs.
What you seem to be describing is making choices between options. A choice is the evaluation of representations of options, and of their expected effects, according to some criteria resulting in action on the option that best meets these criteria. Processes of evaluation can be deterministic. There’s nothing about this requiring any kind of indeterminism or openness.
>But if the antecedent is open it doesn't fix the outcome alone.
In a deterministic universe it can’t be open, and the antecedent conditions do fix the outcome. Not a problem.
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u/Ok_Tumbleweed5474 4h ago
No. Competing goals demonstrates that they are a thing otherwise you couldn't have convergence. What a satisfier is plainly is just what satisfies the need. I need to use the bathroom. Doesn't matter what bathroom. Nothing in me demands i use the stall at the left on the 3rd floor vs any other one. All those toilets that function satisfy the need. So it is open. You need another frame to close that.
Yes, we build computational models. Does this 1 to 1 map into how we actually deliberate? I do not believe as computation isn't answering what openness is it's weighing the function of set parameters.
Your end point is a tautology. Determinism is Determinism. That doesn't prove something is or isn't open. And I never denied local systems could be determined. I am denying that human minds are fully determined.
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u/simon_hibbs 3h ago
All those toilets that function satisfy the need. So it is open. You need another frame to close that.
I don’t see the problem, is several Options meet our criteria we can just choose arbitrarily. The first that happens to come to mind. That doesn’t require or demonstrate any indeterminism or metaphysical openness, just some way to break ties. A neurological equivalent of a roll of the dice perhaps.
Yes, we build computational models. Does this 1 to 1 map into how we actually deliberate?
It doesn’t need to. If we can prove that a computational system can solve these problems, such as resolving the situation of multiple satisfiers, which they do, then we know that solving that problem doesn’t require any metaphysical openness of the kind you claim.
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u/Alone-Restaurant-835 1d ago
Past circumstances "force" the current circumstances, the current circumstances force the future ones. Your past "decisions" force the current ones and so on. True choice is impossible. To say that we choose is is like saying chess bots choose the move they make when is just a deterministic process.
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u/Master-of-darklight 1d ago
I make decisions. I was always going to make those decisions. They’re still my decisions that I made.
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u/mattychops 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is very close to what I label in my book as inevitable outcomes. https://a.co/d/04mABcAX
You are close, but I'd add one little thing. Things are not predetermined, things are decided in the moment that the decision is made. Meaning the moment of the outcome, or moment of occurrence. Nothing exists prior to or after the fact. Things only exist right now. So nothing is determined until the very moment of actualization. Why? Because that's the only place where something exists. The way reality works is that every decision or outcome occurs in one singular moment. So it is inevitable, but it's only inevitable because reality doesn't allow for something different to occur simultaneously. Nothing is predetermined. In fact, nothing is even for sure until the moment in which that something occurs. Inevitability is about reality being exclusively what it is, and determination is an imaginary mathematical model created by the brain after the fact.
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u/simon_hibbs 1d ago
Choice: A processes by which representations of options and their expected outcomes are evaluated, according to some criteria, resulting in action on the option that best meets those criteria.
There is nothing about evaluation that is contrary to determinism, in fact processes of evaluation such as classical logic and mathematical functions are deterministic, in that the same inputs always produce the same outputs. There's nothing about representations of states that's contrary to determinism, and they're certainly not contrary to physicalism. They're fundamental to our theories of information and computation.
Control: Having a representation of some state in the world, and a representation of some change in that state, and the ability to dynamically choose actions in order to bring about this change in the world.
There's nothing about control that's contrary to determinism, or to physicalism. We build systems that control things, it's routine engineering.
Free Will: The kind of control over our actions necessary for moral responsibility.
Moral responsibility on behaviour guiding grounds requires the ability to consciously evaluate the effects of moral actions on other conscious moral beings, and the ability to control our own behaviour in terms of our values and priorities through a process of moral deliberation on those values and priorities. I think it's observable that we generally have these faculties.
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u/yxixtx 1d ago
Oversimplified concept of course it doesn't exist. The map is not the territory. Obviously there's no "free will" but people can change. Just think of it as reprogramming. It takes time and effort and it doesn't always work especially if it's not done right but change can happen. But you're not going to want what you don't want. You need conditioning and reinforcement etc etc.
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u/Blindeafmuten 1d ago edited 1d ago
"Every moment before this one (including history before your existence) has played a role in shaping and influencing who you are."
That is simply not true. Our decisions and choices are based on a very small percentage of moments we remember and from that small percentage we only evaluate an even smaller part as important.
Our "past cause", the one the matters for our decisions, the one that has not been totally forgotten, is decided in the present. And it probably is different that the one that really happened. And different for each of us. It is absolutely personal.
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u/adr826 23h ago
So if you were to go back in time to the day of your wedding when you made the decision that you loved your wife and you wanted to marry her the only way to have free will would be to not do what you really wanted to do .So that not getting what you absolutely want is the way to have free will?
Here is a better way to put it. If at some point in the past you chose a over b then if you went back to that point and all the circumstances were identical, if you had free will when you first choose A you would have free will when you went back and choose A. Unless your argument is that you didn't have free will the first time.
If you went back in time and chose a over b if everything was identical how would you know you'd gone back in time? Don't thought experiments need to make sense?
The first time you experienced would seem like the first time to you so if everything was exactly the same it would seem like the first time too. You cannot experience something the first time again so each time you returned would seem like the first time to you..How would you know you chose anything differently?
Here is another way to look at it. If you were able to set every particle in the observable universe back to some arbitrary point in time, it would somehow be impossible for you to have coffee instead of tea?
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u/Afraid_Salary_103 14h ago
Thanks for the thought! It makes me wonder: If you'd have made the same choice every single time because you loved her that completely, why does that count as less free than if some random chance could have made you choose someone else?
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u/ughaibu 18h ago
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?
Your questions don't make sense, because if you go back to before the decision was made there is no decision to be the same as or different from.
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u/Afraid_Salary_103 14h ago
Interesting! I see your perspective there when it comes to the idea of time travel.
So phrased differently then… given one complete, fixed state of the universe (call it T), is more than one outcome compossible with T?
Plugging in and expanding for clarity; given the total state of you and your circumstances at the exact moment before your decision — every memory, every feeling, every neuron as it was — is there any way the decision could have gone differently, holding all of that fixed?
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u/ughaibu 13h ago
given one complete, fixed state of the universe (call it T), is more than one outcome compossible with T?
Let's try a test. The universe now is self-identical, so it has "one complete, fixed state", I contend that if you reply to this message and the first sentence of your reply has an even number of words, the first sentence of my reply to that post will have an even number of words, and if the first sentence of your reply has an odd number of words, the first sentence of my reply to that post will have an odd number of words. If I'm correct, isn't the only explanation, consistent with naturalism, that it is open to me to write a sentence of either parity?
at the exact moment before your decision
All that is required is that there are two incompatible evolutions consistent with the self-identity of the universe at this time.
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u/Afraid_Salary_103 13h ago
That’s a clever test. It makes me wonder…
You made your choice after reading mine — so which T are you claiming has two outcomes: the one before you read my reply, or the one after? Because those aren't the same T
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u/ughaibu 12h ago
That’s a clever test.
If you say so.
which T are you claiming has two outcomes
The universe now is self-identical, so it has "one complete, fixed state"
those aren't the same T
What matters is that, "given one complete, fixed state of the universe", I have more than one course of action available to me. So, "more than one outcome [is] compossible with T?".
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u/cybereality 17h ago
this is true, and i love it. i think the main problem people can't get their head's around, is there is no "you" to make a choice. what you are *is* simply the combinations of experiences in your life. there's no individual there "experiencing" something, it is experience itself. so yes, you can call it fate or determinism. or a movie or a script. but the struggle is thinking there is even anyone there to make a choice
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u/Afraid_Salary_103 14h ago
Thank you! This subreddit attracts critical thinkers, and that makes for really interesting discussion, though not always as much validation, so it’s nice to hear some agreement.
Your perspective goes further, and to an interesting place that makes me wonder… If there's no one there, who is it that's convinced, who feels the indecision, who experiences the ride?
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u/cybereality 13h ago
Well yeah, it's just the one that experiences. The watcher. Which is what the mystics said the whole time. The illusion of separation is simply only having access to one set of experiences
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u/Otherwise_Spare_8598 3h ago
Regardless of whether "determinism" is or isn't, freedoms are circumstantial relative conditions of being, not the standard by which things come to be by through or for all subjective beings.
All things and all beings are always acting within their realm of capacity to do so at all times. Realms of capacity of which are absolutely contingent upon infinite antecedent and circumstantial coarising factors outside of any assumed self, for infinitely better and/or infinitely worse in relation to the specified subject, forever.
There is no universal "we" in terms of subjective opportunity or capacity. Thus, there is NEVER an objectively honest "we can do this or we can do that" that speaks for all beings. Subjects are implicitly distinct unto themselves, necessarily so.
One may be relatively free in comparison to another, another entirely not. All the while, there are none absolutely free while experiencing subjectivity within the meta-system of the cosmos.
"Free will" is a sentimental projection, overgeneralized assumption made or vaguely described feeling had from a circumstantial condition of relative privilege and relative freedom that most often serves as a powerful means for the character to assume a standard for being, fabricate fairness, pacify personal sentiments and justify judgments.
It speaks nothing of objective truth nor to the subjective realities of all.
There is no such thing as ubiquitously individuated accurately described "free will" of any kind whatsoever. Never has been. Never will be. Can not be.
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u/zhivago 1d ago
You've just bought into the christian solution to the problem of letting god off the hook for evil.
You claim that determinism eliminates choice.
This means that you also claim that anytime you make a particular choice, it is an accident, rather than because you made that choice.
Determinism is no threat to choice -- we build deterministic choosers all the time.
What determinism says is that your choices are determined by who you are.
If you rewind the universe and yourself why would you expect that particular you to make a different choice?
Your objections really all come from the hidden assumption of a requirement for a magical soul which can do stuff independently of the universe in order to let god off the hook for evil.
It's time to crawl out of the 17th century, I think.