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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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I'm a fairly hardcore/radical determinist, and tend to agree that individuals shouldn't be held morally responsible for actions, any more than a hammer is morally responsible for driving a nail. However, that does not mean people should be free from consequence. There are plenty of reasons - even as a hardcore determinist - to hold people to account for their actions, either as a social corrective mechanism, public safety, deterrent, or personal sanity.
As for getting their actions to align with your morals, that's a more complicated question that depends on the type of person they are.
This is a great answer.
Just like someone's immoral actions are preordained, the consequences are too.
How does a hardcore determinist believe in “shouldn’t?” Doesn’t that imply that people have the ability to change their behavior?
My answer changes depending on your meaning but:
Of course. My brain is constantly updating and improving itself. I'm just not ultimately in control of how that process happens. Though that does not mean that I should stop living. I can still experience and enjoy my life, and 'choose' to improve it. It's just that the I that made that choice is a consequence of my brain calculating optimal paths based on a myriad of factors: genetics, culture, circumstance, biological drives, personal history, drugs, etc.
Let’s say you see someone playing in traffic, and tell them they shouldn’t be doing that. They respond, “I can’t not do it, because my brain already made the decision to do it, so I have no choice but to do it.”
Is this person correct? Or do they have the ability to just follow your advice and stop playing? Do they have the ability to ignore your advice and keep playing? If they have the ability to do both, then to what degree can we say that your advice is determining their choice? How can we say that choice is determined if we can also say that they should make a different choice?
We are constantly making and updating our choices in response to new information. Just because the brain decided upon one course of action at one point in time does not preclude it from changing course in the future. That's just a new choice. All available information is taken into consideration at all points in time.
If our brain can make these choices, then how can we say it is determined to make a specific choice?
By determined, I mean it follows a logical set of rules, not that it is set on a specific action. The idea would be that it was determined to make all those choices because everything else is also following the rules of the universe. Just as it was determined that they play in traffic, so was it determined for me to tell them to stop, just as it was determined for them to listen. They didn't choose to change their mind, they were always going to change their mind.
That’s what raises my question of when we say someone “should” do something. If what you describe is true, there are not any better or worse choices or actions, there are just actions that are consequences of a previous action.
I’m not sure if you’re familiar of Jelle’s Marble Races, but the general conceit is that marbles are sent down a track or through obstacles while a sports commentator analyzes the race as if observing human competitors. The humor arises from the cognitive dissonance of talking about strategy, risky decisions, athleticism, etc. while the audience is fully aware that these are inanimate objects being acted upon by mechanical forces.
Likewise, talking about what decisions should or shouldn’t do with a worldview that these actions are simply things that happen due to more complex interactions of cause and effect that we can’t immediately see causes a similar sense of cognitive dissonance for me. It seems that human minds and language have evolved to experience a world where our actions do have meaning and that we don’t really experience them in a way that feels deterministic to us.
You brought up the brain a vat thought experiment in another reply, and the answer is similar: even if we are brains in a vat, that’s not how we experience the world. And we don’t really experience the world as a deterministic one, either.
To clarify: are you saying that there is a “you” who is a separate entity from your brain (and the rest of your body?)
Do you see it as your fingers are typing a reply and you’re just watching them do it on their own? You wouldn’t say that you’re the one typing?
I believe consciousness is a result of processes of the brain, and the brain is a very complex machine. It's hard to say anything too concretely beyond that because I don't really understand how it works. I live as though the brain and my consciousness are in perfect sync, but I'm unsure how true that is.
There are, for example, experiments where it can be shown that decisions are made before we are consciously aware that we have made them. Others show that severing a nerve between the hemispheres of our brain can result in two independent consciousnesses. Who can say where I end and my brain begins?
Your brain is you, though, just like your hands are you. Whether there’s a lag between the time that imaging detects you made a decision and you say you made one does not change the fact that you’re the one making the decision.
That's one way of seeing things, and I respect that viewpoint, but I disagree. I primarily view myself as my consciousness; everything else is secondary. How do you know you aren't a brain in a vat?
I’m a fallibilist: I don’t believe we can know anything for certain. The best we can do is base propositions off contingent statements: “If what I see is reliable, then what I see in the mirror is not a brain in a vat.”
A brain in a vat is not a very useful starting axioms, so I have no reason to give it serious consideration. By contrast, while taking the general accuracy of my own senses as axiomatic eventually leads me to conclude they can be fallible (example: hallucinations,) it is nonetheless a way more useful axiom for deriving a base of contingent knowledge.
The person making the claim has to advance the evidence. The default is the assumption that the way the universe presents itself is the way it is. If you want me to consider this possibility find supporting evidence for it.
Also we have evidence against that model.
Sure, but this is still an assumption I would need to agree to - though obviously a productive one - not necessarily true. The only thing I can know is my experience.
This isn't particularly useful beyond explaining why I view my consciousness as primary and hands secondary or tertiary or something. The brain is tricky because again, I don't know where it ends and my consciousness begins.
Incorrect. You can easily be deceived. The primary is physical reality that is the only thing that remains regardless of what you think. I have more evidence that the real world exists than I do that you are a thinking mind.
Descartes ruined philosophy. Reality exists everything else we should question.
If your perception is subject to failure, so to is the evidence, no matter how convincing. So yes, we act upon the assumption that reality exists. We both agree with this.
But that doesn't mean it is true. And all I'm saying is for this very narrow point of what I care most about, Descartes does have a point. I care more about my mind than my foot. I mean, maybe you can think of a better way to frame the argument because I doubt you even disagree. If you have a gun and you are forced to shoot yourself anywhere on your body, would you choose your foot or your brain?
The better counter to me would be to prove external value. Would I sacrifice myself for someone else? If I believe reality doesn't exist, the answer should presumably be no. If I believe reality does exist, the answer could be yes. Or alternatively, shooting myself in the foot suggests I believe in a causal relationship within reality towards shooting my brain and losing consciousness, which I shouldn't necessarily believe.
But even then, it's not that I disbelieve reality, it's just that I can't know for certain what's real outside my mind, so there's not really any contradiction between acting as if it is real and being uncertain if it is.
All this is doesn't matter anyway: the point is less you could be a brain in a vat, but rather if you were a brain in a vat, would you be any less you? I don't think so.
I have more evidence that I am a thinking mind than that I do that the real world exists. There's no point arguing this point it won't go anywhere.
The endocrine system. What do you think cause you to get horny, to get excited, to be afraid, to know to seek out sleep?
You have very little evidence for that. You have as much as you want that the real world exists.
So..um what drives the hammer?
What drives the thing that drives the hammer? What drives the thing that drives the thing that drives the hammer? What drives the thing that drives the thing that drives the thing that drives the hammer?
Physical processes out of our control.
Well, I blame the nails. They're just asking for it.
I am genuinely and in good faith interested what you think about quantum mechanics and that there seems to be an element of true randomness there.
I was pretty much a determinist until an actual physicist that I know and respect told me that he is totally convinced that there is stuff in quantum mechanics that just cannot be predetermined.
And if anything can be undeterminable then by influencing other things there would exist true randomness and then a fully deterministic world cannot exist in my eyes.
But I am very willing to learn more if you know a good counter-argument since I always thought determinism is quite an elegant view of the world.
I just cannot follow it if I am not convinced it is true.
Randomness doesn't really save traditional free will. A robot that selects its actions by rolling dice is not any more "free to choose" than a robot that selects its actions according to a deterministic program. There isn't any free-will juice that gets introduced by adding randomness.
Your "free will" is the process by which you select actions. For humans, that's a bunch of physics and chemistry happening in your brain; it receives influences from your senses, your body, and its own self-awareness (i.e. its model of you, your actions, tendencies, etc.). Whether that process depends closely on QM, or is boringly classical, doesn't control how "self-determined" it is.
I am not sure you replied to the right comment since I never mentioned free will at all but was more interested in how a person believing in determinism handles the current state of science that at least suggests the existence of true randomness.
In my eyes true randomness contradicts a deterministic world, but I am interested to learn more from anyone who is more educated on this topic.
If I understand you correctly I agree with you though that what might be called free will is what happens in an individuals brain when they make a decision.
The discussion whether this decision making process in the brain can be truly free is a very interesting one, but not the one I wanted to have.
My personal layman's opinion is that my brain has enough uniqueness to it that the decisions I make are individually mine and there are other unique people that make their own individual choices.
If those choices and decisions are truly free matters less to me as long as they are truly individual.
I’m not the other person, but I think you might be confusing the term “determinism.” I think you might also have a bit of an over-enthusiastic understanding of quantum mechanics, which is a very common problem when people have QM explained in lay person terms I’m not going to get into the QM stuff because I’m a biologist and not a physicist, and I think your world just became more interesting with your new information. I’d just say hold off on the conclusions until you read a bit more, and start sliding towards the actual science books rather than the pop science books as you get your feet under you. You’ll have a different appreciation once you can read an advanced undergraduate textbook on modern physics.
Determinism as used here means behavioral determinism. There is significant evidence that a large number of our actions and reactions aren’t thought through, but rather are “automatic” responses. In fact, some neuroimaging work on decision-making has indicated that we reach a conclusion and then reverse-justify it by thinking we’re thinking about it. My subconscious mind has already decided to buy the bagel, but my conscious mind is still talking itself into it.
Again, people can take that kind of thing to an unjustified extreme. I think free will exists in a limited sense, but that it is highly constrained. In this case (the original question, not the person to whom you’re replying) is using their own misunderstanding of behavioral determinism to excuse their misbehavior. It’s a self-indulgent philosophy that you can probably pick apart if you really wanted to spend the time and effort in making them meticulously explain every step and aspect of their position, but it’s probably easier to just drop the person or to deal with them while remembering they’re possibly clinically psychotic, but almost definitely at least an asshole.
First off, thank you for the detailed response.
I recognize that you know more about this than me so I am happy to learn.
There are a couple of points in your post though that I want to reply to.
That is explicitly not what I want to talk about.
I might have misworded my first post or misunderstood op but I understand determinism as the view that with perfect information over any system it can be predetermined what will happen in the future of this system. Wikipedia says: Determinism is the philosophical view that events are completely determined by previously existing causes.
I thought that to be the case for a long time.
If I could control all the variables I could roll a die to a 6 every time or at least tell the outcome as soon as it's thrown if I know everything else there is to know.
I also recognize that my understanding of modern physics is minimal at best.
But a physicist friend of mine told me that there is stuff that is truly random, so in gross simplification if I throw the exact same die in the exact same way under the exact same conditions it could still show different results making it impossible to predetermine the result.
If that is the case I don't think this world is a system where it is possible to determine the future even with perfect information.
And maybe you are right that my knowledge is just too superficial to hold a real opinion in the debate between determinism and indeterminism, but I also don't really have a horse in this race.
Just if you were to ask me as a layman I would think indeterminism to be more plausible given the (grossly simplified) information above.
The OP that I replied to described himself as a determinist, so I was just curious of their response.
But now I got a lot of other input to think about so I am happy either way.
Again, none if this is meant to attack you and I realize to someone more informed this might just seem as random rambling, but I was just honestly interested so thank you again for the response.
One interpretation would be Many Worlds; that is, every quantum possibility is real in its own multiversal branch. So, to assign moral agency you would need to show that I chose the world I'm in now, over some other version of my life in which different choices were made. Although, I'm not certain you even need to go that far: I have no idea to what degree quantum randomness can actually affect our choices. But, in any case, that too would be out of our control.
There are layers to the universe. While you can't predict everything you don't usually need to. The object is dropped and therefore it falls. If you zoomed in deep enough you would see the chaos that is going on in the subatomic but the object still falls all the same.
Not being able to predict everything does not mean we can predict nothing.