Still being a determinist

youtu.be/877ivBuT7Hs

>>still being a determinist
>What's your excuse?
The course of action that would lead to my neurons firing in the exact way to produce this sentence was set into play 14 billion years ago.

thats alot of assumptions, my dude

Meh, I was asked for an excuse so gave one.

I'm basically taking a step back in logic to appeal to reasonableness. I think everyone would agree the degree of choices we have is limited, if not predetermined. Because our purview of choices are predetermined, we are entirely predetermined by simple logic.

Literally the only good argument against determinism is occasionalism, and once you go there you've gone as far into skepticism as you can possibly go and philosophy is then a waste of time.

reading philosophy is pushing me TOWARDS determinism, I'm somewhat of a compatibilist rn

You're predetermined to read these exact same threads for all eternity

>not being a determinist
grow up kid

I don't believe in causality

Inanimate matter obeys determinism while living organisms do not. Prove me wrong.

>Inanimate matter obeys determinism while living organisms do not
Why is that so? What distinguishes inanimate from animate?

I still can't believe this is the guy people point to when talking about the beginning of modern science
>like bro how do u know if something works 100 times it will work the 101th time??

Living organisms are simply complex chains of cause and effect, your distinction between the two is based on the fact you can easily understand one and not the other.

>he doesn't understand the ontological difference
fake 'n gay

>be a cow
>get fed and pampered for 100 days by my nice af owner
>get led into a slaughterhouse
>obviously he's just going to feed me again since inductive reasoning is obviously universally valid

>not being a soft determinist
What’s the point in taking any action at all if supposedly we have no free will?
You can’t be blamed for inaction if you have no free wok can you?

I can't see where the argument is

I think hard determinism is a meme in light of modern understanding of neurosciences and evolution.

Sure your actions are determined in a sense from the stimuli of your environment and the endemic genetic and chemical combinations of your body and mind, but only to a certain point. I think its mostly true for children in that, unless you're some 160 IQ kid wonder you will be very reliant on the right stimuli. But its hard to argue someone who realizes and understands how things affect their actions, and can set and define goals for themselves is determined completely. People can sit down and use their evolved simulation and problem solving skills to effectively make free willed decisions. And almost every aspect of ones life can be changed in this manner. You could argue the set of goals and directions they contemplate is decided purely from stimuli. But different people still react differently to the same stimuli and can contemplatively synthesize new ideas. People are closer to a slow automated ship that can be freely steered based on their own internal preferences.

Objectively, no. Subjectively, stop being a fucking NEET.
>What's the point in taking any action
You don't take action, you are PROGRAMMED to action

The problem can be complex enough to be unsolveable by mathematics. In which case it's impossible to prove the system depends entirely on initial conditions.

Freudian unconscious

This user gets it, eventually when you model determinism of complex decisions, you get to "Why did user choose to interpret this sentence from Stimer in a particular way". The only possible answer you can give is
>Lmao neuron just fired that way bro

Which makes determinism no longer an accurate model.

I don't have to come to you with prerequisites of having read this pretty-faced curly-headed Firby to tell you that it is so fucking obvious that determinism is the only way. Sure I had to look up determinism and its definition (which I also had to do a couple weeks ago) to make sure its what I was thinking, but I can assure you that this is a philosophy I have come to on my own, and, also, a philosophy I've written a couple essays on which are pretty fucking spectacular. Seriously, though, keep getting caught up on terms and definitions like the rest of these fucktoids in this thread, and see how far that gets you. HA!

Complexity has nothing to do with determinism. Simply because an outcome depends on a choatic process (and therefore can't be accurately predicted) does NOT mean it isn't deterministic.

But you can't say it actually is deterministic without a cause. No matter how many minutiae level down science lets you observe human thought you won't be able to explain every decision's cause.

Someone took the time to type this..

Just because it can't be explained does not mean it isn't deterministic.
To say human thought can arise without an origin is not only illogical but also an argument against free will.

>hard determinism is a meme in light of modern understanding of neurosciences and evolution
>People can sit down and use their evolved simulation and problem solving skills to effectively make free willed decisions

>modern neurosciences
>people can use their problem solving skills to make free-willed decisions

nigger what the actual fuck am I reading

You can't just poo-poo determinism by saying it doesn't comport with modern neuroscience (which it does) and proceed to substantiate your claim using terms like "evolved simulation" while shirking the responsibility of explaining how these "free-willed" decisions came to be.

The things you mentioned, like problem-solving skills, have a genesis like all other things in the universe. Also, mentioning things like stimuli (by which I assume you mean outside stimuli interacting with an organism) is immaterial to the case of free will. We are merely discussing whether our responses to stimuli are of our own volition or of predetermined origins.

because the alternative is giving credence to the notion of chaos, which fundamentally undermines the notion of cause and effect on which the physical principles of our universe is based

Determinism is a model of how decision making works, if the model doesn't work at all levels it isn't an accurate model. When it can't explain certain aspects of decision making, it becomes an inaccurate model.

Claiming there is a predetermined decider of actions without a model describing it is just as vague and illogical as claiming there isn't one. I'm of the mind that the evolved human capabilities for surviving as hunter gatherers gives each person enough of a conscious mind to make decisions that are basically independent of stimuli. If you can point to what causes these decisions other than vague combinations of stimuli and biochemistry then I'll cede you your argument is compelling. Otherwise there is no reason to not believe the simplest explanation which is conscious people can make decisions based on preferences. People model their decisions in their head, and choose the ones they like best.
Preferences can be roughly predictable but can change on a whim and are functionally infinite.

And you will never be able to truly pin anything on it other than, "They just decided that choice" despite many people and fields of science trying their damnedest.

>because we can't explain valcanoes, fucking magic
>because we can't explain cognition to a degree of certainty, fucking magic

You are invoking voodoo when in virtually every other situation in the universe, matter behaves in a calculable, predictive manner (barring the quantum world, where it is still predictable randomness in set paradigms).

>conscious people can make decisions based on preferences

But you fail to explain, a la all compatibilists/free will types, what precedes this randomness and more broadly the mechanisms through which randomness appears. You cannot explain this because it cannot be ascertained; it simply does not comport with the laws of nature.

What your are proposing requires explanation, see: You are the one claiming that the universe behaves differently in this one instance, cognition, so the onus is on you to explain. Yet, the only explanations I've seen posited from the non-determinist camp require far more faith and magical thinking than simply submitting to the axiomatic rules of the natural world.

The argument is you can't dismiss the problem by misspelling it

What I'm talking about is a system so complex it is impossible to solve without relying on probabilities and statistics.

I mean I could go over example sets of decisions with long and detailed cause chains that break down at decisions when they reach a certain level of abstraction. I could describe to you theories of the randomness in these decisions, but none of them would be conclusive or explanatory. I'm not arguing there is anything like a soul or similar mumbo jumbo. Consider that matter and energy is predictable only at certain levels of simplicity. Quantam randomness is one level and I will posit that cognition is at a level of complexity and randomness so far removed from even quantum, that it is functionally free will.

>Can't define infinite decision sets
>Can't define cause for many simplistic decisions

Cognition works in sets of infinity and thus doesn't follow the rules of the definable and finite material universe.

But complexity isn't an argument, so that's immaterial to your case. At one point in time cells were unheard of and biological life was explained away by "spontaneous generation." Ipso facto randomness emerged where nature hadn't been fully understood and life therefore did not obey the laws of nature.

Quantum randomness, even if we suppose that it has big (i.e. quantifiable) effects on cognition, would still not mean any elements of free will are possible. If I spin a hexagonal polyhedron and drop a ping pong ball on it, it can't be said that the ball chose which direction it flew merely because the direction originated at a random point along the polyhedron. Just because the direction it went was random doesn't mean volitional, random choice occurred, it just means that the beginning of its direction was random (by virtue of random factors, i.e. where the balls drops).

In much the same way, just because at an extremely small level the constituents of matter can be arranged in some sense, randomly, does not mean that randomness and volition appears further down the line of cognition, it just means that cognition was ushered in a direction that was entirely out of the individual's control.

That's the case for any chaotic system
They exist in maths, and they are deterministic

>it's a determinism vs. free will thread

The dome of Figure 1a sits in a downward directed gravitational field, with acceleration due to gravity g. The dome has a radial coordinate r inscribed on its surface and is rotationally symmetric about the origin r=0, which is also the highest point of the dome. The shape of the dome is given by specifying h, how far the dome surface lies below this highest point, as a function of the radial coordinate in the surface, r. For simplicity of the mathematics, we shall set h = (2/3g)r3/2. (Many other profiles, though not all, exhibit analogous acausality.)

A point-like unit mass slides frictionlessly over the surface under the action of gravity. The gravitational force can only accelerate the mass along the surface. At any point, the magnitude of the gravitational force tangential to the surface is F = d(gh)/dr = r1/2 and is directed radially outward. There is no tangential force at r = 0. That is, on the surface the mass experiences a net outward directed force field of magnitude r1/2. Newton's second law, F = ma, applied to the mass on the surface, sets the radial acceleration d2r/dt2 equal to the magnitude of the force field:

(1) d2r/dt2 = r1/2

If the mass is initially located at rest at the apex r = 0, then there is one obvious solution of Newton's second law for all times t:

(2) r(t) = 0

The mass simply remains at rest at the apex for all time as shown

However, there is another large class of unexpected solutions. For any radial direction:

(3) r(t) = (1/144) (t-T)4 for t greater than or equal to T
= 0 for t less than or equal to T

where T is an arbitrarily chosen, positive constant. One readily confirms that the motion of (3) solves Newton's second law (1). See Note 6

If we describe the solutions of (3) in words, we see they amount to a violation of the natural expectation that some cause must set the mass in motion. Equation (3) describes a point mass sitting at rest at the apex of the dome, whereupon at an arbitrary time t=T it spontaneously moves off in some arbitrary radial direction.

No cause. No cause determines when the mass will spontaneously accelerate or the direction of its motion. The physical conditions on the dome are the same for all times t prior to the moment of excitation, t=T, and are the same in all directions on the surface.

Just because determinism is obviously true, doesn't mean it really means anything to human beings, on a local level. It's complexity is so great that you will never grasp it, it's physically and deterministically impossible to do so.

But cognitive decision sets are actually infinite there's no reason to believe it follows some physical source. You can think of literally anything invent languages within languages ad infinitum. The infinite cognitive set of decisions really has no bound to physics, its just likely to be predictable decisions.

I will agree people are very predictable for almost all decisions, but they really aren't bound by physics to make any given decision.

Wow what a non argument. Says that someone who makes a decision unlikely in their decision set would rationalize it as insanity, therefore all decisions are beyond control. Personality is a preponderance to likely decisions and not a actual limit on them.

The image just states that free will doesn't exist since it adopts a patternist philosophy
Not sure why it pretends the question itself is flawed

If you can't accurately predict something you can't be certain it's determined.

The math I posted shows an exemple of uncaused motion in newtonian mechanics. It's an argument in favor of undeterminism (more in favor of free will than it isn't)

Are you saying the weather changes as an act of free will?

This assumes personality is unchanging at all, which to me is unlikely in many cases.

I think it only makes a weak assumption: that changes to personality are never sudden breaks.

*weaker

I believe we have better reasons for believing that human beings possess free will over the weather.

Hopefully those reasons are more sound than
>if you can't predict it then you can't know it's determined

Then how are decisions made if there is no cause? Magic?

It's an argument for chaos rather than for freedom. The pre-individual elements may be free, but how do we go from those to "our" freedom of the will?

That's only because you don't know anything. If you had my knowledge, you couldn't say that about us.

Quantum randomness disproves determinism.

wait let me verify this brb

First of, in the case of chaotic systems, it's not "impossible", we just don't know how yet.

Relying on probabilities to solve the problem is outright stating there is some degree of randomness to it, i.e. admitting it isn't deterministic.

>Quantum randomness disproves determinism.
t. Doesn't Understand Physics

There are two obvious objections to this. (1) Quantum mechanics is a model of the universe, not an insight into how the universe itself works; there could be an even smaller, deterministic system underneath that we just don't understand yet. (2) Quantum randomness only occurs on very small scales; once you hit the size of a large molecule, things behave deterministically, so even if we take QR as the ultimate, capital-t Truth, it has 0 relevance to discussions about free will, or determinism as most determinists take it.

>there could be an even smaller, deterministic system underneath that we just don't understand yet.
Goddidit. Quantum eraser experiments have erased hidden variables. What remains is your desire to have a deterministic
>Quantum randomness only occurs on very small scales;
...and? If that small scale didn't affect the larger scale, our models wouldn't even account for it since we couldn't know about it.

Determinism is just wanking on the proposition given to us by the simple models like the Newtonian one. It's like saying that Achilles can never catch the tortoise.

Not the guy who you're responding to, but you're actually retarded. Bell's Theorem erased the possibility of LOCAL hidden variables, there could still be non-local hidden variables (De Broglie-Bohm interpretation). Quantum mechanics can be interpreted deterministically or indeterministically, the mathematical formalism gives us no reason to believe that the probabilities expressed in the theory are ontic over epistemic.

>obviously true

quantum mechanics disagrees

>Bell's Theorem erased the possibility of LOCAL hidden variables, there could still be non-local hidden variables
That's eternally true for everything, so I just ignore it until I absolutely have to take something into account.

>What's your excuse?
Intelligence and the ability to reason.

But other people with intelligence and the ability to reason have come to different conclusions. This does indicate that those "elements" will not yield the same result deterministically.

If I was a determinist, I would assume I was wrong. I'd look for freedom in the chaos of madness.

Their differing conclusions are proof they lack intelligence and the capacity for reason. It's as simple as that, if you can't understand the nature of causality, you're some kind of sub-human fire-worshiping retard who thinks magic is real.

>Their differing conclusions are proof they lack intelligence and the capacity for reason.
Right back at you.
>It's as simple as that, if you can't understand the nature of causality
What are the effects of mathematically random events in this world, then? Deterministic? Heh heh.
>some kind of sub-human
Claims the environmental hazard.
> fire-worshiping retard
What kind of straw man is this? If anything, progressives used to worship fire.
>who thinks magic is real.
Define magic and I'll tell you if it is true. (I don't know anything about magic)

Not worth replying to, beyond a reply saying so. There's no point trying to convince or convert retards, just know I think less of you.

>t. environmental factor

>relying on probabilities to solve the problem is outright stating there is some degree of randomness
no
see: weather, bacteria colony population sizes etc...
They are not random, they are chaotic. Poor observation and prediction doesn't influence the actual event in itself
>inb4 link to observer effect

Where's your argument ?

Don't bother, for some reason 99% of people can't understand that just because we don't have enough information to know something to an absolute degree of certainty that it isn't random somehow.

3rd line of non greentext

Quantum mechanics merely implies another spatio-temporal dimension in which parallel possibilities are accounted for and resolved simultaneously alongside the results we get to see in our own timeline. Therefore, on the contrary, it does not imply choice, but rather just another layer to the deterministic mechanism.

>Quantum randomness disproves determinism
Stop posting anytime

I'm not :^)

That just adds complexity to it. We're not like reflexive bugs, but the algorithms our minds use to think can't be anything other than deterministic. Even as it recurses on itself, that is still an output of a predetermined process.

Reality is both deterministic and not at the same time, depending on the perspective. In the God-mind everything has already been written. In our perspective, bound by form and limit, we appear to have free will. Since you can't know what the God-mind knows you default to making "decisions" even though what you were going to "choose" was already written.